Post by darcy on Nov 1, 2008 9:33:06 GMT 1
I am selling my property in Croatia.
Anybody knows a good RE agent in Montenegro?
Thanks!
www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/world/europe/01balkans.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Despite Crisis, Wealthy Russians Are Buying Up Coastal Montenegro
Kathryn Cook for The New York Times
Russians are everywhere around Budva, including in the Adriatic Sea. Residents say Russians are the only ones who would be swimming this time of year.
By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: October 31, 2008
BUDVA, Montenegro — The global financial crisis has buffeted the balance sheets of Russia’s legion of billionaires. But suitcases of cash and Russian-owned luxury yachts keep arriving in this idyllic town on the Adriatic, helping Montenegro earn the nickname Moscow-on-the-Sea.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Kathryn Cook for The New York Times
Thanks largely to Russia, Montenegro receives more foreign investment per capita than any other country on the Continent. Russians are building a $310 million hotel and condominium complex on a rocky peninsula at Budva.
Among the biggest investors is the Russian developer Vyentseslav Leibman, a young millionaire who is pressing ahead with investments of $310 million, including plans for a 27-floor modernist hotel, luxury seaside villas, docks for the pleasure boats of the Russian superrich and a water park for their children.
The investment might seem daring given the way the economic downturn has hit several of his fellow wealthy Russians. But Mr. Leibman, a Muscovite who is managing partner at Mirax Group, the company owned by the Russian billionaire developer Sergei Polonsky, insists he can barely keep up with demand.
He said more than half of the sprawling condominiums in Mirax’s new complex — which sell for more than $10,400 per square foot and come with outdoor marble Jacuzzis — had been sold to executives of giant Russian companies like Gazprom, Lukoil and VTB. They paid, he said, upfront and in cash.
Despite the financial crisis, “the money keeps coming,” said Mr. Leibman, who recently helped bring Madonna to perform in Budva to promote his development. “And hopefully the global financial crisis will help sober up the cost of land here, which is now more expensive than in Monaco.”
Thanks in large part to wealthy Russians, Montenegro has received more foreign investment per capita than any other country on the Continent. In recent years, Russian investors have gobbled up land on the Montenegrin coast, a fashionable alternative to the South of France and coastal Turkey. Russians, including the heavily leveraged Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, have also made huge investments in the country’s industrial sector.
In neighboring Serbia, Gazprom, the Russian state energy monopoly, recently bought a majority stake in the national energy company, Petroleum Industry of Serbia, for $520 million and agreed to invest another $650 million by 2012. The deal will give Gazprom a dominant position in Serbia’s energy market while transforming Serbia into a gateway for the transportation of Russian gas into western Europe.
As governments across the western Balkans have turned toward the United States and Europe — and actively seek European Union and NATO membership — the influx of Russian capital is seen by some in Brussels and Washington as a retaliatory move by Moscow to assert influence in a formerly Communist region with which it has long had close ties.
Gen. Blagoje Grahovac, a senior adviser to the speaker of Montenegro’s Parliament, warned in a recent interview with the Serbian newspaper Nedeljni Telegraf that the United States, the European Union and NATO were being “outmaneuvered” in the western Balkans. “Whoever holds the upper hand economically will also do so politically,” he said.
The European Parliament late last year commissioned a study of Russian investment; among its concerns is that a burgeoning property market provides an ideal front for illegal transactions. The European Commission has repeatedly warned of money laundering in Montenegro.
But Dmitri S. Peskov, spokesman for Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, dismissed the notion that Russian investment was geopolitically motivated as “utter nonsense.”
“When British people 30 years ago were investing in Spanish coastal areas, it would never come to anyone’s mind to speak about enhancing political influence,” Mr. Peskov said. “When tens or hundreds of thousands of British or American people are investing in the Gulf countries, this is not a political pressure. But every time when it comes to Russia or Russians, it is immediately treated as flexing political muscle.”
But the Russianization here is unmistakable. Russians can be seen and heard everywhere: on the beaches, in clubs, in upscale restaurants and in a recently opened Russian-language elementary school. Until recently, a billboard at the airport in Podgorica, the capital, greeted visitors in Russian: “Come where they like you!”
Lazar Radenovic, Budva’s young deputy mayor, said Russians started to invest here eight years ago, after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, when real estate prices were severely depressed. Russian investment has since grown to more than $13 billion, he said. In Budva, he noted, the influx had created a new class of millionaires — 500 at last count — who had improved the town’s tax base and development.
Anybody knows a good RE agent in Montenegro?
Thanks!
www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/world/europe/01balkans.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Despite Crisis, Wealthy Russians Are Buying Up Coastal Montenegro
Kathryn Cook for The New York Times
Russians are everywhere around Budva, including in the Adriatic Sea. Residents say Russians are the only ones who would be swimming this time of year.
By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: October 31, 2008
BUDVA, Montenegro — The global financial crisis has buffeted the balance sheets of Russia’s legion of billionaires. But suitcases of cash and Russian-owned luxury yachts keep arriving in this idyllic town on the Adriatic, helping Montenegro earn the nickname Moscow-on-the-Sea.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Kathryn Cook for The New York Times
Thanks largely to Russia, Montenegro receives more foreign investment per capita than any other country on the Continent. Russians are building a $310 million hotel and condominium complex on a rocky peninsula at Budva.
Among the biggest investors is the Russian developer Vyentseslav Leibman, a young millionaire who is pressing ahead with investments of $310 million, including plans for a 27-floor modernist hotel, luxury seaside villas, docks for the pleasure boats of the Russian superrich and a water park for their children.
The investment might seem daring given the way the economic downturn has hit several of his fellow wealthy Russians. But Mr. Leibman, a Muscovite who is managing partner at Mirax Group, the company owned by the Russian billionaire developer Sergei Polonsky, insists he can barely keep up with demand.
He said more than half of the sprawling condominiums in Mirax’s new complex — which sell for more than $10,400 per square foot and come with outdoor marble Jacuzzis — had been sold to executives of giant Russian companies like Gazprom, Lukoil and VTB. They paid, he said, upfront and in cash.
Despite the financial crisis, “the money keeps coming,” said Mr. Leibman, who recently helped bring Madonna to perform in Budva to promote his development. “And hopefully the global financial crisis will help sober up the cost of land here, which is now more expensive than in Monaco.”
Thanks in large part to wealthy Russians, Montenegro has received more foreign investment per capita than any other country on the Continent. In recent years, Russian investors have gobbled up land on the Montenegrin coast, a fashionable alternative to the South of France and coastal Turkey. Russians, including the heavily leveraged Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, have also made huge investments in the country’s industrial sector.
In neighboring Serbia, Gazprom, the Russian state energy monopoly, recently bought a majority stake in the national energy company, Petroleum Industry of Serbia, for $520 million and agreed to invest another $650 million by 2012. The deal will give Gazprom a dominant position in Serbia’s energy market while transforming Serbia into a gateway for the transportation of Russian gas into western Europe.
As governments across the western Balkans have turned toward the United States and Europe — and actively seek European Union and NATO membership — the influx of Russian capital is seen by some in Brussels and Washington as a retaliatory move by Moscow to assert influence in a formerly Communist region with which it has long had close ties.
Gen. Blagoje Grahovac, a senior adviser to the speaker of Montenegro’s Parliament, warned in a recent interview with the Serbian newspaper Nedeljni Telegraf that the United States, the European Union and NATO were being “outmaneuvered” in the western Balkans. “Whoever holds the upper hand economically will also do so politically,” he said.
The European Parliament late last year commissioned a study of Russian investment; among its concerns is that a burgeoning property market provides an ideal front for illegal transactions. The European Commission has repeatedly warned of money laundering in Montenegro.
But Dmitri S. Peskov, spokesman for Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, dismissed the notion that Russian investment was geopolitically motivated as “utter nonsense.”
“When British people 30 years ago were investing in Spanish coastal areas, it would never come to anyone’s mind to speak about enhancing political influence,” Mr. Peskov said. “When tens or hundreds of thousands of British or American people are investing in the Gulf countries, this is not a political pressure. But every time when it comes to Russia or Russians, it is immediately treated as flexing political muscle.”
But the Russianization here is unmistakable. Russians can be seen and heard everywhere: on the beaches, in clubs, in upscale restaurants and in a recently opened Russian-language elementary school. Until recently, a billboard at the airport in Podgorica, the capital, greeted visitors in Russian: “Come where they like you!”
Lazar Radenovic, Budva’s young deputy mayor, said Russians started to invest here eight years ago, after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, when real estate prices were severely depressed. Russian investment has since grown to more than $13 billion, he said. In Budva, he noted, the influx had created a new class of millionaires — 500 at last count — who had improved the town’s tax base and development.