The AIM-listed firm which owns the lease on Plymouth’s closed down airport and is building two huge skyscrapers on the city’s waterfront has appointed an Israel-based businessman with a track record in major developments as its new boss.
Corey Beinhaker is the son of Canadian architect Phil Beinhaker, whose FB Investors LLP company took a majority share-holding in Sutton Harbour Group (SHG) in January 2018.
Mr Beinhaker lives in Jerusalem but is a director of two companies headquartered in Manchester: Future Habitat Ltd and Beinhaker Design Services Ltd.
He worked for IBIB Group Consultants (Israel) Limited from 2010 to 2017, latterly as its chief executive, where he was contract manager for a number of significant projects including the Tel Aviv Red 10 Line Underground Station design and the design and technical specification for the traffic management for the inter-urban network in Israel.
The 50-year-old has now been named as the new chief operating officer at SHG, effectively taking control of day-to-day activities, and takes the helm 18 months after Jason Schofield resigned as chief executive.
A statement from the firm said: “The appointment concludes the search undertaken during the past year which was led by other board members, Graham Miller and Sean Swales, and supported with an external recruitment consultant, to add another executive director and return the board to a total of five directors.”
Mr Beinhaker, who will still answer to the board of which his father is executive chairman, has been working closely with the company since January 2018 when FB Investors acquired a 72.65% holding, initially through Beinhaker Design Services.
He has latterly been working as an employee of SHG, making available his property development expertise to the company.
Mr Beinhaker - who is also director of three firms in Israel: Beinhaker Group Planning and Development Limited, B Binyamina Limited and Tsuin Derech Limited – steps in at SHG at a time when the company has announced it is about to start work on two huge blocks of waterfront flats.
In September 2019 the ambitious firm said it wants to start work on the nine-storey Harbour Arch Quay apartment block, at Plymouth’s Sutton Harbour, in late 2019, with all 14 apartments being marketed off-plan.
The building could be completed in just over a year, but SHG is also keen to start work on the larger Sugar Quay scheme in the first three months of 2020.
That building will be 20 floors high, making it one of the tallest buildings in Plymouth. In 2018 SHG raised £3million from shareholders to kick-start development of the two towers, which will be only a few metres apart, either side of the existing Salt Quay House, also owned by SHG.
Sugar Quay is planned to be built by late 2022, the firm said, and would include 170 apartments.
Meanwhile, the SHG is pressing ahead with work to upgrade its Plymouth Fisheries site, near to where the flats will be built and is also looking at placing two floating pontoons in the water.
SHG has also said that a two-storey Harbour Car Park extension, which will accommodate a further 114 parking spaces, is also due to start late 2019, with the additional parking to be available for use in summer 2020.
The company also owns the long lease on the former Plymouth City Airport site, at Derriford, which closed for aviation in 2011 and has been mothballed.
Mr Beinhaker is the second director appointed by FB Investors LLP in accordance with a relationship agreement entered into in November 2017 with Sutton Harbour Group.
The main purpose of the areement is to provide that the relationship between FB Investors and SHG is conducted independently and on an arm’s length basis, SHG said.
Mr Beinhaker’s father Philip, SHG’s executive chairman, is the other director appointed by FB Investors LLP. Corey Beinhaker has no personal holding of SHG shares.
