This year, the government intends to prepare and announce a tender for a re-attempt to privatize the company Montepranzo Bokaprodukt from Tivat by offering to sell 75.05% of the company’s shares, which are currently owned by the Investment and Development Fund (IRF), the PIO Fund and the Institute for employment (ZZZCG).
– The aim of the privatization of Montepranzo-Bokaprodukt is to find a strategic investor to ensure the conditions for the exploitation of resources at an extremely attractive location on the Montenegrin coast, in order to further develop and improve the Montenegrin tourist offer, and thus the entire economy – it is written in this year’s Privatization Plan, which is The government adopted it last month.
So far, two attempts to privatize this company, which was once bought by the Budva company Merkur, have failed, so Montepranzo returned to the majority ownership of the state, only to be unsuccessfully tried again almost ten years ago to sell it to the Boka Group company.
Montepranzo, which used to be engaged in agricultural production (viticulture and fruit and vegetable growing) on large land complexes near Tivat airport, has not had any production or any other significant economic activity for years. The company is in debt, its account is blocked, and the Municipality of Tivat alone is demanding close to six million euros from it in the name of unpaid real estate tax.
The Intention of the local administration of Tivat, considering that none of these claims can be collected from the non-existent business activity of Montepranzo, is to take a part of the land that the company disposes of, in the value of its tax claim, and in this way create spatial opportunities for the operation of some communal services that holsters with space, but also for the further development of sports and tourist facilities in that city.
Montepranzo manages several million square meters of land in Tivat and Kotor, most of which is a complex of former agricultural land in Mrčevac, along the Adriatic highway across from the Tivat airport. This once very successful company, which once produced large quantities of wine grapes, vegetables and fruit and even exported fresh flowers from its greenhouses, was destroyed in recent years, because the former authorities wanted to develop a tourism-real estate business here instead of agriculture.
The former state and local authorities in Tivat, led by the DPS, officially changed the purpose of the former vegetable gardens, vineyards and orchards near the airport fifteen years ago, in the planning documentation, from agricultural to construction in order to implement a controversial housing and real estate project in this place, first of a Dutch businessman. Chris Librex, and then to the DPS of the close businessman Jovan Gvozdenović-John Kennedy to build a large golf course and residential resort there. Kennedy planned the resort with city ramparts and imitation of old stone buildings and called it “Old Tivat” in promotional materials. The plans of Kennedy’s company Boka Group failed ingloriously, so “Stari Tivat” and the golf course next to it did not spring up on the neglected former arable fields and along the shores of two smaller artificial lakes that were previously built here for crop irrigation.
This complex “in one piece” has more than 800,000 square meters, but about 270,000 square meters of that is disputed because the land is claimed by numerous citizens of Tivat, whose families the property was once expropriated at symbolic prices for agricultural property, and later the state changed its use from agricultural to urban-building land. Some of the disputes that the citizens initiated against the state on that occasion have in the meantime been concluded in their favor with final judgments.
According to the latest available business reports, Montrepranzo ended the 2021 business year with a loss of EUR 425,721. On paper, the company has five employees, owns land and buildings with a book value of over 1.8 million EUR, and has undistributed losses in the amount of over 3.2 million EUR.
No one has yet been responsible for the deposited construction waste
Despite the infamous failure of the idea of playing golf next to the noisy and busy highway and the Tivat airport runway, Montepranzo has not yet returned to agricultural production.
For five years now, the company has been ceding part of the plots that are formally in its ownership to the Tivat Utility Company for free use. In 2020, the Municipality of Tivat, which was still managed by DPS, allowed enormous devastation on part of those areas in 2020 because they allowed the company Regionalni vodovod, which was then headed by a high official of DPS, Goran Jevrić, to use the former vegetable gardens and orchards, literally buried with almost 15 thousand cubic meters of excavation and construction rubble from the construction of the pipeline for the municipality of Herceg Novi. Because of this, no one has been held accountable to this day, and wildly deposited construction waste is still found on former arable land.
Meanwhile, Montepranzo received more than two million euros from the state budget last year in the name of expropriation fees for land along the route of the Jadranska magistrala, which is needed for its planned transformation into a boulevard-type road with four lanes, on the stretch from Tivat to Jaz. In that deal, a little more than 67,000 square meters of land was expropriated from Montepranzo.
