It seems this has been quite a good week for the Goodman family, mostly comprising beef baron Larry and son Laurence. The €1 added to a bottle of wine should ensure a steady stream of cross-Border shoppers, and with Newry within easiest travel distance for most of the State’s population, and with the Goodmans developing a significant new shopping centre there, their project at the site of the former Greenbank Industrial Estate should see enhanced footfall as a result of higher shopping costs on the other side of the Border.
And yesterday, the Goodmans are reported to have closed the sale for the former Bank of Ireland headquarters on Baggott Street in Dublin city centre. The building which was being developed by a large consortium that included the UK bankrupt Paddy Shovlin and Tony and Patrick Fitzpatrick, and the larger-than-life Derek Quinlan – or Derrick Quinlan as his friends the billionaire Barclay brothers call him – and the Irish bankrupt, Sean Fitzpatrick and lastly, according to the Irish Times, the CEO of Trinity Biotech, Ronan O’Caoimh. The Irish Times quotes a statement from the Goodman family saying “the property division of Parma Group through its wholly-owned subsidiary Ramly Ltd has purchased the former Bank of Ireland headquarters building in Baggot Street”
Earlier in the year Bank of Scotland (Ireland) and Danske Bank and ACC Bank had Kieran Wallace of KPMG installed as receiver to the property which was subsequently put on the market by Jones Lang LaSalle with an asking price in the €30-35m region. The actual sale price hasn’t been disclosed. Jones Lang LaSalle described the property as “the best redevelopment opportunity in Dublin” – the property listing doesn’t appear to be on the JLL website. NAMA is not associated with the sale, and it is understood that the Goodmans are not NAMA borrowers.
The 76-year old Larry Goodman is understood to be Ireland’s 15-richest person with a fortune estimated at €750m. Aside from his meat processing business which prompted a tribunal, Larry has interests in private hospitals including the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin and the Blackrock Clinic in Galway and there has been talk of a new facility in the grounds of the exclusive Adare Manor in Limerick.
NAMA Wine Lake 
Find the Queen……..
I see that nothing much has changed in how business is done in Ireland since I left. KPMG always wanted this building.
To spell it out.
This is a building that an employee of the Bank of Ireland described as “the only building in town where you wipe your shoes on the way out.”
Current rental value after refurbishment = €5 million
Purchase Cost €35 m
Refurbishment = €35 million
Design/ Interest/ Legals/ Agents > €5 million
Voids (minimum 2years) > €10 million
Total cost = €85 million
So without a tenant, it is all risk for little return. Not something that Larry would subscribe to.
Ten foreign Private Equity funds chase it, but were “also rans”.
It is known in the market that the receivers KPMG would like to move into it.
Larry and KPMG have a long standing umbilical relationship, through many “ups and downs”.
Larry wins bidding process…..
@WSTT, according to Philip Connolly in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post, the price was “between €40m and €50m” though no source is cited. The 220,000 sq ft building which was vacated by Bank of Ireland in August 2012, was built in 1978 and designed by Scott Tallon Walker and is “said to require extensive refurbishment and became a protected structure in 2006” being described by aesthetes at Dublin City Council as “one of the most important Modernist buildings in Ireland”
We can expect the March of the bankers and their broods in 20 years time as well.
If I recall correctly, Goodman & Co. were issued enormous amounts of credit/credit insurance by the Irish State (Albert Reynolds really) to “sell” meat(“meat”) to Iraq.
I regard Larry Goodman as the premier example of the “semi-private” sector in this country: Nominally the companies are private, but in reality the vast majority of revenues ultimately come from the public treasury. In Goodman’s case, they came very directly out of the public purse; he could not have made the money he did, or gotten into as much trouble as he dit, without the obscene levels of credit export insurance gifted to him by Albert Reynolds.
Makes you want to ask “Where’s my few hundred million punts in export insurance to sell broke Iraqis sloppy pig meat?”, “Where’s my state backed debt write off and comeback?”, “What’s the point of this country?”
The idea of the Beef Tribunal’s star meat processor running a few private hospitals amuses me no end. I wonder if all those private patients have considered what they might be getting themselves into.
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