Maybourne

Maybourne, formerly the Savoy Hotel Group, has been operating luxury hotels in London with origins that go back over 200 years. The group was renamed when the Savoy Hotel was sold off from the original group of four hotels – The Savoy, Claridge's, The Berkeley and The Connaught. The oldest hotel in the group is The Connaught, which was originally built as the Prince of Saxe Coburg Hotel in 1815. It was renamed The Connaught in 1917 after Queen Victoria's third son, Prince Arthur, the first Duke of Connaught. The Maybourne name was formed when a group of Irish investors, headed by Derek Quinlan, bought the Savoy group of hotels from Blackstone and Colony Capital in 2003 for £750m. It was decided soon afterwards that the Savoy Hotel did not fit into the plans, thus this hotel was sold to Kingdom Holding for approximately £250m. As the three remaining hotels were in a very poor state of repair, one of the investors, Paddy McKillen, immediately set out on a plan to completely refurbish the properties, beginning with The Connaught. Finance for the purchase of the group was provided by Anglo Irish Bank. When the financial crisis hit, Anglo Irish Bank was not able to survive, and the group's loans were transferred to National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), a workout bank created by the Government of Ireland in response to the Irish financial crisis.