Gold Investor Beats The Crown To Nab Mall With Life Sciences Potential

An investor and financial theorist who set up gold and crypto investment platforms is in talks to buy a shopping centre in Oxford that has planning permission in place for a conversion scheme that includes labs. 

Canadian investor Roy Sebag has seen off competition from a joint venture of The Crown Estate, Pioneer Group and Oxford Science Enterprises to buy the 227K SF Clarendon Centre, EG reported. 

CBRE was appointed by owner Lothbury Property Trust to sell the centre earlier this year, with a guide price of £30M. 

Plans are in place to convert the centre to a mixed-use scheme that includes laboratories, offices, shops and student accommodation. Oxford Science Enterprises is a body set up to help startups that spin out from research undertaken at the university. In 2022, Oxford Science committed to run a 30K SF incubator at the redeveloped scheme. 

It is not known whether Sebag intends to push on with the conversion plans, EG said. 

Sebag is the chief executive and founder of GoldMoney, a platform where investors can trade in precious metals as well as store them for owners. The company stores $2.8B of precious metals for clients, according to its website. 

He had previously set up crypto platforms, but he exited that market, according to reports in 2019.

In 2022, he wrote The Natural Order of Money, which posited that there is an intrinsic link between money and nature, one that has been broken in modern societies. Returning to money being based on a gold standard would reassert the link, he said in the book. 

The Crown Estate is making a £1.5B push into the life sciences real estate sector, and earlier this year announced that it had bought a former Debenhams department store in Oxford for conversion to labs.

It also this week announced plans to undertake a £1.5B overhaul of Cambridge Business Park to add more labs, offices and homes.