Zagreb To Get A City Centre

Five years after the Zagrepcanka building was bought, the City of Zagreb was entered in the land registry as the owner of the real estate.

“I am the luckiest man in the world today, as I present to you the Zagrepcanka project. This means more to me than a victory in the party,” said Mayor Milan Bandic to the press and City Hall members on the premises of Zagrepcanka d.d. in Heinzelova Street, where he presented the project of designing the place. He said that there would be a business centre in one part of the Zagrepcanka building and apartments for 8,800 residents, which is to say about 3,100 apartments, would be built. In the business section, construction will span nine floors and this will be done in keeping with the General Urban Plan (GUP) and regulations on conservation. 

“In this way, by integrating the old and new space in Zagrepcanka, that is to say Heinzelova Street, fittingly called City Centar Zagreb, [we will] build four shopping malls, a hypermarket, several specialized stores, a kindergarten, a business tower, conference halls and a multimedia centre. The opening of the centre is expected to create 5,000 jobs,” said Ivica Fanjek, the head of the City institute for physical planning. 

Trams to Heinzelova 

The Zagrepcanka project in Heinzelova is also the beginning of the city project for Radnicka Street, which should be a business centre in the future. A series of architectural works as well as works on the traffic infrastructure, such as widening the tram rails in Heinzelova and building a better road, have been announced. 

Interestingly, the project was only announced today, even though it has been five years since the City of Zagreb had bought Zagrepcanka for 15 million euros, but it was not until today that the City of Zagreb was entered in the land registry certificate as the 100 percent owner of the entire Zagrepcanka. 

Furthermore, the municipal court in Sesvete simultaneously acquitted Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic in the case of the paid advert “Istina je” (It is true). In this way, after five years, the Zagrepcanka soap opera was brought to an end and to the benefit of the City of Zagreb. 

It is true, Bandic was acquitted 

To clarify, the matter at hand involved a legal dispute over Zagrepcanka real estate. The company Krma d.d. claimed it owned the biggest part of the real estate and thought that it had the right to be entered as the owner in the land registry. In the course of the legal proceedings, in which the City of Zagreb was accused of having signed a risky and damaging Zagrepcanka purchase agreement, Bandic published an ad that included a comment on the course of the proceedings. Eventually, as we said, the legal dispute ended with victory, which to say, with the City of Zagreb being entered as the owner of the real estate, while Bandic was acquitted.   

“When I bought Zagrepcanka five years ago, we paid 15 million euros for it. Today, however, it is worth 70 million euros. And this shows that I was right from the start,” Bandic said in the end.