There are bills that are paid before leaving a restaurant and there are other bills that end up being paid in the Supreme Court. This case is about one of the second. Amancio Ortega, at the time greatest fortune in Spain and owner of the building where it operates RoganoGlasgow’s oldest restaurant. This establishment has not reached an agreement with its landlord for six years about who should pay for the repair of the premises after flooding that left it unusable.
According what was published According to the Scottish press, the dispute over who should pay the reparations has gone through three judicial instances and has reached the highest court in the United Kingdom. The main argument of the lawsuit is an account of 789,000 pounds sterling (about 913,000 euros at the exchange rate) in losses due to not having been able to open it during the last six years. The curious thing about the case is that, after all this time of litigation, both parties have reached an agreement just the night before the case was to be heard before the Supreme Court.
A restaurant that is worth much more than its menu. To understand why an apparent discrepancy between a landlord and his tenant has reached the Supreme Court, it is necessary to know what Rogano is. In 1935, while the Queen Mary ocean liner took shape on the Clyde, the restaurant was decorated in the same art deco style as the great Cunard ship, and thus a classic of Glasgow hospitality was born.
Just as they say local mediathe restaurant has been operating continuously for the last 84 years, serving a clientele ranging from neighborhood residents to celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Rod Stewart, Jude Law, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Harvey Keitel among many others.
In 2020 its lights went out. In March 2020, Rogano lowered the blinds like everyone else due to the restrictions derived from the pandemic, thinking that the closure would be a matter of a few weeks.
Between December 2020 and January 2021, the building suffered several serious floods that led to an electrical fire that caused serious damage to the premises, leaving it uninhabitable and forcing its owner to leave the blinds down for longer than expected. That’s where the real problem began: the works were never carried out, and the emblematic restaurant has been boarded up since then.
The legal mess begins by knowing who the tenant is. According what was published for the BBCthe building where the popular restaurant is located belongs to Pontegadea UK, the British subsidiary of the Amancio Ortega’s real estate holding company. Precisely, thanks to the Pontegadea real estate investments in buildings like the one in dispute, the Spanish millionaire has just become the biggest real estate tycoon on the planet. Having a restaurant closed and boarded up in Glasgow is not exactly a drama for your bottom line, but it is a legal problem that has gotten out of hand.
The parent company that operates the Rogano, Forthwell Limited, argued in its lawsuit that flooding was a risk covered by the landlord’s insurance, and that Pontegadea had an obligation to repair the property. The claim included compensation of £789,000 for lost profits due to the prolonged closure resulting from the Pontegadea’s refusal to make reforms.
Pontegadea responded that Forthwell could not claim those losses because the restaurant was not operated by them but by a subsidiary, Lynnet Leisure Rogano Limited, under an occupation license for which they paid £1 a year, and that subsidiary was a third party that did not appear in the original contract.
A case that was going to create a precedent. After six years of legal disputes, the case escalated through three different judicial instances. In June 2024, the High Court of Scotland ruled in favor of the Rogano, but at the end of that same year The Court of Appeal overturned part of that decision, and the dispute ended landing in the Supreme.
The high court of the United Kingdom had transferred his sessions in Glasgow to review this case, something unusual since he usually resides in London, which gave the case a new dimension: the ruling of this court could set a precedent for how responsibilities are distributed between landlords and tenants in similar situations. But there was no failure.
The “in extremis” pact that left the judges with the word in their mouths. At the beginning of the hearing scheduled for May 20, Forthwell’s lawyer informed the five judges that the parties had reached an agreement at 11:30 p.m. the previous night.
The lawyer acknowledged that closing the agreement on the eve of the hearing was “extremely unsatisfactory,” to which the president of the court responded dryly: “Yes, that is an understatement, frustrating the lost opportunity to define the responsibilities in future disputes. The terms of the agreement remain unmade public, as does the future of the Rogano.
Pontegadea’s obstinacy. Pontegadea’s business model is not the usual one among real estate companies. Pontegadea invests in the best buildings on the main streets of cities around the world. Its main objective is not to buy cheap buildings to renovate them and obtain a capital gain from their sale, they are real estate. already with solvent tenants. In this way, Amancio Ortega begins to amortize his purchase from the first minute.
That is why it is surprising that Pontegadea has become embroiled in this legal dispute in which, whether to allow the Rogano to reopen or to rent it to any other tenant, the premises were going to need that the damage be repaired. Which destroys the argument of a dispute over reparations and strengthens the interest in obtaining a large compensation from one of the largest fortunes in the world.
In Xataka | Amancio Ortega: the billionaire who lives like a neighbor (except for private jets and superyachts)
Image | GTRES
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