Dolce Vita Miraflores for sale at €5.3M

A bankrupt shopping centre in Miraflores on the outskirts of Lisbon is on the market again for €5.3 million.

It is the third time that the shopping centre, the first from the Dolce Vita brand in Portugal which opened in 2002, is up for sale.
Portugal’s shopping centre segment, which had already been seeing margins eroded by competition from online shopping and high-street retail business in recent years, took a hard knock throughout the Covid-19 pandemic when shopping centres were shut down and could only offer home delivery or click-and-collect services.
Reports Negócios, the Spanish bank Abanca, the mortgage holder on the shopping centre, is trying to sell the asset again after two failed attempts over the past two years. This time the asking price of €5.3 million is almost half what it had been valued at b the bank three years ago.
The Dolce Vita Miraflores shopping centre had belonged to the bankrupt Chamartín Group which failed in 2015. The retail outlet ended up in the hands of Abanca along with the group’s other failed group’s other shopping centres such as the Dolce Vita Ovar, in Aveiro and Central Park, in Oeiras.
The bank wound up the company that owned five Dolce Vita shopping centres, a further two of which were sold in the summer of 2019. The only one remaining now for sale is Dolce Vita Miraflores.
At the start of 2020 only Athena Equity Partners put in an offer of just €2.5 million for the shopping centre which was rejected on the grounds that it was too low.
Abanca is said to be trying to claw back loans of around €35.5 million from Dolce Vita Miraflores.
One of the interested parties said to be in the running for the shopping centre is White Sand Capital Portugal, a company linked to an international group held by the African Swazi entrepreneur Paul Friedlander.