Buy & Sell Bulgaria Insight Newsletter

Christopher Violaris, Chairman and Managing Director of Eurolink Investment Group

Passage quotation of speech

For more information regarding the Eagle Has Landed, click here.

Friends, dear clients, business associates, strategic partners of the company, dear … dear all,

The world is going crazy. What we have believed up to now, what we based our hopes on, what for ages we were taught to trust, all this is collapsing. And is collapsing why? Because it was based on false values, it was basically a balloon that took obviously 80 years to blow up, but it has blown up. Last night I was monitoring the news. I didn’t get much sleep to be honest with you, because I wanted to position ourselves today on a firm base. What is coming up in the news is just amazing. But an item has confirmed the validity and the correctness of the policy which we have followed for years. People, the news said, are turning to traditional values. Now, what are these values - Gold, Diamonds, Land and Property! Those who have money to invest they are not giving it to the banks any more; they are not giving it to the Stock Exchange anymore; they don’t trust them anymore; they are turning to the traditional values. As a student of economics I was taught that this is a primitive way of investing. Well, it appears that we are going back in history. We are going back to the primitive times. It appears and it is obvious that these are the values which we can actually rely on. These are values with unchangeable historic length.

I know most of you for some years now. During our planning and dreaming times we dreamt of a time when these beautiful locations which we put in the centre of our attention would have actually been included in the official planning of the Municipality, of the authorities in Varna, of the general development programming of this region and that eventually we would have made some money out of our investment. Our aim and our ambition in those days were moderate. The factor ‘you never no’ is always there. There are certain things which you can control and obviously there are a lot of things which are always out of your reach and your control. It was not a surprise for us to see the whole, the totality of the regions which we wanted to develop included in the beautiful, very avant-garde and very professional Master Development Plan which my dear and highly respected friend Prof. Nikiforov has put up for the town of Varna. He followed our thinking, why - not because of political influence, not because of any other means, but because he at the time when he was putting his pen to his paper, he shared the same dream, the same mission, the same vision.

What you will see as a plan with some different colours, marking the different regions, what has already been announced to you as news, for us it was hard work. Building a new town, as my friend Malcolm would confirm, by the way, I sincerely apologize for not making it to your wedding, I wish you all the best, but I am sure that what I was doing here, while I was supposed to be at your wedding, is also worth a lot - just a small explanation. What you see and what you take today as a given fact is the result of very hard work. Not in the sense that we were actually holding the pencil or the pen and we were adding or taking out of the planning ideas. It was actually laying down the foundations of these ideas. We have a vision as a company and this vision is very specific. We want a town or a quarter if you like, where people can live like human beings. We want a town, a quarter, where people would live together and in harmony with nature, where the kids would become kids again and play freely within the protection of Mother Nature and not as caged human beings in an apartment. We want people to associate between them, to become friends, to talk to each other. We want people to enjoy the fruit of their labour. This is not easy. Especially in a country where what counts is the front window. The front window is beautiful but the rubbish is thrown behind the window. You cannot get people to live in a place where there is no infrastructure.

Prof. Nikiforov will give the information regarding the Master Town Plan. It is not a phantom any more. It is not a dream any more. Frank O’Dowd will talk to you about the Golf Course, which is not a dream any more. It is there. We already started building the infrastructure. This means also, that all the other projects that we have in mind, they are lining up - the Marina Bay; Marina Gardens is already attracting a lot of attention, both from us and our strategic partners Nordic Development Group (NDG); Springfields and the area of the new golf course is attracting exceptional attention and interest from clients from South Africa, from Russia and the Arab countries, and there is a cosmogenia going on which concerns the areas which we have got in our planning. I am addressing you as friends, as clients, but also as people with whom I have to hold a dialog.

You know very well, that if you were to put your money with the banks which went down by now your eyes would have been red from crying. We gave you in return of this investment a solid essence, something which existed, exists, is there and it has value. No other company would have taken a gram of responsibility after handing over the title deed to you. I can assure you of that. We did not stop there, and we didn’t consider our obligations towards you as being honoured and completed by giving you the title deed. We carried on, building value for you on our expense. Obviously at the end of the day we are not losing. I can assure you of that and I am sure you know we are not losing. When we create value for ourselves, naturally we create value for you.

It is a very special pleasure for me to have my dear friends and partners Morten Pedersen and Henrik Siebken from Nordic Development Group, a strategic partner, a serious company, a company that gives additional value to our group and gives additional essence to our planning. It is also a great pleasure to have my ex-colleague from the banking sector and dear friend Henry Tondovski and Thorsten Eggert with their experience, another strategic alliance. I can read you another 6 names of very substantial companies that have actually been added to our club. We are in a state just before reaching final agreement with Royal Van Omeren N.V, Holland. Those of you who know something about shipping and marinas and liquid storage would know that Royal Van Omeren N.V is one of the biggest companies in the world. Well, Royal Van Omeren N.V will be, hopefully, our partner in developing Marina Bay. PKC Capitals of Moskow and a Cypriot developer who happens to be their partner will be, probably, our main partner in developing Albena Cliffs. These are plans about to be signed and a procedure to start. And obviously we have got Intergolf Inc., and I will stop on this point to make some comments, which have come up with a very impressive solution to our intention of building the 2 golf courses.

I hear some of you calculating returns of three and four and five hundred per cent. Yes, as Henry Tondovski will say, because he told me this morning ‘the easy times are over, the easy money has been made’. Now you have to work, and you have to build-up your investment, in order to have this kind of returns and obviously this kind of returns, as I said, is gone. There are some of you here, who will and already have five and six and seven hundred per cent increased returns on their investment. There would be though others with 20 and 30 per cent per annum. This is not a bad investment. Those of you who think that they are looking for something far bigger and far better, you are in the wrong place. There is one thing, which we can guarantee you, that here you are going to get this return and you are going to make a profit on your investment. If this is not enough for you, and I say it with full honesty, you can go to somewhere else, where you would lose your money.

The company you are associated with has solid, granite foundations and the planning was the same from the very beginning. There were times, and these times are still valid, where we could grab credits from the banks as much as we wanted. Very often, you take the money from the bank, forgetting that one day you have got to return it and forgetting that the moment you take this money from the bank, the bank has already become a partner in your own pocket. Very often I hear the question: ‘Have you got the money to build the golf course?’, ‘Have you got the money to build the Marina?’ Well, we have what is needed. If you have a solid, real and realistic proposition I can assure you that there are millions of candidates out there who will be willing to join up with you. This is exactly what we do. We didn’t set out to grab and hold everything. This would be a very lonely and I would say uninteresting situation. We want partners. We are ready to share not because we cannot do it by ourselves, because in this world you have got to work and share with other people. These people may be companies, maybe individuals and maybe corporates. This is the way to go about doing business these days, always taking reasonable and safe steps ahead. I plan to expand on what I have just talked about in tomorrow’s workshops and the round table.