Good morning. Pull up a stool at the breakfast bar and have a glance at the morning’s news.
Intu’s announcement that it has abandoned its cash call(£) is still dominating the morning papers.
Intu’s share price plunged as low as 5.99p during trading yesterday, before finishing 41% down at 6.28p. The shares, which have lost 80% of their value since the beginning of the year, value the company at £144m.
“I am not in crisis mode”, insists Intu boss(£) Matthew Roberts, but not many seem to share his confidence(£) that “Intu will survive”.
In fact, Intu faces an even more bleak prospect in July, when it runs a serious risk of breaking multiple covenants on loans secured against individual assets.
The warning signs(£) have been quite clear for some time. Now the question is: What options are left for the once-great retail landlord? And others facing the same risks?
As EG’s editor points out, Intu is just one victim of a contagion that could easily spread.
All of which is sowing the seeds of the next big debt crisis(£).
Don’t worry, though. Incoming Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey reckons he can handle it(£).
Meanwhile the new chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is being told to be bold by the BPF’s chief Melanie Leech. She has a simple wish list – properly fund the planning system, and rip up the rules on public spending.
And she isn’t the only one wanting to tear up the Green Book. A coalition of northern leaders have helpfully sent Sunak a report by Peel Holdings(£) detailing exactly how those rules should be rewritten.
And while we are at it, what about Cornwall? It isn’t just the North that needs “levelling up”, you know.
In the feud that just gets nastier, Sir Frederick Barclay is threatening to sue(£) the family his twin brother. The billionaire has made a rare statement(£) to say that if the Ritz hotel is sold for less than £1bn, he will sue his nephew and possibly his twin as well. Its better than Succession, isn’t it?
Moda Living and Apache Capital have a far more harmonious partnership, as they win permission for an 824 flat hive in Hove.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s state investment fund, Temasek, is in the running to develop the £1.5bn, 4m sq ft ID Manchester scheme(£).
The fire safety consultants(£) for the Grenfell Tower refurb knew full well that it would only “make the existing crap condition worse”(£), but pushed it through anyway.
And Whitehall has been slow to learn the lessons of the Carillion collapse, and still thinks ‘cheap’ is the same as ‘good value’.
There are now 31,000 more people to whom ‘cheap’ is an alien concept. Knight Frank reckons the ranks of the ultra-wealthy will top 650,000 by 2024.
Of course, the good thing about being incredibly rich is that you can afford to be incredibly generous. Take the Duke of Buccleuch, for example, who is giving land away to locals(£).
Meanwhile in Japan there are scores of properties that no-one wants. Well, that isn’t strictly true, it’s just that no-one wants to live in them. Dozens of entire villages in the remote countryside lie empty as the population shrinks(£).
Back in the UK, a developer’s plans to build a luxury house on the banks of the Thames have been halted by a singer’s horde of knick-knacks. Three Degrees front-woman Sheila Ferguson(£) has gone to court to stop the build, which she fears will damage the lock-ups where she keeps a career’s worth of keepsakes.
And finally, the Bank of Mum & Dad is increasingly being asked to fund property purchases these days, but no-one said the returns would be this bad. A court in Cheltenham has heard how a woman throttled her mother and tried to bite her father’s hand when they asked when she was going to pay back the £280,000 they had lent her to buy an eight-bedroom farmhouse. Quite literally a case of biting the hand that feeds… You can read the grubby details here(£).
