Wednesday, May 30, 2007

£70M Price tag for Islington Businesses

The Islington Gazette just has a further story on the continuing developments in the Council Sell-Off of a large swathe of their commercial properties.

ISLINGTON Council's £45million portfolio of 222 shops, warehouses and charity offices is set to be sold for almost £70million to property investment company Structadene.

Many leaseholders are still hoping to buy their own premises - even though a number of the 159 traders who had hoped to purchase now need to raise hundreds of thousands more than they were expecting. Structadene has told the council how much it is offering for each property in the portfolio and, in order to buy, leaseholders need to price-match this figure.

As we discussed on our site back in February, the tenant businesses were originally looking to be offered the right to purchase. Now we need to ensure that as much as possible neither the Council is deprived of revenue nor that are our local businesses are adversely affected.

We need to ensure that the Right to Buy for the tenants is as transparent and a fair a process as possible. We also need to check that the Council does not squander the monies it raises, and we will do all we can to find out how this money is 'reinvested' into our Borough!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Some years ago I was resident in Islington when Margaret Hodge-Watson sold almost all that we owned in the borough.She then went on to work in the City with a merchant banker to advice on local council funding. Things rarely change.