Fury mounts over Sefton industrial estates sale

Apr 18 2008 by Ben Schofield, Liverpool Daily Post

Graham Haywood

SEFTON Council are considering seeking an injunction preventing the sale of its former industrial estates, the Daily Post can reveal.

Furious councillors yesterday pressed officers to seek legal advice, after it emerged taxpayers could have missed out on a £4m profit windfall.

Yesterday we revealed the industrial estates, sold for £8m in early March, are being auctioned in London. The auctioneer is anticipating bids exceeding £12m.

Senior councillors are also calling for an investigation into whether or not council officers were issuing sound advice over the sale. It is understood the council could use the contract they drew up with the new owners and other written guarantees to hold up the resale of the industrial estates.

Cllr Peter Dowd, Labour leader in Sefton, said: “On the information we currently have available, we are not satisfied that what they are doing is reasonable given their commitment to us, especially if there’s reasonable potential that the council taxpayers will lose out.

“We are seeking Queen’s Counsel’s advice about whether or not the auction, at an early stage after the sale and given their commitments about continued ownership and the running of the business, is appropriate and is not a breach in good faith of the terms we agreed with them.”

Council officers will be put under the spotlight to assess whether they were right to advise councillors to remove restricted covenants from the deal.

The sale took almost a year to finalise, and it is understood that covenants were initially central to the proposed contract.

They would have bound the buyers into keeping the land for a fixed period, and Sefton could have levied a cash sum in the event of an early sale.

But the bidders reportedly approached the council at the eleventh hour demanding they were dropped. It was, Sefton was told, a deal breaker.

Cllr Dowd recalls being advised covenants were “inconsequential”.

Following yesterday’s story, Sefton’s scheduled cabinet meeting opted to go into a private session specifically to discuss the sale and the potential loss of profits. Councillors and officers batted the issue around for almost an hour.

Before removing the press and public, Graham Haywood, Sefton’s chief executive, insisted the tendering process was robust, the best price was secured for the estates and the £8m was earning £500,000 revenue after being invested.

He added that any suggestion houses could one day be built on the land was “misleading”.

The industrial estate land is due to be auctioned in 75 plots by real estate company Colliers CRE on May 13.

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