Wooed with the finest Havanas and vintage wine
At a time when the role of Ireland's property developers comes under scrutiny as a small part of the jigsaw which led to the Government's unprecedented €400bn guarantee to safeguard the country's six banks, Barrett, who rarely gives interviews, has lifted the veil on how sales of prime real estate are brokered.
And he reveals how his love of fine wines helped him and his Treasury Holdings partner Johnny Ronan to clinch one of their mega deals -- the €500m purchase of the iconic Battersea Power Station site on the banks of the river Thames.
Barrett says that they had tried to buy the 35-acre site for three years and had come "mouthwateringly close", but it was his ongoing interest in restaurant wine lists -- favouring obscure grape varieties, regional specialities "and outright spectacularly great wines" -- that lubricated the tense negotiations with the powerful Hwang family of Hong Kong.
He remembers the zenith of Treasury's feverish acquisition of blue-chip real estate around the world and how business is done with the big players in the Far East. Barrett abandons his usual reserve and reveals a hedonistic streak and love of the good life which proved invaluable.
"The site lay tantalisingly waiting for a saviour, legs akimbo, breasts appetisingly on openish display. We lay in patient wait, hoping for the right moment, which eventually arrived," Barrett says of the 2006 deal.
"Battersea Power Station is pivotally located in London, near Chelsea Bridge on the south bank of the great sweeping body of water that bisects London, the River Thames, a mere 2,000m from the Palace of Westminster (which apparently has a surprisingly poor wine list, but one which doesn't seem to deter the members from giving it a lash in medically unwise quantities). It is the world's largest brick building, and formed the backdrop for the cover of the Pink Floyd album Animals and is definitely the greatest remaining undeveloped riverside site in central London," he writes in a new book That'll Never Work... Success Stories from Private Irish Business, compiled by Michael Gaffney and Colin O'Brien, both partners in KPMG.
"China is a different place to Europe, full of ancient traditions, customs opposite to our own and a way of doing business based on the personal relationship between two parties, rather than contracts.
"I had learned that way of doing business in the Hot Pot restaurants of China's major cities, in spectacularly lavish private dining rooms in the most splendid of settings near the Forbidden City where relationships were formed, strengthened and enhanced over bird's nest soup, sharks' fins, braised python, the slug-like sea cucumber and the aphrodisiac jellyfish, all washed down with copious quantities of baiju, a grandfather to, and much more powerful version of, our own poitin," Barrett says in the book, published by Mercier.
As they were trying to negotiate over Battersea, there were a series of dinners in Hong Kong and Shanghai where the flesh of the deal was put on its bones, "but not before the Hwangs sought to figure me out".
"No deal is ever done in China without the parties engaging in an elaborate choreographed sequence of a type of mating dance, where, over dinner, they figure out if you are the sort of chap they'd do business with. Woe betide the Westerner who tries to cut the dating process short or doesn't keep up his end by lashing back equal quantities to them as they judge you when you're in your cups."
Barrett describes the moment when he met George Hwang, the eldest of the four Hwang brothers, who has one of Asia's finest wine collections and one of the three best cigar collections in the world..
"George decided to grill me and provided one of the most difficult oenological tests ever set. And then he discovered, in a chance remark about a dusty Sassicaia, that I knew a thing or two about wine, garnered from all those Malbecs and Syrahs and Grenaches and Cabernets and Tempranillos and Merlots that I had spent years around the globe slurping, never thinking it would come in useful in such an arduous examination.
"It's difficult to describe George's great joy when he
found someone that enjoyed the pleasures of the grape as much as himself. And when he did, the wine flowed and the vintages kept coming one after another after another," Barrett recalls.
He doesn't place values on the wines and cigars, but they included some of the world's most important vintages and some of its rarest cigars.
Some of the greatest wines in the world were decanted -- together worth the price of a brand new family car or more -- during two spectacular banquets, one of 10 courses lasting seven hours, and another of eight courses running to six hours.
At the first dinner, the wines included Chateau Lafite 1989, which sells for €10,000 a case; a €2,000-a-bottle Chateau Latour 1982, a magnum of Chateau Petrus 1986 which sells for €2,000, a €500 Australian Grange 1986, and a priceless 1911 Corton.
The feast was given atmosphere by the finest Cuban cigars, including Cohiba 1492 (only 300 boxes were ever made), Cohiba Double Robusto and Davidoff Dom Perignon, a single one of which will set you back €400.
If anything the second dinner was even more lavish, with wines worth thousands of euro each and the rarest 1891 Havanas plucked from a sunken galleon taking centre stage. Vintages included Chateau Mouton Rothschild (1989), Chateau Haut Brion (1989), Meursault Domaine Lafon (1992), a magnum of Chateau Cheval Blanc, a Chateau Clinet (1989) and a Chateau Legay also from 1989. Some cigars, 1992 Churchills, finished the feast.
Barrett writes: "I am thrilled we bought Battersea, but I'll never forget the way it was bought, the negotiations in London, Dublin, Shanghai and Hong Kong, the ups and downs of the deal, the volatile participants and, most especially, the extraordinary way we did it drowning ourselves in some of the world's best wines, supplied by as generous a heart as you'd ever find."
A scheme to convert the Battersea site into a stg£4bn mixed-use retail and commercial development is at the planning stage -- although Mayor of London Boris Johnson has set out proposals that could restrict the development of tall buildings in much of the city and could impact on Treasury's plans.