The company Adriatic Marinas from Tivat, which is developing the project of the nautical-tourist center Porto Montenegro in Tivat, announced that it is ready to work with the Municipality to find an adequate solution to the problem of the company's debts of millions for unpaid utilities, so that this does not "slow down the development of the project". Porto Montenegro.
At a press conference three days ago, the management of the Municipality of Tivat presented the findings of the economic forensic expert Nenad Šipka from Novi Sad, who, examining the documentation on the calculation and contracts for the collection of utilities for the Porto Montenegro facilities built in 2015 and 2017, found that Adriatic Marinas indisputably, on that basis, together with statutory default interest, he currently owes more than seven million euros. On the other hand, the Municipality of Tivat has no outstanding obligations towards that strategic foreign investor.
As heard at the conference, Adriatic Marinas has not yet paid utilities for a total of five new large residential buildings of the new complex in Porto Montenegro, called Boka Place. That complex, worth 100 million euros, has been under construction since the end of last year and will have more than 75 thousand square meters of total area, and Porto Montenegro was originally billed for utilities in the amount of about 1,8 million euros. However, the company did not pay them, but complained about it to the Ministry of Ecology, Spatial Planning and Urbanism, which has yet to declare itself as the second instance authority in that procedure.
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In the meantime, the Municipality of Tivat has announced that it will not give up the collection of that money, but that it will now charge Adriatic Marinas utilities for Boka Place, because it did not pay them on time, at the new prices, increased by about 50 percent, which have come into force in the meantime. The municipal officials said that Adriatic Marinas, which sells its customers a square meter apartment in Porto Montenegro at a price of 8.000 to 170 euros, has no reason not to pay utilities to the municipality in the amount of 210 to XNUMX euros per square meter, because all investors who build new ones pay these fees. objects.
Court expert Nenad Šipka also stated that the Agreement on the forgiveness of Porto Montenegro's previous debt of 5,6 million euros for utilities, which was signed in the summer of 2018 by the former mayor Siniša Kusovac, was illegal and inadmissible under the Law on Obligations, and that therefore legally void. The Agency for the Protection of Competition of Montenegro, which at the request of the Delegation of the EU in Podgorica two years ago launched a review of that deal as a possible illegal state aid to Adriatic Marinas, has not yet made a final statement about it.
Taking into account the statutory default interest, the Municipality of Tivat is now demanding more than seven million euros from Adriatic Marinas on this basis, plus new multimillion-dollar utilities for Boka Plece.
Adriatic Marinas announced today that "The utility offset contract is an important segment of our main investment model and contract with the Government of Montenegro and the Municipality since the beginning of the Porto Montenegro project, long before our current investors took it over from its founder in 2016. "
Adriatic Marinas is now owned by the state investment fund ICD from Dubai, which bought the company several years ago from its founder and owner, Canadian billionaire Peter Munk and his partners.
Commenting on the press conference of Tivat's municipal officials, Adriatic Marinas assessed that "this type of communication with the public on important topics such as this is key to healthy management, and we welcome the structured and professional approach taken by the Municipality in finding a solution to this issue. "
"We recognize that this commonly used mechanism to assist municipalities in meeting their infrastructure obligations related to major development initiatives has, for some reason, become misunderstood when applied to our project, so the help of various expert advisors is now needed to arrive at a reliable and a permanent solution to this issue, and we sincerely hope that this can now be achieved in the near future" - they said from Adriatic Marinas, adding that it is "a very ungrateful issue that the existing local government and our company have inherited."
"However, we are determined to work with the Municipality of Tivat to find a professional way to resolve this issue and not allow this to slow down the development of the project. The understanding and productive relationship we have with the Municipality of Tivat has enabled us, during the recent extremely difficult period of the pandemic caused by the corona virus, to continue achieving successful joint results even better than those we achieved until 2019. This kind of action will further strengthen our ability to work together and invest, further support and improve our community, and continue to create new jobs and strengthen the economic perspective of Tivat" - they said from Adriatic Marinas, without specifying whether and when to pay the millions of debts for taxes paid to the city of Tivat by all other investors, i.e. when the city will register for the new communal infrastructure built within that complex, if it already had to waive the payment of fees that would allow it to build it itself.
Adriatic Marinas pointed out that the Boka Place project "and the future phased development of new projects, such as the superyacht overhaul company in Bijela, bring new jobs, as well as new facilities for leisure, sports, catering, culture, as well as work spaces and housing in the entire Bay of Kotor and Tivat, especially with our further development and confirmation of the status of a first-class coastal community in Montenegro."
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