By CRAIG KARMIN
One of Ireland’s top investors who gobbled up trophy properties in Manhattan, London and Eastern Europe during the market’s go-go years now owes hundreds of millions of dollars and is holding a global fire sale of his assets.
Derek Quinlan’s first New York City property to get dumped: an Upper East Side townhouse. A buyer has signed a contract to purchase the five-story townhouse at 20 E. 64th St., which had an asking price of $29.5 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Quinlan paid $26.2 million for the property in 2005.
That sale and numerous others around the world mark the latest chapter in the rise and fall of one of the most recognizable players in Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” economy, which boomed in the years leading up to the global recession. The former tax inspector from Dublin, Mr. Quinlan founded his own firm investing money for high-net-worth individuals in 1989. His initial purchase was an ice-cream parlor in a Dublin suburb.
As head of a private-equity firm, he borrowed heavily to make splashy acquisitions at home and abroad. For example, his group paid $1.4 billion for the Savoy Group, which controlled Claridge’s and other posh London hotels, and later bought the Madrid headquarters building of Banco Santander. He managed a fund that once had assets under management of around $15 billion.
Mr. Quinlan also bought a waterfront villa on the Cote D’Azur that had its own discotheque and was located next to homes owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Roman Abramovich, a Russian-born billionaire who owns the U.K.’s Chelsea Football club.
In New York he had his eyes on townhouses. In addition to 20 E. 64th St.—a 25-foot-wide property with its own elevator which he rented out for $90,000 a month—his firm bought another East 64th Street townhouse around the same time for $18.7 million that was once the headquarters of the New York Observer.
Many of his loans had recourse provisions that enabled lenders to go after his personal savings in the case of a default, said a person familiar with the matter. When his investments floundered during the market bust, he owed hundreds of millions in debt.
Mr. Quinlan resigned from his private-equity firm, which was renamed Avestus Capital Partners, in 2009 and moved to Switzerland. He couldn’t be reached for comment.
To pay back his creditors, Mr. Quinlan has put up for sale several of his marquee holdings, including stakes in the Banco Santander building and the Citibank tower in London. In that city, he has already sold a house in the Mayfair neighborhood, a DKNY building and the Asprey building on Bond Street.
In New York, he first listed 20 East 64th St. with Prudential Douglas Elliman in 2009, then with Leslie J. Garfield. It is now in contract, according to people familiar with the matter. The sale price and buyer’s identity aren’t known.
The other townhouse, 54 East 64th St., was listed for $25 million through Sotheby’s International Realty but was recently taken off the market.
Despite setting up a New York office and meeting with lenders and potential investors in the city, Mr. Quinlan never got very far in the U.S., buying Chicago property, a Georgia golf resort and some land in Southern California before the market turned.
Mr. Quinlan’s personal debts to the National Asset Management Agency, an Irish government agency created to buy up risky loans from Irish banks, are around €230 million ($340 million), according to London’s Sunday Times. He has paid off about €140 million from property sales in the past year.
After he failed to agree on a debt repayment plan with the National Asset Management Agency, the agency took control of some of his property and debts outstanding.