CAPE TOWN - NEPI Rockcastle said yesterday that it had sold the shares it owned in the listed group Unibail Rodamco Westfield (URW).
The real estate investment trust that owns commercial properties in central and eastern Europe said it had owned 1.2 million URW listed shares as at September 30, and the €25 million (about R458 million), net loan facility associated with the URW shares were repaid in August, using some proceeds from the Romanian office sale transaction.
Nepi Rockcastle’s board, however, decided last month to sell the shares given an improvement in the URW share price and use the proceeds to repurchase NEPI Rockcastle shares, followed by their cancellation.
The URW share sale was executed between November 23 and December 4, and amounted to about €75m. NEPI Rockcastle repurchased 17.72 million of its own shares, representing 2.95 percent of the issued share capital.
After completion of the transaction, the remaining authority to repurchase shares was 102.47 million shares, 17.05 percent of the share capital at the time the authority was granted.
The group share price was up 0.4 percent to R84.27 at the close on the JSE yesterday, but the price has ramped up sharply by 46.4 percent since trading at R57.57 on October 30.
At the end of last month Nepi Rockcastle said recent decisions by the Polish and Bulgarian governments meant that tenants occupying approximately 85 percent of the group’s gross lettable area (GLA) were expected to be operational as of November 28.
In Poland, Covid-19 related restrictions imposed on non-essential stores’ trading were lifted from November 28, increasing the group’s operational GLA by about 15 percent. In Bulgaria, new trading restrictions from November 28 until December 24 were estimated to affect 5 percent of the group’s GLA.
BUSINESS REPORT