If you’ve missed the outlandish stories of the Sunday Sport newspaper, fear not. Diary hears that the relaunch of the title is moving apace, aided by North West property firm Anvic Developments.
Publishing group Sport Media went into administration on 1 April, but Sunday Sport is set to return on 8 May – after West Ham United co-owner David Sullivan bought the title from administrator BDO.
The phoenix-from-the-flames title will be headquartered at Anvic’s City View House in Manchester. The developer’s managing director, Paul Dawson, seems to have entered into the spirit. He said: “It was the first newspaper to break major stories such as ‘World War II bomber found on Moon’ so I’m very much looking forward to more of its incisive journalism.”
Reach for the sky – on a budget
Will the current wave of skyscrapers rising in the City be the last? No, says Sir Stuart Lipton, but future towers must be built much more cheaply.
The veteran developer told Bloomberg last week that he has commissioned Davis Langdon partner Steve Watts to design a prototype 40-storey tower costing close to £125 per sq ft to build – about half the cost of the Walkie Talkie and Cheesegrater. Watts says he has managed to cut the cost to £135-£150 by “keeping everything as simple and repetitive as possible”. So with cost at the forefront of everyone’s minds, future towers may not be glitzy enough to earn their own nicknames.
“The latest towers are wibbly-wobbly fancies of the sky,” says Lipton. No prizes for guessing who he is having a pop at.
Cleaning up CMBS MESS
The £288.2m sale last week of the Aviva Tower brings a torrid tale for bondholders near to an end. The gross proceeds from the break-up of the White Tower portfolio, assembled by Simon Halabi, now stand at £1.08bn. This is a long way short of the £1.8bn value put on the assets in 2006, when credit investors bought slices of the securitised £1.15bn loan against the portfolio.
Class A noteholders are expected to come out of this with their money back, as will most of those with class B notes, but the rest will be licking their wounds.
Nevertheless, some analysts are looking on the bright side. One said: “The positive thing is that, with this CMBS mess being cleaned up, it feels that we have hit another milestone in terms of dealing with the legacy of the crisis for property in general.”
Phew.
Only soft around the middle
Developer Panther Securities announced a rise in full-year pretax profits to £6.4m last week, up from £2.9m the previous year.
But this seems to have done little to soften the mood of chairman Andrew Perloff, who likes to air his views at length in the group’s annual accounts. This year’s “Chairman’s Ramblings” stretch to seven pages, starting with a tirade against the scapegoating of BP and its former chairman Tony Hayward, bankers and the UK’s top 10,000 taxpayers.
But perhaps all this grumpiness can be put down to Perloff’s expanding waistline. He confesses at one point that his suit size has gone up four times since his youth, when he brushed shoulders with George Best in a London nightclub.
Raise a glass to Ronson
Gerald Ronson might allow himself a wry smile at reports from the new Bistro du Vin in St John Street, EC1, which has been serving a cocktail named after the developer throughout April.
Sales of the Ronson – made with vodka, fresh raspberries, lemon juice and crushed ice – have hit 472, whereas the umbrella-topped tipple named after the Candy Brothers has notched up only 24 sales.
But then, the Candys’ key ingredient, Campari, is an acquired taste.
Property bods mix with nobs
Property was fairly well represented at yesterday’s royal wedding bash. Of the 300 guests thought to have been invited to the dinner dance hosted for Wills and Kate by Prince Charles, 33 have titles, the Daily Mail tells us, while 20 went to Eton. So far, so class-ridden. But things got more egalitarian. Eleven guests work in finance and six in the media or PR. Four, meanwhile, are property developers or estate agents. Sir John Madejski (left) was one; “upmarket property agent” Davina Harbord, 24, was another. “Hairdresser turned estate agent” Tim Mathieson is probably the third. But who else? With the Mail curiously unforthcoming, we’ll be poring over footage all weekend to spot them.
