Bite the dust

The sale of the "military NDK" is not the only controversial property development hitting the skids recently. Madara Bulgarian Property Fund said in a filing with the London Stock Exchange on June 30 that it had put on hold a project on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast.

Yet more bad news for one of the biggest names in architectural design, Foster + Partners, who was forced to shut down offices in Berlin and Istanbul at the start of the year. The Black Sea Gardens holiday property project, which Madara Bulgarian Property Fund was to develop with its partners, was also designed by Sir Norman Foster’s firm.

The fund’s initial estimates put the cost of construction at about a billion euro. According to the plan, construction work at Karadere, near the town of Byala, would already have started on the five towns capable of housing up to 15 400 residents.

The project was advertised as a carbon-neutral and self-sustaining resort thanks to biomass power, promising to integrate the residential clusters into the contours of the landscape and preserving the majority of the site as virgin terrain.

Nevertheless, it was criticised by conservation groups, who said it would destroy some of the last remaining virgin beaches on the Black Sea coast and would have a devastating impact on the biodiversity in the region. In the end, the credit crunch easily accomplished what dozens of petitions could not.

The fund said that "the project is currently on hold pending the availability of satisfactory financing," but also that it planned "to negotiate the sale of certain assets at an acceptable price to provide for any additional investment activity or for working capital purposes," without specifying which properties were up for sale.

Madara Bulgarian Property Fund’s partners in Black Sea Gardens is Bulgarian firm BBT Projects, which is indirectly linked to refuse collection firm Titan AS. BBT Projects manager Marian Atanassov told Kapital that the fund’s decision did not put an end to the plans to build the resort on Karadere beach.

"We have all the construction permits and are working to ensure that this project becomes reality. We are drafting a new strategy and are in advanced negotiations with a potential investor," Atanassov said. He declined to name the interested party, but one name linked to it is Kuwait’s Al-Babtain Group.

Kapital weekly, issue26