Anglo seeking to repossess $90m property from New York 'condo king'

STATE-OWNED Anglo Irish Bank is seeking to repossess a $90 million (€71.6 million) New York apartment building from a developer dubbed the city’s “condo king”.

The bank’s US subsidiary is going to the New York courts to take possession of 225 Rector Place from a company, YL Rector Street LLC, controlled by developer Yair Levy.

YL borrowed $165 million from Anglo Irish to finance its plans for the building among other things. The property is in the Battery Park area of New York and is worth an estimated $90 million.

Mr Levy founded YL Real Estate Developers 30 years ago. The firm specialises in investing and developing properties at high-end addresses in the city.

His focus on luxury apartment developments led the New York media to nickname him the “condo king”.

Anglo Irish yesterday confirmed that it is taking foreclosure proceedings against Mr Levy’s company. This process involves a bank or lender going to the courts to take control of an asset against which it has a secured loan.

The bank is claiming that the company defaulted on loan repayments, and breached a number of other terms of its agreement with the lender. Mr Levy is a high-profile figure in New York. He emigrated to the city from Israel in the early 1970s and moved into property developing after a successful stint in fashion retailing.

He has regularly done deals in partnership with another well-known property developer in the city, Kent Swig, although the pair reportedly had a falling out late last year.

Anglo Irish Bank is at the centre of the crisis that has engulfed the Irish financial system since last year. Earlier this month, the Government nationalised the bank, driven by concerns over its solvency and volatility in its deposit base. The bank is the focus of several investigations into directors’ loans and a scheme under which it loaned cash to clients to fund purchases of its own shares.