Greek REIT said to seek $1.4 billion as foreign investors return

Pangaea REIC, the real estate investment trust owned by Invel Real Estate Partners and the National Bank of Greece SA, aims to raise about 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) to invest in Greece and Italy, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

Pangaea, based in Athens, plans to issue bonds by the summer and offer shares to the public for the first time as early as October, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. They declined to say what proportion of the proceeds each will account for.

Foreign investors are returning to Greece after a crisis that nearly pushed the country out of the euro, and the European Commission predicts the economy will grow for the first time in seven years in 2014. Regulators set a deadline of October 2015 for Pangaea’s IPO.

The Athens Stock Exchange General Index has jumped 182 percent since reaching a 22-year low in June 2012. The Hellenic Republic’s bonds returned 23 percent in the first quarter, the best performance among 34 sovereign-debt markets tracked by Bloomberg World Bond Indexes.

Ellie Sweeney, a spokeswoman for Invel at Powerscourt in London, declined to comment.

Invel, a London-based real estate investment firm led by Christophoros Papachristophorou, bought a 66 percent stake in Pangaea in December in a deal that valued the company at about 1 billion euros. Pangaea has since acquired real estate in Greece and Italy and currently has assets totaling 1.2 billion euros, the people said.

Papachristophorou is a former managing director at Deutsche Bank and global head of RREEF Opportunistic Investments.

[Bloomberg]