June 15 (SeeNews) - Croatia's state-owned fund for enterprise restructuring and privatisation, CERP, said it will hold on July 28 a public auction to sell its entire interest of 351,880 depositary receipts of Dutch-registered foundation Fortenova Group STAK Stichting, or 0.1178% of all depositary receipts issued by the foundation, at a starting price of 4.75 million kuna ($661,000/631,000 euro).
Potential investors should pay by July 19 a guarantee of 475,430 kuna in order to take part in the auction, CERP said earlier this week in a public invitation for the auction to be held at the CEPR premises in Zagreb.
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The foundation Fortenova Group STAK Stichting represents the ownership body of Amsterdam-registered Fortenova Group Holdco B.V., which is the single shareholder of Croatia's Fortenova Group, the successor to the collapsed food-to-retail concern Agrokor.
Last week, CERP spokeswoman Tijana Hrvojevic Matkovic told SeeNews that the aim of the sale of the depositary receipts is Croatia's exit from the company's shareholders' structure, in line with the obligations that Croatia has taken with its Recovery and Resilience Plan.
CERP obtained the depositary receipts in the process of supervision of indebted Agrokor, its subsidiaries and affiliated companies as settlement for CERP's recognized receivables of 89.7 million kuna, she explained.
The nominal value of the 0.1178% stake is 1.86 million euro.
All of Agrokor's assets except Slovenia's largest grocery retailer, Mercator, were transferred to Fortenova Group under a debt settlement agreement with Agrokor's creditors in 2019.
Fortenova is Croatia's largest privately-owned company and one of the biggest companies in Southeast Europe. It has over 50,000 employees and operates in three core activities: agriculture, retail and food, as well as non-core operations. It has manufacturing plants in several countries.
It owns Mercator, and the biggest food retail chain in Croatia, Konzum. Konzum and Mercator together have a significant market share in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In April, Fortenova said its biggest shareholder, Russia's top lender Sberbank, signed an agreement to sell its 44% stake in the Fortenova Group to Hungarian asset manager Indotek.
(1 euro=7.524 Croatian kuna)