Colourful property tycoon involved in the purchase and resale of two London landmarks
Jack Dellal, who has died aged 89, was one of Britain's most successful and colourful property tycoons. A second-generation Iraqi Jew, he loved big deals, big gambles and a big family.
In his long business life, he twice came to wider attention by buying and selling notable London office blocks. At the time of his death, he was reckoned to be worth more than £1bn.
Universally known as "Black" Jack because of his love of gambling, Dellal made his first fortune in banking, where his company, Dalton Barton Securities, specialised in making loans to property companies. A "secondary" bank, it borrowed from other financial institutions, then re-lent the money at higher rates of interest. It was built up in the late 1960s and early 70s by Dellal and his longtime associate, Stanley van Gelder.
In 1972, Dalton Barton, based in Dellal's native Manchester, was sold for £58m to a merchant bank, Keyser Ullmann. Dalton Barton's success was due entirely to loans it had made to property companies, and with the bank's two previous owners, Dellal and Van Gelder, both on the board of Keyser Ullman, the headlong lending against real estate continued. But within a year, the secondary banking crisis was getting under way as rising interest rates, rampant inflation and severe credit restrictions combined to drive many property companies towards insolvency.
When the commercial property market crashed in 1974, Keyser Ullman and many other banks found themselves with loans of greater value than the properties and projects they were raised against. Dellal resigned from his position of deputy chairman, but it later emerged that the bank had backed some of his own personal business projects, mostly in property. Dellal-linked companies had borrowed more than £3m, a sum that was never repaid and eventually had to be written off.
In total, Keyser Ullmann, which was chaired by the Conservative MP and former cabinet minister Edward du Cann, had to write off £100m, most of which had been loaned during the Dellal years. The bank never recovered.
In the immediate aftermath of this debacle, Dellal kept a low public profile but was busily building up his property interests with Van Gelder and also doing deals in South Africa. In 1987 he returned to the limelight with the purchase of Bush House, home of the BBC World Service. He paid the then enormous sum of £55m for what had been dubbed "the world's most expensive building" when it was completed in 1929. Two years later, he sold it on for £130m to a Japanese company, Kato Kagaku, and was hailed as the property industry's No 1 dealmaker.
Dellal continued in business through the 1990s, often in partnership with Guy, his eldest son from his first marriage. Then, in 1999, Shell-Mex House, a 1930s art deco office building on the Strand in London, came on to the market. Dellal, along with other heavyweight investors, was interested, but all were pipped at the post by a newcomer to the London market, the New Yorker Steven Witkoff, who with Lehman Brothers paid £180m.
Never one to give up, Dellal was back on the scene when the building was again on the market two years later. It was bought for £327m in 2002 by Rotch, the property vehicle of his old friends Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz. Dellal was a co-investor. In 2007 they cashed in when the building again changed hands, going to the private equity firm Westbrook for £490m.
Dellal remained at the heart of interlocking business and family networks. His parents, Salomon and Charlotte, were born in Baghdad in the 1880s before migrating to Manchester. Jack was born there and attended Heaton Moor college, Stockport.
He had a great sense of humour – when he felt wronged in the pages of Private Eye, he thanked the magazine for publishing his photograph and suggested they made amends by sending him a case of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1959, "which I have never tried". He was a prodigious gambler, and one business associate recalls seeing him in Cannes, playing four roulette tables at once for stakes running into thousands of pounds, while also paying court to an attractive young woman.
He is survived by his second wife, Ruanne Louw, and their son and daughter; by a son and three of the four daughters of his first marriage, to Zehava Helmer, which ended in divorce; and by two daughters from another relationship. His second daughter, Suzanne, died at the age of 23 of a heroin overdose in 1981, since when drug rehabilitation projects have been a focus of the charity he endowed, the Dellal Foundation.
• Jack Dellal, businessman, born 2 October 1923; died 28 October 2012