New York Times
9 August 2009
Bruce Ratner, the man attempting to develop an $800m, 18,000-seat arena at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, has visited three rating agencies in preparation for selling bonds this autumn to finance the first project on the scheme. Aside from the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, Atlantic Yards is the largest project under way in the city.
Economic Observer (China)
10 August 2009
Fears are rising in China of a new housing bubble after a plot of Beijing land sold for a record price at a government land auction and the price of secondhand apartments at nearby properties shot up to 16,000 yuan per m2, some 4,000 yuan per m2 higher than they were selling for earlier in the year.
The Australian
10 August 2009
Property company Sunland has claimed that three men – Matt Joyce, Marcus Lee and Angus Reed – conspired to defraud the company in a complex transaction on the Dubai waterfront in 2007. Documents filed in the Queensland registry of the Federal Court allege that Joyce and Melbourne-based property developer Reed knew each other well but did not reveal this relationship to Sunland representative David Brown when he was buying land in Dubai. The documents claim that Joyce and Lee persuaded Brown to purchase Reed’s rights to a plot for A$6.5m, plus the difference between the going rate and the price Reed negotiated, a total of A$14.3m.
Irish Times
10 August 2009
The Dublin Docklands Development Authority should disclose just how much it has lost at Ringsend in Dublin, according to Fine Gael environment spokesman Phil Hogan TD. He said that documents he had obtained showed that the authority and its partners had grossly underestimated the scale of remediation work needed at the former Irish Glass Bottle site. As a result, he said, the board of the DDDA had to sanction funds to plough into the site that could have been used for urban regeneration.
El Pais (Spain)
11 August 2009
The CEO of a Málaga developer and his brother have been bailed by the Spanish courts for a total of ¤828,000. They have been charged with two cases of fraud by around 20 clients who made down payments on houses that were never built. The buyers, mostly British, filed charges against Grupo Mirador, which is run by Enrique and Leopoldo Faura, after waiting nearly five years for their homes to be built.
