One of Brighton’s leading hotels has been sold for £39 million by Royal Bank of Scotland.
The Metropole – currently branded the Hilton Brighton Metropole – has been bought by an investment company called Topland which is run by Israeli-born billionaire brothers Eddie and Sol Zakay.
The hotel, in King’s Road on Brighton seafront, has 340 bedrooms and enough conference and exhibition space to hold 5,000 visitors.
It was built in 1890.
Topland said that the operating lease from Hilton, the American hotels company, had ten years to run.
RBS is 83 per cent owned by the taxpayer. It made a loss of £1.1 billion last year and lost £3.6 billion in 2009.
The disposal of the Metropole is part of a sale of assets prompted in part by the banking crisis.
The man blamed for bringing the bank to its knees was disgraced former chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin, also known as Fred the Shred for the way he ruthlessly cut jobs.
He is back in the news after an MP revealed that he had obtained a super-injunction to gag the press and public.
The nature of the super-injunction was not disclosed but MPs are expected to debate the growing use of these legal gags which prevent all of us from exercising our freedom of speech.
