Taiwanese hospitality service provider Leefang Group’s (李方酒店管理集團) Hotel Indigo Kaohsiung Central Park (高雄中央公園英迪格酒店) is to be auctioned off in the foreclosure market after the sales of properties elsewhere failed to resolve the group’s cash strains.
The hotel with 129 guest rooms, which is in a 12-year management contract with InterContinental Hotels Group PLC, said in a statement that the auction would not affect its operations.
The brief statement came after local Chinese-language media over the weekend reported on the upcoming auction.
Photo: CNA
“The hotel maintains normal operations and will continue to deliver quality services,” Indigo Kaohsiung Central Park said, adding that its management team would give top priority to protecting the rights of hotel members and guests.
The fashion-minded property, which opened in central Kaohsiung in December 2016, is profitable, but Leefang Group’s debt problems have led to the foreclosure, local media said, without citing sources.
Financial stress has driven Leefang Group, which started as an accounting company and grew into a property investor and hospitality firm, to sell its Royal Seasons Hotel Taipei (皇家季節酒店) on Nanjing W Road and Airline Inn (頭等艙酒店) in Taipei’s Ximending (西門町) area.
The company’s founding couple, Lee Ming-sung (李銘松) and Fang Su-dei (方素蝶), have incurred considerable debt to finance a plan to convert an old retail complex they had acquired years earlier into a luxury hotel under the La Meridian brand in central Taichung, the reports said.
The couple for years poured money into renovating and decorating the planned hotel, but last year decided to quit the project after the hospitality industry was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, they said.
However, the decision came too late to reverse the group’s financial standing and creditors filed a foreclosure request for Indigo Kaohsiung, they added.
The couple also sold the Hengyang branch of the budget Space Inn (太空艙旅舍), which they own, and an apartment on Taipei’s Dunhua S Road to pay their debts.
Indigo Kaohsiung, with 15 floors above ground and three below, sits on a 384 ping (1,2670m2) plot of land, and has an asking price of NT$2.91 billion (US$102.14 million), foreclosure data showed.
The group is also seeking buyers for its hotel investment in Taichung at a price of NT$8 billion, as well as Space Inn’s Xinyi branch, the reports said.
The couple have made a fortune from property investments. They gained renown by selling a plot of land in Ximending to a local life insurer at an unprecedented price, raising their net worth to more than NT$10 billion, the reports said.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
RSS