War of the malls in Cluj

Polus Transilvania will this week start construction of the Polus City Center shopping centre, an investment estimated at 140 million dollars. “The construction of the retail centre will be completed in August 2007, and its official opening will take place in the fourth quarter of 2007, around October,” Arpad Paszkany, general manager of the company, told ZF Transilvania. The main competitor of Polus Transilvania is the Iulius Grup, which several weeks ago started to build the Iulius Mall in Cluj, a shopping centre worth some 50 million euros. The rival of Iulius Grup in the tender for this project was South East Euromentor, one of the companies that Arpad Paskany holds shares in. This made the representatives of South East Euromentor challenge the result of the tender organised by the Cluj County Council in court. The project that Polus is to start this week will have among others things, a Carrefour hypermarket covering a 16,000-square metre surface area and electronics shops such as Altex and Domo. For almost 10 years, Polus City Centre has been just a project due to legal problems related to the ownership of the plot of land. This autumn, Polus Transilvania started to prepare the land for construction work and has recently ended a dispute with the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine with financial compensation.