Another London acquisition

INDITEX founder Amancio Ortega paid £82 million (€93 million) for another London property in Foley Street, via his Pontegadea real estate company.

The 1920s building close to Oxford Circus and the British Museum, was origi‐nally built as a printer’s and later housed the BBC’s overseas service.

This was the Zara bil ‐lionaire’s second impres‐sive property deal in re ‐cent months, following the €100 million purchase last March of an apart ‐ment building in Dublin’s Hanover Square.

The Foley Street build ‐ing was bought from Abrdn ‐ formerly Standard Life Aberdeen ‐ in a trans‐action overseen by prop‐erty advisers Savills.

Abrdn bought the 4,000‐square metre Foley Street building for £70 mil‐lion (€79.5 million) in 2017, leasing it for 25 years to the Kier Group in 2018.

Undeterred by Brexit, Ortega continues to invest in the London property market with assets worth approximately €3 billion. His biggest purchase, The Post Building, was ac ‐quired in 2019 for around €700 million.

He owns properties in Oxford Street, St James’s Street and St James

US investment fund, Apollo Global Management, has the John Wood Group in its sights.

Usually referred to as Wood, the multinational engineering and consulting business headquartered in Aberdeen turned down four previous offers, main‐taining that they did not re‐flect its real value.

Matters changed with

Square as well as Devon‐shire House, the former townhouse of the Dukes of Devonshire in Piccadilly.

The Foley Street sale was one of London’s few largescale property trans‐actions in recent months, after sales slowed owing to the Bank of England's increased interest in ‐crease.