Creditors put fugitive Guo Wengui’s dragon head-shaped Pangu Plaza on the auction block at a steep discount to recoup debt
- Pangu Plaza Tower 5, shaped like a dragon’s head next to the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing, will receive bids for 24 hours from 10am on August 19 on Alibaba’s Taobao e-commerce site
- The building has a reserve price of 5.18 billion yuan, less than half the neighbourhood’s going rate and one-eighth of what its fugitive former owner said it is worth
An iconic office and hotel building in Beijing formerly controlled by the Chinese fugitive Guo Wengui will go on the auction block on August 19, as his creditors sell his forfeited assets to recoup debt.
Proceeds from the auction will go toward repaying more than 3 billion yuan of debt owed by Zenith to the Bank of Shanghai and a Shanghai investor, both listed as applicants of the auction.
Designed by Taiwan architect CY Lee, the man behind the Taipei 101 Tower, Pangu’s layout claims to be imbued with elements of feng shui. Named after the creator of heaven and earth of Chinese mythology, the Pangu project features a row of five buildings aligned along a north-south axis, with the dragon’s head – Tower 5, where the Pangu Seven Star hotel sits – pointing south.
Atop each of the three towers that make up the dragon’s body, the developer had built four siheyuan, as Beijing’s traditional courtyard homes are called. Veronica Chou, daughter of the Hong Kong textile tycoon Silas Chou, owned one of the “siheyuan in the air”, according to her 2014 interview with Financial Times. Chou could not be reached to comment.
The average price of Grade A offices in the neighbourhood of the Bird’s Nest is 88,585 yuan per square metre, 53 per cent higher than the reserve price of Tower 5, according to Fang.com, a major real estate online portal.
This is not the first time auctioneers had tried to get money out of Pangu. An August 2018 auction of 49 residential units and 19 offices valued at a combined 8 billion yuan failed to find any buyer.
A second auction, with a 20 per cent discount across the entire portfolio, was scrapped in February for lack of interest.
This time around, putting the entire “dragon’s head” up for sale has garnered a lot of spectators, with 39,213 people registering to observe the online auction as of July 18. Still, no one has put down the 1 billion yuan deposit needed to participate in the auction.
