Commercial Property

Your Highness, please help us get our money back

“To Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned: We are an Irish couple who moved to Qatar in 2004 to work and live in…

Thu Feb 10 2011 - 00:00

“To Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned: We are an Irish couple who moved to Qatar in 2004 to work and live in a different country. My husband is a pilot and I am a medical genetic scientist . . . ”

SO BEGINS a letter sent by Jenny Creed Geraghty to the wife of Qatar’s ruler this week. It’s the last ditch attempt by Jenny and her husband Paul to get back the €60,000 they’ve paid to developer Damac for a one-bed apartment in Doha, Qatar, due to be delivered last April.

The couple aren’t typical Irish investors overseas, buying a second investment property. The Doha apartment was to have been their first home. Originally from Greystones, Co Wicklow, they left Ireland to work in Qatar in 2004, partly because although they both worked hard in good jobs, they couldn’t afford to buy a home without taking out a loan beyond their means.

They say now, a little ruefully, “we fled the Celtic Tiger into the jaws of the Arabian tiger”. They liked Qatar so much – the climate, the enlightened rule of the Qatar government, the friendliness – they decided to buy their first home there.

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In February 2007, they paid their first 10 per cent deposit on a €150,000 one-bed apartment in a development in Doha called Lusail being built by Dubai-based developer Damac, and made further staged payments up to a total €60,000. It was due to be ready in April 2010, but construction has, apparently, barely started; the latest information they can get is that it will be ready in 2014.

The couple have since moved to New Zealand to further their careers and at this stage, they want their money back.

But like many Irish investors in Damac, despite trying many avenues, they can get little or no information from the company, which has stalled developments all over the Middle East. Reports predicting a major property boom in Qatar in the years before it hosts the World Cup in 2022 ring a little hollow in the Geraghtys’ ears.

Yet they describe their time in Qatar as “a splendid period of our lives” and feel it a shame that the activities of one developer could tarnish it in western investors’ eyes.

They hope now that the wife of Qatar’s ruler will hear their plea.