The capital’s largest office center, the Horizon Business Park Center, now belongs to Ukrainian Commercial Property Investment Holding, a subsidiary of Dragon Capital, the investment fund announced in a press statement on Oct. 31.
The firm said that it had closed a three-year deal to purchase the seventy-nine-thousand-square-meter office building from Ukrsotsbank, a subsidiary of Alfa Group, owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman.
Today the office center is used by major companies and organizations such as the American Chamber of Commerce, Cisco Systems, Philips, Siemens, L’Oreal, Regus, Shell Oil, 3M, IBM, Pfizer Ferrero, Platinum Bank, Life:), and LaFarge.
The transaction was carried out in two stages. In October, Dragon Capital purchased one building with approximately 7,400 square meters of usable space, which was only a small fraction of the whole business center. After it received permits from Ukraine’s Antimonopoly Committee for the further acquisition of the entire property complex, Dragon Capital proceeded with closing the deal.
The Horizon Business Park Center consists of five interconnected office buildings, including two office towers located in the central part of Kyiv, on Mykoly Amosova and Mykoly Hrinchenka streets. Additionally, there are underground, zero-level and above-ground parking lots, as well as various infrastructural facilities as extensions of the business center.
Dragon Capital’s Volodymyr Tymochko, who is in charge of the company’s direct investments, said that the deal was the largest in the last ten years on the Ukrainian office real estate market. Work on the deal has been going on since 2015.
Dragon Capital’s marketing and communications director Olga Beloblovskaya would not disclose to the Kyiv Post the amount of the deal due to confidentiality.
Tomas Fiala, the president of the investment firm, said that he was confident that investments in Kyiv’s real estate will prove profitable within three to five years, as the economy is showing positive signs of growth. The company now controls 160,000 square meters of space, according to Fiala.
Ukrsotsbank’s chairman Ivan Svitek said in a statement that the bank had been preparing to sell the non-core asset for a number of years, developing relations with key tenants and then preparing the asset for sale. The proceeds from the sale will be invested into the bank’s core activities, such as lending to private and business clients, according to Svitek.
U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs was also involved in the indirect purchase of the real estate asset, according to the Ukraine’s Antimonopoly Committee.
