Bucuresti Mall gets 124m euros in funding

Anchor Group of Turkey, the builder of the first mall on the Romanian market, Bucuresti Mall, has been granted a loan worth 124 million euros from Bank Austria Creditanstalt (BA-CA) and HVB Bank Romania, in one of the biggest financing deals contracted on the domestic real estate market this year.

International law firm Salans has negotiated the loan on behalf of the two banks. The credit is destined to finance the construction of a new Anchor Plaza office building, with an area of 30,000 square metres, as well as to refinance loans for Bucuresti Mall and Plaza Romania commercial complexes.

“The loan will be reimbursed over a ten-year period. About 15 million euros from the value of the loan have been earmarked for the construction of the office building. The construction will start this summer and be finished in 2006”, stated Eli Ergun Ergen, general manager of Anchor Grup SA.

“We are ready to allot additional resources for the important projects carried in Romania. Beside the projects of this type, we also want to expand financing aimed at the logistics area, warehouses and office buildings,” stated Claudius Ferentz, BA-CA Senior Manager for the Real Estate Finance arm for Central and Eastern Europe. BA-CA is part of the second largest German banking group, HVB.

In Romania, the BA-CA unit and HVB have released financing of over 300 million euros over the last three years for real estate projects. Other projects outside Bucharest and abroad are about to be developed, so that the portfolio of Anchor Grup SA should grow in the short and medium term.