Erikka Askeland: Herd of white elephants seen on M8

The Maxim development in North Lanarkshire has proved to be a white elephant, with potential costs for many of the celebrities who bought into the tax wheeze used to sell the scheme to investors, including Natasha Kaplinsky

The term "white elephant" describes a valuable possession that its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost of upkeep is out of proportion to its usefulness.

Maxim, the 330 million office park alongside the M8, has often had the term applied to it. In fact, the development of ten vast empty office buildings built under a government-backed tax wheeze on the verge of the biggest property recession in recent history could be described as a herd of them.

The effect of the recession meant the value of the property plummeted below the substantial 198m bank loan that funded it, perhaps even as early as a year after the scheme was complete. The loan, made in the sunny uplands of Peter Cummings' HBOS days, has come under heavy weather since Lloyds Banking Group inherited it. Buckling under the weight of the elephant hanging around the neck of its capital ratios, the bank put the park - and it's massive debt - up for auction.

The buyer of the, admittedly deeply discounted, debt is Cerberus Capital, an aggressive venture capital firm from New York led by George Bush's former treasury secretary John Snow. The sale sparked a competition with at least one other US investor, which is an indication that the Americans will come a long way to chase a cheap deal when they sniff it. Or they haven't spent a lot of time staring at the hundreds of thousands of square feet of empty office space that currently plagues North Lanarkshire - most of this thanks to Maxim.

The firm that built the offending office park in the first place was Tritax, a slick Bond Street-based property investor that specialises in building out former enterprise zones.