Ambitious Italian real estate investors aspire to be boring. History is littered with colourful property players – from Silvio Berlusconi to Luigi Zunino – who lived up to their nickname in Roman dialect of palazzinari, wide boys who made their fortunes in property, while often falling foul of the law.
Giuseppe Statuto, a rising star of real estate with a taste for fine art and luxury hospitality, kept an extremely low profile as he sought to reconstruct his family’s fortunes in the wake of the global financial crisis. In 2002, Gruppo Statuto had formed a real estate joint venture with Lehman Brothers, just five years before the Wall Street firm collapsed in August 2007. Yet many other deals had gone well for the young entrepreneur, born in 1967, and such holdings would see Statuto and his family business survive the credit crunch.
The son of a construction firm owner, Raffaele Statuto, Giuseppe and his brothers Domenico and Ivan founded a general partnership in the same trade in 1993, in Caserta, near Naples. In 2001 they moved the business to Rome, opening an office in the upmarket Barberini district, to trade in properties and rent out real estate. With just a handful of employees, the business largely went under the radar, despite its burgeoning asset-rich empire. Indeed by 2005, Statuto had an estimated net worth of €1 billion, with a home furnished with priceless artworks from the likes of De Chirico and Fontana, according to sources familiar with the firm. Astute real estate moves such as the purchase of the Danieli hotel in Venice, and stakes in Milan’s up-and-coming Navigli area, plus shopping centre deals in the affluent north, meant the group was able to lean on important assets when the credit crunch hit. Statuto, meanwhile, had started to see luxury hospitality as a way out of the crisis, driving deals for Four Seasons-branded hotels in Milan and Taormina as well.
Arrested and charged
Yet despite Statuto’s name remaining out of the spotlight for most of the post-GFC years of reconstruction, something went awry. In December 2018, Giuseppe Statuto and his right-hand man Massimo Negrini found themselves under house arrest, charged with fraudulent bankruptcy connected to Statuto-controlled entity Brera, which had gone to the wall in 2016 writing off losses of €32 million, mostly in unpaid taxes. Italy’s finance police alleged that some €8 million had been transferred out of Brera through a “complex web of fraudulent legal transactions” prior to its collapse, and noted that it wasn’t the first time that entities connected to Gruppo Statuto had gone bankrupt, leaving creditors empty-handed.
Statuto responded by offering to repay the €8 million, which proved effective in halting legal proceedings. Shortly before arrest, the entrepreneur, had, in any case, continued to make bank, thanks to LVMH’s $2 billion offer for US luxury hotel group Belmond, in which Statuto held a 5.1% stake, valued at some $35 million alone.
Since then, according to a source familiar with the firm, Statuto “has learned his lesson. He is surrounded by a water-tight legal team, and won’t want to make any mistakes again”.
Luxury hospitality
Post pandemic, Gruppo Statuto has doubled down on the luxury hospitality theme, betting on its counter-cyclical resilience both in Italy and abroad. Around a year ago in Rome, Statuto acquired the newly completed Six Senses hotel on Via del Corso for some €245 million from Orion Capital Managers. Corrado Trabacchi, partner of Orion Capital Managers, described the hotel as a “new jewel of hospitality for the five-star luxury segment, currently not sufficiently covered in the city by the existing supply”. The deal for the property represented the highest price per room ever achieved in the Italian capital, at €2.6 million per key, and was brokered by Coldwell Banker Commercial.
This deal followed Statuto securing a €495 million facility to finance the opening of another Six Senses Hotel in Italy, at Via Brera 19 in Milan. The structured finance agreement, inked with Italian lender Banco BPM and the GWM Group, will also back the redevelopment of Palazzo del Toro in Milan’s Piazza San Babila.
Statuto is working on a raft of other luxury hotels in Italy, including a new Mandarin Oriental in Sardinia’s Porto Cervo set to open in 2026. This will launch after a comprehension conversion of the 4-star Hotel Le Ginestre and its 80 rooms, which Statuto acquired in 2022 through its Slhre Fin 1 entity. Statuto beat off competition for the site from financier Enrico Meneghetti, who had plans to turn the hotel into the first Rosewood Hotel on the Costa Smeralda.
Gruppo Statuto is also overseeing the transformation of one of its longest held properties, Venice’s Hotel Danieli, into a Four Seasons, expected in 2025, to designs by Pierre-Yves Rochon. Meanwhile, Rosewood Hotels & Resorts has signed with Statuto to debut Rosewood Mian in 2025, with 70 rooms, including some 20 suites.
European expansion
The firm has also declared an interest in expanding across key European markets. Statuto made its debut in Spain in July 2023, acquiring the Hotel W on the island of Ibiza from Scala Capital. The property was opened in 2019 and has 125 rooms, of which 37 are suites.
In January of this year, Statuto acquired the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Paris for €205 mln. News of the deal first broke in December, when Mandarin Oriental was reported to have inked an option to sell the Paris hotel, which opened in 2011. The five-star hotel with 135 rooms is considered one of the most luxurious properties in the French capital and will continue to be run by Mandarin Oriental under a long-term management agreement.
Media reports say that Statuto has mandated Lazard to find capital partners to continue its push into Europe’s luxury hotel markets. International joint ventures and further luxury drives could well cement Statuto’s reformed reputation, as he seeks to expand his hospitality empire still further.