German Property Fund Finds Foreign Buyer
April 5, 2005German real estate fund Agiv is set to be sold, with the buyer likely to be a foreign company, a group spokesman said Tuesday. "We have a lot of candidates, five to be precise, with most of them foreigners. We're on the verge of selling Agiv completely or in part," the spokesman said, confirming a corresponding report in the business daily Handelsblatt on Tuesday. The newspaper suggested that US financial services giant Citigroup was the favorite to buy a number of Agiv's activities. The fund is partially insolvent following a series of misjudged investments. The German real estate market has been stagnating for years and is substantially undervalued compared with other European countries. And in recent months a number of Anglo-Saxon investment funds have been moving into the market. Press reports have suggested that Citigroup is also in the running to buy Viterra, the real estate arm of energy giant E.ON.