ZARA: What is Zara,its seems to be every where and on every one

The Times December 20, 2005

Billionaire Zara tycoon buys £140m City block
By Jenny Davey



AMANCIO ORTEGA, the Spanish billionaire behind the Zara fashion chain, has snapped up 100 Wood Street, an office building designed by Foster & Partners in the City of London, The Times has learnt.



Señor Ortega has agreed to acquire the 153,000 sq ft building, whose tenants include JP Morgan Chase, Schroder Investment Management and F&C Asset Management, for his family’s Pontegadea investment company. He will pay about £140 million — £15 million above the £125 million asking price.

Deka, the German property fund, put the building up for sale this year through CB Richard Ellis and Savills, the commercial property consultants.

It is understood that the deal is only Señor Ortega’s second property investment purchase in Britain. In the summer he bought Abacus House on Gutter Lane, another building in the City of London once owned by Deka.

Señor Ortega, 69, is Spain’s richest man and one of Europe’s wealthiest self-made men, with an estimated personal fortune of £6.5 billion. He is known as one of the world’s most casually dressed billionaires and refuses to wear a tie.

He has built one of the world’s biggest fashion empires after learning the rag trade as a 13-year-old, delivering shorts for a local tailor. He opened his first Zara store in 1975 and then expanded the chain internationally. In 2001 he took Inditex, the company behind the chain, public.

He has made personal investments in such diverse areas as electricity and gas, banking, tourism and property.

News of the transaction came as Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker said that just under £9.35 billion of commercial property had changed hands in the City of London this year, almost double the £5.25 billion done last year. Cushman said that £2.66 billion of deals have been agreed in the fourth quarter alone.

Clive Bull, head of Central London investment at Cushman, said that a string of deals were still in the pipeline as investors largely ignore the impending Christmas break.

Overall commercial property investment across the UK looks set to break records for a second year running, with deals set to hit £50 billion this year, comfortably beating the £42 billion of transactions last year.

Canary Wharf, the docklands developer, appears to be about to take its total sales in 2005 to more than £1 billion after lining up KanAm, a German fund manager, to buy the headquarters of Reuters.