RBS Sells London's Cumberland Hotel to London & Regional, Starwood Capital
Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, the largest bank owned by the U.K. government, sold London’s Cumberland Hotel to London & Regional Properties Ltd. and Starwood Capital Group LLC to reduce its investment in hotels.
The transaction closed yesterday, RBS spokeswoman Aoife Reynolds said in a telephone interview today. Reynolds declined to confirm a report in Property Week magazine that the closely held purchasers paid almost 215 million pounds ($324 million) for the 1,019-bedroom hotel at Marble Arch in central London.
RBS, which is 84 percent-owned by the government, also plans to sell the 494-bedroom Grosvenor House Hotel about a mile away on London’s Park Lane. That may fetch as much as 500 million pounds, the Wall Street Journal said March 3.
The bank bought both hotels in 2001 as part of a sale-and- leaseback transaction with Le Meridien, a hotel group owned by Nomura International’s Principal Finance Group.
London & Regional, which is owned by brothers Ian and Richard Livingstone, owns three Hilton-operated hotels in central London, including one on Park Lane. The others are in Trafalgar Square and in Mayfair.
Starwood Capital, a private investment firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, was founded by Barry S. Sternlicht, the founder of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc.
Malaysian billionaire Quek Leng Chan, one of whose companies operates the Cumberland, withdrew his bid for the hotel on the day the transaction was due to close, the London Evening Standard reported May 28.
To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Woodifield in Edinburgh at pwoodifield@bloomberg.net.
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