Lopesan chairman Eustasio López confirmed on Tuesday that the five-star hotel Miguel Ángel in Madrid, which has been closed since 2020 and is still under construction, had been purchased from British-Iraqi Nadhmi Auchi. This means that Auchi now has the money to pay off the debt it had with the Frux fund. Lopesan sources told Maspalomas24H that the transaction was worth 205 million euros. The hotel has 241 rooms and allows the chain to operate in the Spanish capital in an area other than the summer model but rather in the high-end segment.
In 2021, Nadhi Auchi withdrew from the property management contract with the chain that managed it, BlueBay Hotels, owned by Jamal Iglesias. Auchi hired BlueBay on January 1, 2016 to manage the property for a period of 15 years. However, the owner decided to break it at the end of 2019. One of the uncertainties about the Lopesan operation is what will happen with the hotel works, that is, who pays the bill. Until a few years ago, Jamal Iglesias had a hotel in San Agustín, in the south of Gran Canaria.
The current president of the Miguel Ángel hotel, Luma Auchi, daughter of multimillionaire businessman Nadhmi Auchi, was managing director of the pharmaceutical company Regent-GM in North London for a period between 1996 and 2001. She is a professional in the medical sector and since 2003 she has been under the shadow of drug trafficking due to an outside investigation that splashed her.
The hotel that Lopesan has bought was previously owned by the Luxembourg holding company General Mediterranean. Auchi is a British citizen exiled from Iraq, where his brother is said to have been executed by Saddam Hussein's regime. Other career politicians on the board of General Mediterranean or its subsidiaries include former Liberal Party leader Lord Steel, former European Commission president Jacques Santer, former Conservative chancellor Norman Lamont and former Conservative health minister Gerry Malone.
