The man who built and lost Canary Wharf Paul Reichmann Paul Reichmann, the Canadian property developer who died on Friday aged 83, made and lost fortunes on the global real estate markets. In doing so, he created two of the world's foremost financial districts. As the head of a family-owned business that had a roster of projects spanning North America and Europe, Reichmann ran the world's largest real estate company for much of the 1980s. However, in a fate common to those at the top of the property game, he overextended his operations; betting too heavily and realising too late that the market was turning. To understand the style and conviction that shaped and later felled Olympia & York, which Reichmann and his brothers founded in the early 1960s, one need look at the company's signature projects: Canary Wharf in London and New York's World Financial Centre. Thirty years ago, both sites were virtual wastelands; areas that the fast-growing cities had left behind. Today, the developments are among the most valuable pieces of commercial real estate on the planet. In 1979, O&Y bought a portfolio of skyscrapers on the southern tip of Manhattan. The plan was to redevelop the buildings into an office hub able to serve Wall Street's growing hegemony in world finance. The project threw up a series of complex engineering challenges, including infilling large areas of water to create foundations. But the company persevered, ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars into the construction. It was this success that led Margaret Thatcher to phone Reichmann in 1987 and ask him to deliver a similar project in London. But Canary Wharf was a different proposition. Where the World Financial Centre was on the doorstep of Wall Street, the success of Canary Wharf would require London's financial institutions to decamp to a water-ringed outcrop three miles to the east of the City. They didn't. In 1992, O&Y was forced into bankruptcy with about C$13bn in debts, making it the biggest corporate failure up to that time. The setback transformed Reichmann's reputation from a visionary with a shrewd sense of timing and a rock-solid man of his word, to a reckless developer willing to gamble huge amounts of other people's money. The winding-up of O&Y was a messy affair, during which lenders frequently criticised Reichmann's management style and negotiating tactics. In 1995, Reichmann received backing from a coterie of wealthy investors, including Saudi Arabia's Prince Waleed bin Talal, to buy back Canary Wharf from the banks. The project got back under way and last year superseded the City as Europe's largest financial district. But for Reichmann, the damage was done. The second youngest of six children, Reichmann was born in Vienna in 1930, the family having moved to Austria from Hungary some 10 years before. Later, as the Nazis advanced, they continued on to France and Spain, finally settling in Tangiers in 1940 before moving to Toronto in the 1950s. Sir George Iacobescu, the chairman of Canary Wharf and business associate of Reichmann for over 30 years, said on Friday that his legacy should be defined by the skylines he had left behind. You have to wipe out the failure and look at what he has left behind. He was a genius; maybe he was just too much of a genius.