High- flying McEvaddy poised to realise his Berlin airport vision

The entrepreneur's business park will be ready when Berlin's new airport opens, he tells DEREK SCALLY

THE MAN in the digger isn’t at all pleased at the taxi trying to squeeze past him on the windswept building site. To clarify matters, the Turkish taxi driver rolls down his window and indicates the pinstripe-suited man in the back seat.

“Der Mann gehört hier,” he shouts, a muddled, grammatically ambiguous sentence that could mean either “the man belongs here” or “this here belongs to the man”. The man is Irish businessman Ulick McEvaddy, and he most definitely belongs here.

The Swinford native is Ireland’s original high-flyer with a life-long love of the air. Standing in a Brandenburg field he owns, it’s clear he is in his element.

On the horizon, the new Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport (BBI) is taking shape. When it is finished, McEvaddy will be waiting with Airportpark Berlin-Brandenburg, a 154-acre development for hotels, retail, logistics and apartments worth between €600 and €800 million.

McEvaddy and Berlin go way back. During the Cold War, he flew into East Berlin as an undercover intelligence officer. After the fall of the wall he was back, intrigued by the opportunity of the former East Berlin airport of Schönefeld.

Of the united city’s three airports, it was the only one with enough room to grow. The state governments of Berlin and Brandenburg stepped in to build the city’s new airport adjacent to the existing Schönefeld.

“I tried to buy this airport in 1991 but I’m glad I didn’t get it in the end,” says McEvaddy, a wiry, engaging man with an infectious enthusiasm.

It’s only now, after a decade-long crawl from one court challenge after another, that the airport is beginning to take shape. When the final legal objection to the airport was dismissed two years ago, McEvaddy made his move on the adjacent site. Though EU approval for German state investment in the airport was outstanding, McEvaddy took a calculated risk.

“I like doing things, realising a vision. This will be an economic engine for the region, I’m very confident of that,” he says, strolling around the site on a blustery afternoon.

His optimism is a refreshing antidote to the pessimism that has clouded many big projects in Berlin, a hangover from the post-Wall decades of speculative boom and bust. Many post-1989 investors lost their shirts when the united German capital failed to take off as promised; others struggled to keep sitting on sites like those around Schönefeld, allowing second generation investors to move in.

In 2006 McEvaddy took a 60 per cent stake in the joint Airportpark venture with with Bavarian property company Investa. The Bavarians acquired the Airportpark sites back in 1991 and, after nearly two decades of waiting, were happy to bring on board McEvaddy’s aviation expertise and business contacts – and his capital.

The Irishman brought on board his brother, Des, and Farrell Grant Sparks (FGS).

In the local village of Schönefeld, authorities have welcomed the Airportpark they hope will finish off their oddly empty village by filling it out with retail units.

A second level of development will serve the airport directly: McEvaddy says he is about to sign deals with four different hotel groups for premises to be erected on the site. At a third level, the Irishman has commissioned German starchitect Helmut Jahn – the man behind Berlin’s daring Sony Centre – to design a signature building at the commercial business end of the park, an area he hopes will attract big business, logistic companies as well as light industry.

A worldwide marketing scheme for the Airport Park will be launched next year, highlighting its location adjacent to the new airport, and its unbeatable infrastructure. One end of the site borders on the existing suburban and long-distance train line. At the other end, in a stroke of planning luck, the city plans to erect a new train station, the last stop before the airport.

There are other happy twists: the Airportpark site is located on one side of the airport motorway, across the state divide in Brandenburg. That little detail meant the land was radically cheaper here – around €500,000 an acre – than on the airport side, across the border in Berlin, where prices are now at least double what McEvaddy paid and rising.

In addition, the state of Brandenburg is still classified a weak economic area by the federal government, allowing local authorities to offer investors lower property taxes and other incentives.

McEvaddy hasn’t allowed himself to be infected by local pessimism about the airport, saying he is confident BBI can be built up to an airline hub to rival Frankfurt and Munich. Combined passenger numbers to all Berlin airports were 18 million last year and are estimated to rise to at least 25 million when the airport opens, with room for growth.

When he arrived in Berlin to invest, McEvaddy says he was amused to find that his reputation had preceded him. “People here thought I was going to build a low-cost terminal with a tunnel to the main airport,” he said, a variation on his investment in 140-acre site beside Dublin airport. Despite opposition from the airport authorities, McEvaddy remains confident that his Dublin investment will pay off, even if it will be a longer game than in Berlin.

Building a low-cost terminal on his land near BBI is, he says, “doable but not feasible” – it is asking a lot to expect passengers to take public transport one stop to the main terminal after checking in. “I could do it but I’m not going to. I have nothing up my sleeve here,” he says.

Sitting in the current Schönefeld airport, a joyless east German-era shack with smoked-glass windows, McEvaddy sips a coffee and reminisces. He remembers arriving here during the Cold War on a flight from Cairo as a military intelligence officer.

Though cautious about the details, he says his mission involved keeping an eye on the trade in so-called KGB diamonds that passed through East Berlin thanks to an agreement with De Beers.

McEvaddy says he had a uniquely Irish trick for diverting suspicion from what he was really up to. “Let’s put it this way: a drunken Irishman can go anywhere in East Germany and no one would suspect who he’s working for,” he says.

“It’s very useful that, especially if you can drink a bottle of whiskey without getting drunk.”

It sounds like he had a lively time in the Cold War frontier, outwitting Stasi officers and chasing diamond deals. But before it gets too interesting, he ends the conversation.

“It was mainly in East Berlin with some operations outside,” he said. “But I’m not supposed to talk about it, so you can speculate all you like.”

The conversation moves on to McEvaddy’s love of good engineering. He’s happy to confirm as true the urban myth that he can disassemble and reassemble planes with his own hands.

It’s a useful skill to have as head of Omega Air, founded in 1982 and now a world leader in selling and leasing aircraft.

Talking in Berlin, it’s clear he has endless respect for Germany’s engineering and planning tradition that has made possible huge projects like BBI and, before it, Berlin’s new main train station.

In Ireland, meanwhile, McEvaddy says planning is hobbled by politicians and planners who view everything as a question of cost rather than the crucial question of functionality over time.

“Large-scale infrastructure projects are anathema to us. We don’t think in terms of 100 years. Why, I don’t know,” he says.

Compounding short-term, small-scale thinking, he says, is a cultural pessimism, a “that’ll never work mentality” that has plagued every major project realised and suffocated countless others.

“Back when the toll roads were proposed, people complained that they’d never make any money; now people complain that they make too much money,” he says.

“The Germans have the right attitude. They view infrastructure investment as something completely separate to any other kind of investment.”

These days, Germany seems light years away from the pessimism doing the rounds about Ireland’s future, a pessimism he doesn’t share. “When you read the papers you’d think Ireland’s doomed,” says McEvaddy. “But go behind the headlines of a country that clearly overspent – in both the public and private sector – and you see essentially good figures.”

His outlook on the aviation industry seems slightly less optimistic, but equally dogged.

Who else but an aviation lover would invest in Airportpark-BBI – currently the largest infrastructure project in Europe – at a time when airlines are, figuratively, dropping out of the sky?

“The aviation business has destroyed more corporate wealth than any other,” he admits. “Getting it wrong is catastrophic but if you get it right, you get it very right. That’s what’s so exciting about it.”

With his unparalleled knowledge of the airline business, he is confident that BBI can establish itself in a crowded market.

Berlin has what no other major European city has – uncongested airways – and he says long-haul carriers like Cathay Pacific and American Airlines are ready to create a new European hub here. Once they move in, suggests McEvaddy, even BBI foot-draggers like Lufthansa will have to follow.

And what about Ryanair? The airline has, until now, had just a moderate presence in Berlin but McEvaddy is confident that chief executive Michael O’Leary will be as big a player in Berlin’s new international airport as he will be in the adjoining development.

“Michael has done brilliantly with Ryanair, all from thinking outside the box. He’s done brilliantly,” he says, before adding with a grin: “There’s only one thing they don’t do well: charm is free.”