Soho Properties

Management

The chairman and chief executive officer of Soho Properties is Sharif El-Gamal, who had worked as a waiter in Manhattan from 1997 to 2001, and then become a commercial real estate broker in 2002 (leaving his job as a waiter at a restaurant named Serafina), and started the company in 2003. His partners in the company are Sammy El-Gamal (his brother) and Nour Mousa. Mousa is the nephew of Amr Moussa, the former Secretary General of the Arab League. In September 2010 El-Gamal, was being evicted from his SoHo office, allegedly for failing to pay $39,000 in back rent, as reflected in a Manhattan Housing Court filing. The lawsuit was dismissed three months later by the Housing Court because El-Gamal had already vacated the space, arguing that he had "simply moved to another location" and "was never [truly] evicted" in the first place.

31 West 27th Street

In November 2009, it was reported that the firm spent $45.7 million to purchase 31 West 27th Street in New York City, a 12-story, 108,594-square-foot (10,088.7 m²) office building. Soho Properties made a $5 million down payment. El-Gamal said: "We just bought it for the income. It's got great long-term leases, and the financing was really attractive. We have five years at a very attractive interest rate, and it's probably the best B building in this submarket." Soho Properties purchased it from the Witkoff Group, which had purchased the building in 2006 for $31.5 million.

El-Gamal received a $39 million mortgage to buy the commercial building, and a partner, Egyptian-born businessman Hisham Elzanaty, co-signed the loan.

Park51

In July 2009, it purchased the 47–51 Park Place building on the site of the planned then-called Cordoba House, now officially titled Park51 and popularly dubbed by some American commentators the "Ground Zero Mosque". The specific location, close to the World Trade Center “where a piece of the wreckage fell,” was a primary selling point for the Muslims who bought the building, in order to "send the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11". Soho Properties paid the owner $4.85 million in cash for the property.

One of the two investors in the transaction with Soho Properties was the Cordoba Initiative, a tax-exempt foundation established in Colorado in 2004 by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The other investor of the two is another not-for-profit founded by Rauf, the American Society for Muslim Advancement. The Society is jointly run by Rauf and his wife out of the same New York office used by the Cordoba Initiative.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes, devoted a column to raising questions as to the source of the funding for the effort. Some U.S. politicians such as Republicans Peter T. King and Rick Lazio have asked for an investigation of the group’s finances, especially its foreign funding. King said: "The people who are involved in the construction of the mosque are refusing to say where their [$100 million] funding is going to come from." Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, also said:

There should be transparency about who those investors are, whether that money is coming from domestic interest or not, and if it's coming from foreign interests we need to know, because I think that's a liability, and it shows that there is another agenda rather than domestic security and tranquility.

El-Gamal said he wanted the building to be energy-efficient and transparent, most likely with a glass façade. He said: “It’s really to provide a place of peace, a place of services and solutions for the community which is always looking for interfaith dialogue". He envisions it as "a place where I could show off my hospitality, my culture, my background".