Irish Nationwide seeks £40m from debtor

IRISH NATIONWIDE Building Society has appointed administrators to a UK property development company to recover a debt of about £40 million (€46 million).

The building society appointed accountants Malcolm Cohen and Shay Bannon of London firm BDO Stoy Hayward joint administrators to Watchword, a firm controlled by developers Nick Lebetkin and Laurence Selman, last month.

A spokesman at the accountancy firm confirmed that Irish Nationwide appointed the firm as administrators. He said that the company had been seeking planning permission for a hotel and other developments on the site of an old paper mill in Taplow near Maidenhead, west of London.

“Our intention is to sell the site once planning permission has been received,” he said.

Watchword had stocks valued at £38 million at June 2008 but retain profits of just £37,000, according to the most recent set of accounts for the company. Efforts to contact Mr Lebetkin and Mr Selman were unsuccessful.

A petition to wind up Watchword was presented by the UK Revenue and Customs in the High Court in London in May over a tax debt. The hearing was due to take place the day Irish Nationwide applied to the court to appoint administrators to the company.

Watchword submitted a planning application for the 48-acre site at Taplow last April seeking to build a large hotel, 28 commercial units and offices and 152 residential properties, mostly apartments.

The proposed development drew strong opposition from local people particularly about the size of the planned 150-bedroom hotel.

Irish Nationwide had commercial property loans of €4.4 billion in the UK among total loans of €10.4 billion at the end of last year. It wrote off €464 million in bad loans, mostly on commercial property, in 2008, leaving a pretax loss of €280 million. The building society wrote off 3.6 per cent of its loan book in the UK last year.

The building society has taken a more proactive stance against developers since the departure of Michael Fingleton as chief executive last April. Irish Nationwide has taken legal proceedings against property developer Liam Carroll seeking €60 million.