Dolphin Capital Investors admitted to London AIM

Published on: "The Cyprus Weekly"

Dolphin Capital Investors Ltd (DCI), a public company focusing exclusively on residential resort developments in Greece, Cyprus, Croatia and Turkey, has been admitted to London’s AIM market.

DCI is managed by Dolphin Capital Partners Ltd, an independent investment management business founded in 2004 by two Cypriot enterpreneurs – Miltos Kambourides and Pierre Charalambides.

Panmure Gordon, the company’s broker, placed 104 million new ordinary shares on behalf of the company, at 68p per share raising approximately £70.7m sterling before expenses. The placing was oversubscribed. Trading began last Thursday.

The new DCI shareholder list includes Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Merill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Henderson, Framington, Lansdowne, Cazenove, GAM, Legal & General, Standard Life, New Star, M&G (Prudential), National Bank of Greece and others.

Leisure

The company offers the opportunity to invest in residential resort developments in Southeast Europe at an early stage with the target of a high level of medium to long-term capital appreciation.

The investment strategy is to focus on residential resort developments integrated with leisure components (e.g. golf, polo, hotel, marina, spa), targeting holiday and retirement homebuyers from Northern Europe and Russia.

The Investment Manager has agreed terms and is now in the process of finalising, on behalf of DCI, a number of investment opportunities in Greece and Cyprus.

Said Kambourides and Charalambides: “There is an extremely favourable demand versus supply imbalance in the second home market in Southeast Europe, a region that is emerging today as the obvious alternative destination to the increasingly expensive and overbuilt shoreline of Spain and Portugal.”

DCI was capitalised with 5m euros during the summer of 2005 by the Investment Manager and a select group of 12 investors led by Fortress Investment Group, a global private equity group with some $15b under management investing in asset based businesses, with an extensive and very successful track record in real estate.

Local knowledge

The professionals of Dolphin Capital Partners combine extensive local knowledge and contacts with international network and expertise gained at some of the world’s leading financial institutions such as Soros, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and GE Capital.

They specialise in providing capital to rigorously selected projects and matching local developers with their wide-ranging relationships with sophisticated operators, master-planners, marketing agents and financial institutions.

“We are delighted the placing has been so well received and we welcome our new shareholders. DCI is now in an excellent position to use its first mover advantage and capitalise on a wide range of investment opportunities that we have sourced over the past two years”, said Kambourides.

And he added: “We look forward to further expanding our partnerships with leading developers and operators in the development of what will be a unique portfolio of sophisticated residential resorts in Southeast Europe.”

Dolphin Capital Partners (DCP) is an independent investment management business founded in 2004 by Miltos Kambourides and Pierre Charalambides after leaving Soros Real Estate Partners. The company is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and has local offices in Greece and Cyprus.

Source: "The Cyprus Weekly"