West Tower companies owed £25.6m
THE companies that own Liverpool’s tallest building, West Tower, failed owing Anglo Irish Bank £25.6m.
Mapfield Properties Ltd, which owns the freehold, also owes trade creditors £4m according to a creditors’ report. West Tower Liverpool Ltd, which has a lease over the property, owes trade creditors £433,000.
The 39-storey West Tower contains 12,000 sq ft of commercial space and 123 apartments – 106 of which are let to tenants. A further 17 properties are are either owner-occupied or in the process of being sold.
The building, completed in 2008, was developed by the Beetham Organization – the Liverpool-based property developer owned by Hugh Frost and his sons Simon Frost and Steven Beetham. The two companies went into administration in February however the Beetham Organization is still trading.
In the report administrators Les Ross and Martin Ellis of Grant Thornton describe how they were called to a meeting in January by Anglo Irish after the bank had, “lost confidence in the borrower’s capability to manage and develop the group’s property portfolio.”
The administrators have raised around £340,000 from apartment sales and were in the process of having the companies’ assets valued at the time of the report. Anglo Irish is unlikely to recover all its cash and the administrators say they cannot estimate the final dividend for unsecured creditors.
The Beetham Organization has also built towers in Manchester and Birmingham and had permission to build No1 Blackfriars in London, but that scheme stalled due to problems with its funding.
