There is nothing like starting the year off with a big deal — and this one will surely still be at the top when 2022 draws to a close in 11 months.
Ron Perelman, the embattled chairman and chief executive of MacAndrews & Forbes, which most notably oversees Revlon, has sold one of his two East Hampton estates for $84.5 million on January 6. The buyer was listed only as 153 LPL LLC.
As Perelman faced major money troubles, the oceanfront property at 153 Lily Pond Lane went on the market with Sotheby’s International Realty’s Harald Grant for $115 million over the 2021 summer. Photos of the 11,425-square-foot estate were not released. By October, the listing was no longer active.
Rumors have also been swirling since the start of the pandemic that he is also looking to unload The Creeks, his Georgia Pond estate, but it is not officially on the market. Claudia Cohen, the gossip columnist and former editor of The New York Post‘s Page Six and Perelman’s second wife, had owned the Lily Pond Lane property. Perelman put it on the market in the face of money troubles last year. She died in 2007.
The last recorded deed transfer for the property, seemingly upon Perelman and Cohen’s divorce in 1994, was for $3.75 million.
A recent story in The New York Times outlined how the once billionaire landed in financial hot water. It pointed to the $3 billion in loans taken out for Revlon to acquire Elizabeth Arden in 2016 for $1.034 billion. Another MacAndrews & Forbes’ company, Vericast also racked up as much debt, and with Perelman securing those loans with his personal properties, trouble ensued for him when the pandemic hit.
“Off went a Miró and a Matisse, which sold for a combined $39 million. As well as a Giacometti sculpture that Sotheby’s sold in a private sale where the minimum bid was $90 million,” the story explains. “He got rid of two jets and placed his 280-foot superyacht on the market for $106 million. Princeton University, to which Mr. Perelman had pledged $65 million to go toward construction of a new residential college, announced in 2021 that the building would no longer be named in his honor when he failed to meet the original payment schedule.”
Perelman also unloaded The Independent newspaper, which he bought in 2017, during a merger in 2020 with Dan’s Papers, then owned by Manhattan Media, which later sold to current owner Schneps Media a few months later.
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