In Manchester, Yianis Group owns the Hilton Manchester Deansgate. After a seven-year legal battle it initiated against the building's owner, North West Ground Rents Limited, part of the publicly quoted Ground Rents Income Fund, over who should be made to pay £8.9m to fund essential remedial works of the external facade, which Yianis Group subsidiary Blue Manchester Limited eventually won at the High Court in 2019, Yianis Group acquired the freehold for a 'nominal' sum.[2][3][4] Prior to summer 2021, Yianis Group only had a 999-year lease on the commercial premises at Beetham Tower; the first 23 of its 47 floors.[1][5][6]
Yianis Group also own Park Inn Palace, Southend and Radisson Blu, Liverpool.
The group of companies has been embroiled in the so-called leasehold scandal, having been stripped of control of Canary Riverside in 2016 due to poor financial transparency and block management.[8] In August 2022, a costs order was made against it to protect residents at Canary Riverside against the "unreasonable conduct" of the owner of Yianis Group who, the Upper Tribunal determined, had pursued litigation "conducted with the intensity and expense and in the style of commercial litigation" so as "to harass and intimidate some or all of" the flat leaseholders.[9] In December 2022, a tribunal ruled that £1.6 million in insurance kickbacks and insurance premium tax was not payable by leaseholders at Canary Riverside. It had been heard that the surreptitiously inflated insurance premiums had been for commissions and fees to a freeholder linked company, Westminster Management Services. The tribunal praised the leaseholders' persistence and concluded that had they not bought the action, the information revealing the true scale of secret commissions reaped from the development would not have been obtained.[10][11][12][13] In March 2024, the Upper Tribunal ruled in the appeal that the landlord "had failed to demonstrate" it was due any more than the £579,039 of the £1,638,709 that they had charged to the estate between 2010 and 2020, with £1,059,570 not payable by the leaseholders.[14] The overcharging represented 65% of the landlord insurance commissions.
References
^ ab"Portfolio". yianis.com. Retrieved 12 April 2017.
