Irish billionaires JP McManus, Dermot Desmond and John Magnier are set to receive the lion’s share of a £4bn sale of the Barchester Healthcare nursing homes business in the UK.

New York-listed healthcare property investment group, Welltower, is to acquire Barchester and a related company, called Limecay, which owns the group’s portfolio of physical nursing homes, it will be announced today.

Barchester is the UK’s second-largest nursing home operator with a portfolio more than 260 care homes and six hospitals. It employed 17,200 at the end of last year.

Selling agent, Knight Frank, and a spokesman for Barchester declined to comment, but it is believed a formal announcement will be made later today on the New York Stock Exchange.

Barchester and Limecay each have little underlying debt when intergroup loans are stripped out.

Barchester owed £103.6m to related parties and had £366.4m of external loans at the end of last year, according to its latest accounts filed recently with Companies House, London.

Limecay has £1.09bn of loan notes issued to its parent company in the British Virgin Islands.

These are due for repayment at the end of 2027, its most-recent accounts state.

Loan notes can be a tax-efficient way to structure investments.

Limecay’s property portfolio had a gross value of £1.91bn at the end of December.

Barchester and the related properties came close to being sold six years ago to Macquarie for £2.5bn before the Australian financial services giant pulled out of the deal, blaming uncertainty caused by Brexit.

Welltowers was also among runners and riders in that abandoned sales process.

The Irish tycoons invested in Barchester in 1994, a little over a year after the business was set up by British entrepreneur, Mike Parsons.

The three are said to be by far the biggest shareholders in the business.