Barely one year after the InterCon Hotel shut down, plans to turn it into shops and lease part of its space to the government have been revealed.
The InterCon Hotel, also known as Intercontinental Hotel, shut down in August 2020 after sacking all employees. The hotel’s general manager Oliver Geyer told employees in a notice last year that all workers are now redundant and that it would terminate its Nairobi hotel lease.
The hotel is associated with the Moi family. According to a recent report that appeared in the Daily Nation, the late Moi “initially owned a 19.3 per cent stake in Intercontinental Hotel before upping its shareholding to 53 per cent in 2018. This essentially gave the Moi family a majority shareholding of the iconic hotel.” The family acquired the stake through Sovereign Group which bought 5,874,391 shares.
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“Owners of the InterCon Hotel are considering leasing out the building or converting it into a mixed-used property, complicating the State’s efforts to sell its 33.8 percent stake in the five-star hotel. Kenya Hotel Properties (KHP) is seeking a consultant to advise on change of business model for the hotel, which closed permanently in August last year, to include a mixed-use approach —signalling the hotel building could be converted to office blocks, shops and mini-hotels,” a report that appeared in a local daily on Friday said.
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In 2019, the hotel was declared technically insolvent since it could not service its debts that stood at Sh. 717 million. The InterContinental Hotels Corporation has been running and managing the 389-room InterContinental Hotel Nairobi under a 99-year lease since April 1967. Shareholders of InterContinental Nairobi have previously included the Intercontinental Hotels Corporation Group (33.8 per cent), the Development Bank of Kenya 12.99 per cent stake, government of Kenya 33.83 per cent stake.