InterCon withdraws from Nigeria

Lagos, Nigeria – 11 January 2018 – 
InterContinental Hotels Group is withdrawing from Nigeria four years after it opened its first site in Africa’s most populous country following a disagreement with local partners over the terms of how to bring the property out of receivership, Bloomberg reported.

1 InterContinental Lagos, Nigeria

The UK company’s 358-room hotel in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, will no longer operate as an InterContinental-branded property as of January 18, Simon Stamper, IHG’s director of African operations, confirmed. The company’s other hotels in sub-Saharan Africa are in South Africa, Mauritius and Zambia.

“We remain committed to Africa and continue operations in all our other properties across the continent as usual,” he said.

A Nigerian court last May ordered one of the lenders to the 30-billion-naira (US$83 million) InterContinental hotel, Skye Bank, to take over the property from its owner Milan Group over debts of US$29.8 million and 3.8 billion naira, the Lagos-based ThisDay newspaper reported at the time. IHG continued to manage the property, which then went into receivership.