Half-built centre to be completed

A PARTIALLY built shopping centre in Limerick – abandoned three years ago when Liam Carroll’s Zoe Group collapsed – is set to be completed by a Northern Ireland-based developer.

Indian-born Suneil Sharma has just agreed terms with National Irish Bank to take over the building of the Parkway Valley shopping centre off the Dublin Road after acquiring the adjoining retail park for an estimated €30 million. It is producing a rental income of around €3 million.

NIB, owned by Danish banking group Danske, is understood to have had an exposure of over €100 million on the retail park and the 15-acre shopping centre site where the foundations, concrete floors and most of the steel work was completed before contractors pulled out of the development. One expert has put a value of € 15 million to €20 million on the site in the present difficult economic climate.

Mr Sharma would not be drawn on how much he is investing in the project, saying he would be taking a “problem solving approach to work through the underlying asset”. He and the bank would be taking a “collaborative approach” to the development, he said.

Mr Sharma will control 100 per cent of the equity in the project which is expected to cost between € 50 million and € 60 million to complete.

Before construction can resume, local planners will have to grant an extension of the planning permission as the original consent has run out. The site is seen as an eyesore along one of the principal entrances to the city.

The original plan for the shopping centre envisaged an overall floor area of 39,650sq m (426,792sq ft) to accommodate 50 shops, three anchor tenants and 1,650 car-parking spaces. The new owners will obviously be hoping to attract Marks Spencer as one of the anchors following the refusal of the planners to allow yet another extension at The Crescent shopping centre on the other side of the city.

Mr Sharma is no stranger to the Limerick property market having assembled a site in the city centre over a number of years for the proposed Opera shopping centre. He sold it at the height of the market for around €100 million to a group headed by property adviser David Courtney and developer Gerry O’Reilly. Earlier he had also been involved in the development of a retail park on Childers Road which was later sold to Alanis, the company controlled by the Dublin-based McCormack family.

The Parkway Retail Park and the initial work on the shopping centre were developed by the Liam Carroll-owned company Dunloe Ewart which is continuing to manage property assets at Cherrywood in south Dublin and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in the Dublin docklands. It recently sold property investments in Fermoy and Tralee.