Property jetsetter loses control of Hilton hotels
Vincent Tchenguiz sees companies go into administration with debts totalling £250m
PROPERTY mogul Vincent Tchenguiz has lost control of a string of Hilton hotels after the investment vehicles that own them fell into administration with £250million of debt.
The Iranian-born investor owns ten Hilton-branded properties – including a flagship outlet in Kensington, West London – through a series of investment vehicles.
The hotels are owned through companies under his Zinc Hotels umbrella. They are part of his empire of around 300,000 properties in the UK.
US-based Hilton pays rent to Zinc to operate the hotels under its name.
The properties have been on the sale block for around two years, but have not been sold despite attracting wide interest and several bids. The sale process is continuing.
Tchenguiz and his fellow Zinc director Dror Pasher signed off on £250million of loans in 2014 from the GLAS Trust Corporation Limited.
GLAS is understood to have pulled the plug last month. Zinc Hotels (Holdings) went into administration alongside 24 other companies in the Zinc group.
The administrators, Alix Partners, said the commercial operations of the hotels ‘remain unaffected’.
At the peak of the property boom, Tchenguiz, 61, said that he and his younger brother Robert, 57, were both billionaires. The pair were arrested by the Serious Fraud Office in 2011, hours before they were due to host a party aboard their yacht at an annual property fair in the South of France.
The SFO later admitted the investigation, launched in connection with suspected fraud at the bust Icelandic bank Kaupthing, was unlawful.
Shortly after the SFO raid, Vincent’s property management company, Peverel Group, went into administration. He described it as ‘a direct result of the very public commencement of the SFO investigation’.
The brothers were eventually awarded a combined £4.5million in damages. Vincent also received a settlement from Kaupthing.
Vincent bought a stake in the hotels from Hilton in 2002 and later bought them outright. The prize asset in the group is the 603-bed Hilton hotel in Kensington.
The others are in York, Nottingham, Tewkesbury, Northampton, Croydon, East Midlands Airport, Leeds, Watford and Cobham.
In 2016, he launched a £110 million lawsuit against Hilton, claiming it had let the hotels deteriorate into such poor condition that it breached the leases. It is thought another legal dispute may be on the near horizon between Vincent and Hilton.
Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz were both born in Iran, although they are Iraqi by heritage. Their surname is the Persian for Genghis – the Mongol emperor.
Thanks to their jetset lifestyles and lavish parties – such as Robert’s £100,000 Louis XIV-themed 40th birthday – their personal lives have attracted as much interest as their business dealings.
Robert dated the model Caprice, before marrying American model and health guru Heather Bird, from whom he is amicably separated. Vincent has never married, but is often seen with a female companion.
Their sister Lisa went through a divorce from South African food and drink entrepreneur Vivian Imerman, who was dubbed The Man from Del Monte after he sold his share of the fruit juice business for £380 million in 1999. She appeared in a BBC 2 documentary, Millionaires’ Ex-Wives Club, earlier this year.
Vincent Tchenguiz declined to comment.