Bluewater centre 'to be put up for sale'

Bluewater, Europe's largest shopping centre, may be put up for sale, its Australian owners Lend Lease said yesterday.

The move would trigger a huge amount of interest as new planning rules mean that Bluewater is likely to remain as one of just half a dozen gargantuan retail sites in the UK.

Lend Lease invested about £350m to build the retail and leisure complex near the M25 motorway in Kent, which opened in March 1999.

Greg Clarke, its chief executive, told Australian television yesterday he planned to sell assets such as Bluewater as part of a strategy to restore profitability.

Assets such as Bluewater "don't really belong on the balance sheet of an industrial organisation like ourselves", he said.

He said Lend Lease would sell non-core assets and focus on its core activities of building and urban development in Australia and urban regeneration, hospital building and military housing in Britain and the US.

Bluewater could attract bids in excess of £1bn based on the £1.2bn that British Land paid to buy Meadowhall centre in Sheffield from the millionaire entrepreneurs Eddie Healey and Paul Sykes in May 1999.

Mr Clarke declined to set out a timetable for the disposals. "It is not on the short-term agenda. Just rushing to get rid of assets doesn't achieve value," he said.

"We will divest but what I don't want to do is to give it too much of a sense of urgency because it won't be this year and maybe it won't be next."

Lend Lease has seen its shares halve in value in the past three years since selling the profitable MLC fund manager. In March, Bluewater was named retail destination of the year at the Retail Week awards.