Few hearts will bleed at the news in the Telegraph this morning that Vincent Tchenguiz has been forced to sell his Lamborghini after his management company made a £38m loss. But that loss is minuscule compared to the billions squandered on real estate by Citibank during the boom. The giant US Bank has been so sickened by the losses that it has signed over its 60 strong property team and $12.5b of gross assets to a private equity firm called Apollo Management. Nobody wants to tell the FT the net asset value - or how little Apollo paid.
This side of the pond the big news is of course the split of Liberty International into Capital Shopping Centres, a £4.6b investment REIT, run by the current Liberty chief David Fischel and Capital & Counties, a brand-new development business with a very old name to be run by Ian Hawksworth. The story is extremely well covered in The Times, which also carries a profile of Donald Gordon, the 79-year-old South African who founded the business.
The only point left uncovered by the all the papers is the non-financial reason why this split was a) inevitable and b) likely to work: the completely differing personalities involved on each side of the business and the waning influence of Gordon. David Fischel is a roundhead and Ian Hawksworth a cavalier, and "Donnie" now only has 15% of both businesses and is getting on a bit. Agreeing to split will probably be a slight relief to both parties.
Fischel is a slight, self-effacing, careful character who has run Liberty under the stern direction of Donald Gordon since the early nineties from a modest, if slightly shabby HQ in Victoria. Ian Hawksworth is a large and very confident man who came over from Hong Kong in 2006 and joined Liberty after a plan to head up Grosvenor's development business went awry. His sidekick Gary Yardley is of similar stamp. There will soon be no mistake that two very different businesses have been hiding under one roof, one bursting to get out.
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