Green seeks to develop tower blocks on London site
GREEN Property continues to buck the real-estate trend -- with plans to build two skyscrapers in London on a site once linked to controversial AIB borrower Achilleas Kallakis.
Stephen Vernon's Green Property is best known as the owner of the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre. It is one of the few Irish property businesses to have thrived since the crash. It was a bidder to buy NAMA loans and has acted as manager for banks that seized property from former rival developers.
The Dublin-based company has now applied for planning permission to build two residential skyscrapers in the neighbourhood of Battersea.
An application has been submitted to Wandsworth Borough Council to demolish Market Towers House, a 1970s office block, to make way for the development.
The building is part of a portfolio of assets that Green took over from AIB under a complex deal in 2009. Green now controls the assets and gets a share of profits as well as fees from AIB for managing the portfolio.
AIB ended up with the properties after taking control of assets formerly owned by Mr Kallakis's Pacific Group. Mr Kallakis is on trial in the UK over fraud allegations.
The Battersea development is for more than 400 apartments, as well as offices, a hotel, shops and restaurants.
If planning is secured for the development, a spokesman said Green Property could put the property back on the market, or seek financing or partnerships to go ahead with the project itself.
The property is close to the Battersea Power Station site that NAMA and Lloyd's Bank have seized from Treasury Holdings, the UK's biggest building site.
The US government has started work on a new embassy building in the same area.
- Donal O'Donovan
Irish Independent
