The poor house
REO stops paying interest due to creditors
TREASURY Holdings-backed property group Real Estate Opportunities (REO) owners of Battersea Power Station did not pay interest due to a group of its creditors at the end of the August.
REO is apparently in “ongoing restructuring negotiations” with the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), Lloyds Bank and others about its loans. The company announced yesterday: “taking into account the status of the negotiations, the company has determined that the interest payment due … will not be made”, a statement that seems to imply that REO could pay the interest if it wanted to.
It owes its banks around €2 billion and in June said it would not be in a position to repay a €450 million debt due in May 2011. It hired advisers to help it tackle this issue.
Perhaps they could cut back on luxuries and use their tea bags twice.
The future of one of UKs best loved buildings is in the hands of mega debtors who claim they will use “their own money” to build the “essential” Battersea tube extension.
Read more in the Irish Times and Property Week.
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This is predictable. Every change of hands since 1980 has been accompanied by profiteering or followed by financial ruin, without a brick being laid and decay advancing further towards the point of no return. An object lesson in corporate greed, cynicism and public sector gullibility. The site should have been taken over long ago at minumum compensation, then sold only for genuine public benefit, with a performance bond to guarantee it. If banks are owed billions by backrupt companies, who really pays?