Apollo said to lead bidders vying for €650m Harcourt loans

New York private equity firm Apollo is understood to be leading final bidders vying to buy about €650 million of loans linked to a property portfolio held by Pat Doherty's Harcourt Developments.

The loans, known as Project Abbey, are being sold by the National Asset Management Agency and are expected to trade for less than half their nominal value, according to market sources.

Harcourt is best known as the developer behind the Titanic Quarter, which has regenerated a large part of the Belfast’s docklands. But none of the loans in the portfolio up for sale are linked to this project.

However, borrowings associated with 270,000sq ft of a retail, office and leisure complex, Park West, near the M50 motorway in west Dublin are believed to be a core part of the portfolio.

Harcourt, chaired by Andrew Parker Bowles, former husband of the Duchess of Cornwall, is also one of Ireland's largest owners of regional shopping centres. These include Galway Shopping Centre, Longwalk in Dundalk, Laois Centre in Portlaoise and Parkway Centre in Limerick city.

Hotel portfolio

Harcourt also has an impressive collection of hotels, including the five-star Carlisle Bay Resort in Antigua; the five-star

Lough Eske Hotel

, which is based on a 17th-century castle near Donegal town;

Redcastle Hotel

in Dundalk; and

Parkwest Hotel

in Clondalkin.

Final bids for the portfolio were filed last week to Nama's advisers on the sale, KPMG in Dublin. These include offers from Los Angeles-based private equity firm Oaktree Capital and a joint submission from New York hedge fund Davidson Kempner and Deutsche Bank, according to sources.

In 2014, Davidson Kempner bought loans associated with Titanic Quarter offices and apartments from Ulster Bank.

Nama is expected to make a final decision on the Project Abbey sale next week. Spokesmen for the agency, Apollo and Harcourt Developments declined to comment.

Project Abbey counts among the final wave of large portfolio sales by Nama, which has already met its objective of repaying 80 per cent of its senior debt by the end of the year.

Two loan books

Nama’s sale of two loan books – known as projects Emerald and Ruby – with a combined nominal value of €4.7 billion, are believed to have drawn final bids during the week from Oaktree and rival US private equity firms

Cerberus

and Lone Star.

Emerald and Ruby include €750 million in loans attached to boom-time residential property deals. They comprise 950 homes, mainly apartments, 650 of which are occupied by tenants and 300 that are currently vacant.

Meanwhile, two men were arrested in Northern Ireland on Tuesday as part of the National Crime Agency’s allegations of fraud surrounding the sale of €1.6 billion of Nama loans to Cerberus in 2014.

The probe was sparked following the discovery last year of a £7 million offshore transfer to an Isle of Man bank account, which was controlled by a former managing partner of Belfast-based law firm Tughans

Tughans, which was involved in the Nama transaction after being subcontracted by Cerberus’s US lawyers, Brown Rudnick, insisted it was not aware of the money movement.

All parties in the transaction have denied any wrongdoing. The two men who were arrested were released on Wednesday on bail.