As Novac writes on the 17th of January, 2020, the owners of the Arena Zagreb centre, the South African investment fund New Europe Property Investments (NEPI) has bought Delta City’s Podgorica (Montenegro) and Belgrade (Serbia) shopping malls after more than half a year of complicated negotiations.
According to Blic.rs, this is not the first change in ownership of these particular shopping centres. Four years ago, a second South African investment fund, Hyprop Investment, which also owns City Centre One East and West in Zagreb, purchased it for 202.8 million euros from well known Serbian businessman Miroslav Miskovic.
Of the total, more than half of the cost, namely 127.8 million euros, was taken up by the purchase of the aforementioned Belgrade centre, while Montenegrin shopping centre was purchased for a much smaller price tag – 75 million euros in total, and Serbian businessman Miroslav Miskovic earned a massive 38.1 million euros on the transaction.
It’s worth mentioning that back in 2016, the NEPI investment fund purchased the popular Arena Zagreb centre as well as 4.4 hectares of surrounding construction land from Zagreb Granite Polus Lanište for 237.5 million euros.
The price for the centre, which is the second largest shopping centre in Zagreb boasting more than 62,000 square metres in total, stood at a huge 218.5 million euros. The remaining 19 million euros was related to the purchase of the previouslty mentioned 4.4 hectares of construction land, which NEPI could use for future expansion of the centre or for the further development of different, separate facilities.
Otherwise, NEPI is majority owned by several South African companies and its shares are listed on the stock exchanges in Johannesburg, London and Bucharest. The focus of the company is expansion across the markets of transition countries in Europe, and they are already present in Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Serbia.
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