Receiver takes over paralyzed luxury resort in Anguilla codeveloped by US media mogul

Receiver takes over stalled Anguilla resort

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Lenders have assumed ownership of a stalled luxury resort in Anguilla that has the tiny tourism-dependent island’s only golf course and was codeveloped by a U.S. media mogul, officials said Monday.

Victor Banks, Anguilla’s minister of finance and tourism, said a receiver was appointed to take over management of the Temenos resort, where construction halted in June 2008 when developer Flag Luxury Properties LLC ran out of financing for the 286-acre (116 hectare) beachfront parcel.

“It’s a very important property,” Banks said during a Monday phone interview from the British territory of 14,000 people. “We’re hoping to have it finalized and completed and see this property realize its potential.”

Robert Sillerman, a managing director of Flag Luxury whose company CKX Inc. owns the “American Idol” franchise and bought controlling interest of Elvis Presley Enterprises in 2004, was one of the partners in the Anguilla development.

Calls and an e-mail to Flag Luxury’s New York offices went unanswered Monday.

William Tacon, a managing partner in the corporate recovery firm Zolfo Cooper’s office in the British Virgin Islands, was hired as receiver last week by Credit Suisse, which is acting as the agents for lenders that invested in the paralyzed resort.

As receiver, Tacon said he will try to find new funding or owners for the high-end project, which he estimated was roughly 60 percent complete.

“It’s in its very, very early days,” Tacon said Monday from his office in Tortola. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the receiver’s appointment, said lenders are holding the resort’s $180 million mortgage. The newspaper also says one of the buyers was author Dan Brown, whose “The Da Vinci Code” is among the best-selling novels in history.

At the project’s November 2003 groundbreaking, Banks had said Anguilla’s government was hopeful that the $250 million project would help boost the island’s tourism and attract golfers.

The property features a Greg Norman-designed championship course and was supposed to have a 32-room hotel and 78 vacation villas.

The global economic slowdown has slammed the vital tourism sector across the Caribbean, halting hotel projects from the Bahamas to St. Lucia.