MAS Real Estate, a property investor in CEE listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, has priced a €300 mln green bond.
The five-year unsecured eurobond offers a fixed coupon of 4.25%.
The bond issued at 98.9% and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development was an investor, for €24.7 mln of notes.
The issue is the fifteenth green bond in the sector tracked so far this year by PropertyEU.
MAS develops and owns mainly retail assets, in Romania, Bulgaria and Poland and proceeds will be used to finance or refinance eligible projects under a green financing framework, mainly in Romania.
The company's assets include Militari Shopping in Bucharest, Nova Park in Gorzow in Poland and Galeria Burgas on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. It’s portfolio is valued at €1.2 bn.
‘As a management team, we always had sustainability at the forefront of our thinking. Our assets are managed with a long-term-hold mindset and therefore it makes economic sense to think of our investments in a sustainable manner,” said CEO Martin Slabbert.
The company has pledged to achieve green building certification – at a minimum, the BREEAM ‘Very Good’, LEED ‘Gold’ or acceptable equivalent – for all CEE investment property acquired or developed in future and for at least 90 per cent of its existing investment properties in the region.
It will also align its annual reporting with the Global Reporting Initiative Standards and simplify and streamline the group’s corporate legal structure as part of its redomiciliation from the British Virgin Islands to Malta.
Vlaho Kojakovic, EBRD director, Property and Tourism, said: “In the EU27 region, buildings account for 40% of total energy consumption and 36 per cent of CO2 emissions. In central and eastern Europe, this problem is even more acute, with the real estate sector potentially accounting for up to 50% of a country’s total energy consumption. Therefore, the EBRD is delighted to support the debut green bond of MAS Real Estate, a company committed to investing in high-quality green buildings in line with the objectives of the EBRD’s Property and Tourism Sector Strategy 2020-24 and the Bank’s Green Economy Transition approach.”
The bonds were rated Ba1 and BB by Moody’s and Fitch. Deutsch Bank and Raiffeisen Bank advised.
