That is despite targets set by the local council requiring all new developments in Manchester to designate at least 20pc towards affordable homes.
Instead, Renaker’s luxurious apartments were aimed at affluent yuppies and property investors.
One-bedroom flats were sold for £350,000 apiece in skyscrapers that contained dog spas, virtual golf simulators and Mahjong rooms.
It is hard to find many Mahjong players in Manchester, which may well explain why hundreds of Renaker flats were sold to buy-to-let landlords in Hong Kong.
Special seminars were even held by Renaker in the Far East to drum up interest.
For Burnham, who once vowed to tackle the “scourge of absent private landlords” that “bedevils much of Greater Manchester”, it was quite the climbdown.
Even so, controversy over Burnham’s Manchester housing record has so far been largely limited to the North West.
However, as he edges closer to Downing Street, Burnham’s skyscrapers may cast a shadow over his political reputation.
Concerns first emerged in Manchester property circles post-Covid, shortly after Renaker’s first skyscrapers started springing up.
Renaker’s first loan from GMHILF came in 2015, when the business was awarded £23m for a 28-storey development.
Over the next nine years, it received a further £555m in taxpayer cash via a dozen different loans, accounting for three quarters of the entire £983m lent out by the GMCA over that period.
In the process, Renaker’s majority owner Whitaker became one of the wealthiest developers in the country, amassing a personal fortune in excess of £700m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
That is up from £140m six years ago.
“We didn’t really know where he’d come from,” says one Manchester developer about Whitaker, who founded Renaker in 2006. “Everybody knew that he was getting a bit of government money, but no one knew it was that much.
In a GMCA report released this year, authority officials admitted GMHILF “heavily skews” towards Renaker but claimed it had been “highly successful in accelerating the delivery of new housing”.
According to its figures, Renaker was responsible for building 6,110 of the 10,974 homes bankrolled by the fund. Just 4pc of the taxpayer-backed flats built by other developers were deemed “affordable”.
And while Whitaker has never commented publicly on the loans, Burnham has sought to defend them.
In true Northern style, he said this year that the GMCA had to support Renaker because “London-based lenders wouldn’t give us money”.
“They had this downer on Manchester,” he said.
However, for one rival developer, the loans were too much to bear.
Aubrey Weis first lodged his legal claim against the GMCA in 2024, aimed at exposing the GMCA’s loans to Renaker as “subsidies”.
