Unsecured creditors to collapsed shopping centre giant Intu collected their first payout earlier this year, receiving £103M from administrators in May and leaving £4.4B still to be paid.

Partners at KPMG, who were appointed administrators to some of the companies in the Intu network in June 2020, said they had distributed £103M to unsecured creditors to various parts of the Intu empire in a progress report released Thursday.

They said they expected to recoup slightly more than previously anticipated. But given the fact unsecured creditors are owed a further £4.4B and secured creditors have control of the company’s shopping centres, unsecured creditors could still be left out of pocket to the tune of £4.2B, KPMG estimated.

That figure could come down following the sale of one of the shopping centres under the control of the administrators, the Xanadu mall on the outskirts of Madrid. In the report, the administrators said they refinanced the asset in April and will look to sell it in 2023 or 2024 when the Spanish retail market has recovered. This might take a bit of the £200M to £300M from the pile owed to unsecured creditors.

Secured creditors — lenders to individual assets or portfolios — have taken control of former Intu shopping centres and are at various stages of working up plans to try and increase the value of the assets they now own.

CPPIB took ownership of the Trafford Centre in December 2020 after a sales process couldn’t find a buyer willing to pay more than the value of the loan it had provided to the scheme.

A notice to bondholders in July said a process was in train that would see the ownership of the Metrocentre in Gateshead transfer from a joint venture between an Intu subsidiary and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC to bondholders who own £485M of securitised debt. The transfer would happen for a nominal sum because the centre is worth less than the outstanding loan.

Given the need to wait before the sale of the Xanadu centre, KPMG said that the administration process was likely to continue into 2023-2024.

Given the extension, KPMG’s fees could rise by £7M to about £42M, the report said.