The Ocean Plaza shopping center in Kyiv will open on August 11. It was slated for nationalization due to its Russian co-owners.
One of Kyiv's largest shopping malls, Ocean Plaza, will reopen on August 11, according to a statement from its tenants. The mall had been closed since late February due to uncertainty with its Russian owners and the threat of nationalization, according to Forbes.
“We request that the premises be prepared by the above-mentioned date,” the letter states.
Tenants will be notified additionally about the procedure for carrying out work and the import or export of goods.
Ocean Plaza Shopping Center. Context
Ocean Plaza has been closed since late February. Until recently, only the ground floor, home to an Auchan hypermarket and several other stores, was operational. Auchan subsequently announced it was closing its store in Ocean Plaza. The hypermarket's press service reported that they were asked to close by Ocean Plaza management.
Russia's TPS Real Estate purchased Ocean Plaza in 2012 from the developer, a company owned by Vasily Khmelnitsky and Andrey Ivanov. One of the owners of the Russian company is Lilia Rotenberg, the daughter of Arkady Rotenberg, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin.
The Presidential Office considered the nationalization of Ocean Plaza back in March, a lawyer advising the Office of the President told Forbes on condition of anonymity.
A top manager at one of the stores in Ocean Plaza, speaking anonymously, told Forbes that the facility's management attributed the long downtime to high vacancy rates. Before the war, the shopping center was almost 100% occupied by tenants, according to Evgeniya Loktionova, director of the consulting firm Ukrainian Trade Guild. According to the former director of the Moscow shopping center, 60% of them refused to work for a company with Russian roots.
According to YouControl, the net income of the Lybid Investment Union, the legal entity that owns the Ocean Plaza trademarks, amounted to UAH 832 million in 2020, compared to almost UAH 1,3 billion in 2019.
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