Russian lender Sberbank has signed a preliminary agreement to acquire a 51% interest in DB Development, a joint venture of Deutsche Bank and the Austrian building and construction company Strabag.
Russian lender Sberbank has signed a preliminary agreement to acquire a 51% interest in DB Development, a joint venture of Deutsche Bank and the Austrian building and construction company Strabag.
Sberbank will acquire 49% of the company from Strabag, and a further 2% from Dmitry Garkusha, general director of DB Development. The deal is expected to be completed by the end of 2010.
DB Development was created in 2007 to develop and finance a wide range of large-scale real estate and infrastructure projects in Russia and the CIS countries.
'The cooperation of Sberbank - the largest Russian bank, and Deutsche Bank - top-ranked leader in the global capital markets, on the platform of DB Development opens new opportunities for the Russian real estate market, where developers, although having teams of professionals and interesting projects, sometimes do not have the necessary capital base for the implementation as the crisis significantly influenced this sector,' said Andrei Stroev, head of the real estate at Sberbank.
Dmitry Garkusha, general director of DB Development, added: 'We are confident that the synergy of Deutsche Bank and Sberbank cooperation will positively influence the real estate market and allows DB Development to reach the leading positions in the areas of fee-development and attracting financing.'
Sberbank (Savings Bank of the Russian Federation) is a leading property lender in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, with 18 regional head offices and over 20,000 branches.
