€68BN DEVELOPMENT:DUBLIN-BASED PROPERTY development firm Treasury Holdings, which is one of the first borrowers to move into the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), wants to sell a minority stake in London's Battersea power station site to help finance the £5.5 billion (€6 billion) regeneration project.
Rob Tincknell, managing director of Treasury Holdings UK, said the company had hired estate agency Cushman and Wakefield to sell the stake.
Wandsworth Borough Council would probably have decided by the end of August whether to approve the plan to build 3,700 homes and 2.3 million sq ft (213,676 sq m) of offices and shops on the derelict 38-acre site, he said.
“We have appointed a long-term investment adviser to help us turn the planning permission that we hope to get into a reality,” Mr Tincknell said yesterday, speaking at the Mipim real estate trade fair in Cannes, France.
Some of the project’s Irish lenders, including Bank of Ireland and Anglo Irish Bank, are selling the firm’s loans to Nama.
Treasury’s loans are expected to be among those linked to the top 10 borrowers to be transferred to the agency first later this month.
Part of the financing for Battersea was provided by Bank of Ireland, whose loans to Treasury are expected to be among the bank’s first loans to be moved into Nama.
Real Estate Opportunities (REO), the publicly quoted company controlled by Treasury, “has had a difficult couple of years, but the advent of Nama is great news for us”, Mr Tincknell said.
“We’re confident the Nama will support us. We have had very encouraging responses to our planning application.”
Following the transfer of their loans to Nama, Treasury must submit a business plan showing their proposals to develop their projects and to seek further loans.
This is the second attempt by Treasury Holdings, which is owned by developers Richard Barrett and Johnny Ronan, to obtain consent to develop the site, acquired in 2006 for £400 million.
The revised proposals reduced the office and retail space from architect Rafael Vinoly’s original plans, which featured a 300-metre (984-ft) glass and steel chimney as part of a solar-driven ventilation system.
Opponents of the initial proposals included London mayor Boris Johnson.
The structure would have overshadowed the landmark former power station, which has four 350 foot-high smoke-stacks and notably appeared on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1970s Animals album.
The prospect of obtaining planning consent allows REO, which has bought the power station, to proceed with a plan to raise more capital from other investors after the credit crisis led to a scarcity of bank funding.
Barrett and Ronan are the third developers to attempt to redevelop the site, which has been derelict for 27 years.
The decommissioned power station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert- Scott, provided a fifth of London’s electricity supply in the early 1950s.
The project is part of a long-term regeneration plan for the Nine Elms neighbourhood, an area on the south bank of the river Thames that runs between the bridges at Chelsea and Vauxhall.
A neighbouring site to the former power station will become home to the new US embassy in 2017, while the success of the regeneration programme may hinge on extensions to London’s subway system to the area.
Mr Barrett and Mr Ronan built fortunes from real-estate development in Ireland since founding Treasury in 1989.
The company controls property assets valued at more than €4.6 billion from China to Russia and Sweden, according to its website. – (Bloomberg)
