Greenwoods Ecoresorts sold

 In Funds, News

Greenwoods Ecoresorts is to be sold to a Swedish international real estate investment fund in a provisional sale agreement signed with Portuguese bank Novobanco at the end of 2020. The buyer delayed on completing the sale.

When the bank had thought the sale would not go ahead, the fund advanced with the purchase of the first plot of land and signed the Sale and Purchase Agreement (SPA) for the other two plots. The final contract is expected to be signed in the summer according to Jornal Económico.
Greenwoods Ecoresorts Empreendimentos Imobiliários, S.A. studies, projects, develops, executes and sells real estate developments, plots of land, and urban projects and buys and sells properties. The company was known in the past as Ferra & Pimenta.
Its real estate development project ‘Mata de Sessimbra’ was under investigation by the criminal investigation department DCIAP after Novobanco’s administration sent the Greenwoods dossier to the state’s procurator’s office over suspicions surrounding loans that had been made to the company.
There were suspicions that a development project in Sesimbra had been overvalued so the bank decided to pass the portfolio onto the authorities. The bank loan operation had allegedly generated losses of millions for Novobanco. The soured deal was inherited by the bank from Banco Espírito Santo (BES) led by Ricardo Salgado.

What is ‘Mata de Sesimbra’?

Mata de Sesimbra was a large eco residential tourism project in the municipality of Sesimbra involving over 1000 hectares of land with outline planning permission approved for the construction of 650,000m2 of villas, houses, and apartments, commerce and services. In 2012 the project was 50% held by the Pelicano Group which borrowed much of the money from Banco Espírito Santo which failed in 2014, and 50% from a subsidiary vehicle of the Espírito Santo Group (GES) called Esparte. BES was said to have stumped up around €1.1Bn in financing after an agreement was reached between Pelicano and the Portuguese State (the government minister for Cities and Territorial Development at the time was Isaltino Morais, the current Mayor of Oeiras.) The project was a white elephant losing €200 million for which Novobanco (created from BES in 2014, picked up the tab.