Banks take majority stake in Dunne's Ballsbridge hotels

THE BANKS behind developer Seán Dunne’s €375 million purchase of the Jurys and Berkeley Court hotels in Ballsbridge, Dublin, have taken a majority stake in the properties.

Mr Dunne bought the three hotels – Jurys, the Towers and the Berkeley Court – from the Jurys Doyle group in 2005 as he built up a landbank in Ballsbridge, one of the Republic’s most expensive addresses, in a series of record-breaking land deals.

He put €125 million of his own money into the deal, while a group of financial institutions, led by Ulster Bank and including Icelandic lender Kaupthing, lent him the balance.

Companies Office documents show that the properties have been transferred from MJBCH, part of Mr Dunne’s Mountbrook group, to two new companies, Qulpic and ZRKO.

The documents name Qulpic’s and ZRKO’s shareholders as Ulster Bank, Kaupthing and Co-operative Centrale Raiffeisen Boerleen Bank.

Its understood that the deal is structured in such a way that Mr Dunne still retains an interest in the properties, equivalent to 30 per cent.

There is also a suggestion that Mr Dunne has the option of buying out the banks in the future.

Mr Dunne’s company, Mountbrook, did not respond to inquiries yesterday. The developer himself has been out of the country, in Europe and the US, recently.

Mountbrook is continuing to manage the hotels, which have been rebranded as D4 Hotels and the Berkeley, and it is also managing the planning application to build a mixed commercial and residential development on the site.

The hotels are taking bookings for up to two years in the future. Their managements have already said that they are optimistic that the new Lansdowne Road stadium will boost business.

Mr Dunne’s wife, Gayle Killilea, runs a shop, D4 Stores, from one of the premises. That business has a four-year nine-month lease.

Planners have sought additional information on Mountbrook’s proposals for the Ballsbridge site.

An Bord Pleanála is not expected to decide on the current application until close to the end of this year.

Mr Dunne’s landbank in Ballsbridge includes the D4/Berkeley hotels site, Hume House and the AIB headquarters.

It also emerged yesterday that former Anglo Irish Bank chairman Seán FitzPatrick has been given until mid-March by his former employer to repay his loans, which stood at €106.8 million in the bank’s most recent published accounts. It is understood that Mr FitzPatrick expects to benefit from possible developments on an investment in a Nigerian oil well.