This week, the company Dvadeset Osam, the majority owner of Arena Hospitality Group, purchased an additional 33,363 shares of the Pula-based hotelier. Dvadeset Osam invested 1.06 million euros in these transactions. On Monday, the company bought 23,029 shares for 737,000 euros, which accounted for 0.45 percent of the stake. Then, on March 7, an additional 10,334 shares, or 0.2 percent, were purchased in two transactions for a total of 330,688 euros.
After these purchases, Dvadeset Osam holds a total of 2.7 million shares of Arena Hospitality Group, representing 53.5 percent of the share capital or 54.45 percent of voting shares. Dvadeset Osam had to report this since Boris Ernest Ivesha is the chairman of the Supervisory Board of Arena Hospitality Group and the CEO of PPHE Hotel Group, which controls Dvadeset Osam. Additionally, Yoav Arie Papouchado Iveshin is a deputy in Arena’s Supervisory Board and in PPHE.
It is worth noting that the Pula hotelier also reported on Friday that, based on the Buyback Program, on March 6, it repurchased 1,250 of its own shares at an average price of 32 euros, which is 0.02 percent of the stake. – After this acquisition, the Company owns a total of 87,615 of its own shares, which constitute 1.70 percent of the share capital – the notice states.
The share of Arena Hospitality Group recorded the largest increase on the Zagreb Stock Exchange on Friday, rising by 3.75 percent, reaching a price of 33.20 euros. At the same time, the CROBEX index recorded a decline of 0.5 percent.
Dissatisfied minority shareholders
Let us recall that the former Arenaturist was taken over by new owners in 2008: one of the funds from the Goldman Sachs group and Park Plaza PPHE Hotel Group, an international hotel company whose shares are listed on the London Stock Exchange. Eight years after the takeover, one of the company’s owners, a fund from Goldman Sachs, which as a financial investor was not a natural, long-term manager of the hotel company, exited ownership. Arenaturist then transitioned to majority ownership by PPHE’s Dutch company Euro Sea Hotels N.V. (a member of the PPHE Hotel Group), in agreement with PPHE, Croatian pension funds also entered the ownership of the company, and the company launched the first Croatian tourism IPO (initial public offering of shares).
AHG today has more than 26 hotels, camps, and apartment resorts in Croatia and across Europe. We recently wrote about the company’s operations in Croatia and the dissatisfaction of minority shareholders regarding the management of the company and dividend payments in Lider.
