The Barclay brothers have bought three of London's most famous five-star hotels, in a deal that has seen them add Claridge's to their already impressive portfolio.
The brothers, who already own the Daily Telegraph newspaper and the Ritz hotel, bought the Maybourne Group from the Irish National Asset Management Agency (Nama), which is trying to recover billions of euros of bad property debt.
The Maybourne Group comprises Claridge's, The Connaught and The Berkeley hotels, which were bought in 2005 by a syndicate that was marked out as being one of the most audacious deals by Irish entrepreneurs who were surfing a wave of cheap credit.
Nama has said that the Maybourne deal with the Barclay brothers has seen them recover every penny of debt from the Claridge's deal.
"The loans were sold for in excess of €800m with Nama recovering 100 per cent of the original value of the loans plus interest," a Nama spokesman said.
The sale of the hotels is said to be a successful start to what is predicted to be an enormous fire sale of distressed London property by Nama, which will include Canary Wharf's Citigroup tower, parts of Leicester Square and the Louis Vuitton building in Bond Street. 
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