After all the razzmatazz earlier last summer, Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien is now reported to have pulled the estimated €220 million sale of his luxury Algarve resort, Quinta do Lago.
The reason has been given as bids falling short of the asking price.
Sources for the self-made mobile phone tycoon have “declined to comment”, but a real estate company selling homes at the VIP venue has confirmed that O’Brien was seeking “clearly a high price”.
Meantime, his Topaz Energy Group, which operates convenience stores and fuel retail businesses across Ireland, may be changing hands. Bloomberg suggesting Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard “laid out” purchase plans on Wednesday.
The financial website added that in October – months after the 22,000-acre luxury golfing paradise appeared to have gone on the market – O’Brien “pulled a share sale by Digicel”, the mobile phone network provider of which he owns 94%, “halting what would have been the second-biggest initial public offering in the US this year”.
The Irishman, worth a purported 4.2 billion US dollars (Bloomberg Billionaires Index), bought Quinta do Lago – a site that is “more than four times the size of Monaco” – for an undisclosed sum in the late 1990s.
He has since invested at least €30 million, including €9.6 million upgrading the resort’s North golf course last year.
