Agrokor is selling a number of Mercator's shopping malls

Slovenia's largest retail chain, "Mercator", which has been owned by Croatian Agrokor since 2014, is likely to sell more important shopping centers in the upcoming months, Slovenian portal siol.net reports.

t is a so-called monetization project, within which Mercator will sell real estate and then lease them again (sell & lease back, according to the text Seebiz reports. Recently, Mercator was checking interest in sale of real estate and the last time such a project was a step away from realization at the end of 2012, by banks that were in the middle of sales of Slovenian company to Croatian businessman Ivica Todoric, the owner of Agrokor.Slovenian retail chain now wants to sell property to reduce debts for two reasons.The first one is over-indebtedness of Agrokor. According to documents that are available at Slovenian siol.net, at the end of 2014 Croatian company had almost 3.5 billion euros of debt. It was added that this year, app. half a billion euros of financial liabilities is due for payment collection.

Another reason for the sale of Mercator’s real estate are obligations the company has to banks because of loan reprogram . Real estate is the main assets of Mercator.