Uni­Cred­it Bank Ser­bia and Eli­cio Ali VE, a 100% sub­si­di­ary of Eli­cio NV, suc­cess­fully closed the re­fin­an­cing trans­ac­tion of the 42 MW Alibunar wind farm in Q3 2021. CMS Bel­grade has been se­lec­ted to pre­pare the full set of fin­ance doc­u­ments for Uni­Cred­it Bank Ser­bia as the sole lender in the EUR 53 mil­lion re­fin­an­cing.  Com­ment­ing on the trans­ac­tion, Nikola Vu­letić, Chair­man of the Man­age­ment Board of Uni­Cred­it Ser­bia, said: “We are proud that Eli­cio once again re­cog­nised our bank as a re­li­able part­ner for the first re­fin­an­cing of an op­er­a­tion­al wind farm con­duc­ted in Ser­bia. This is a clear ex­ample of how banks and the re­new­ables sec­tor can con­trib­ute to im­prov­ing over­all en­ergy se­cur­ity and con­sump­tion of re­new­able en­ergy in Ser­bia.”  Alain Jans­sens, CEO of Eli­cio, ad­ded: “This re­fin­an­cing rep­res­ents an im­port­ant mile­stone for the Ser­bi­an re­new­ables mar­ket as it af­firms the strong fun­da­ment­als of the pro­ject and the bank­able reg­u­lat­ory en­vir­on­ment for re­new­able en­ergy pro­duc­tion in Ser­bia. The trans­ac­tion also con­firms the fund­ing avail­able in the Ser­bi­an mar­ket to loc­ally fin­ance well-struc­tured pro­jects and to do so on longer ten­ors. These are cru­cial con­di­tions for real­iz­ing Ser­bia’s con­sid­er­able am­bi­tions in terms of an in­creased con­tri­bu­tion of wind en­ergy to the en­ergy mix, an area in which Eli­cio will con­tin­ue to act­ively par­ti­cip­ate.” The team of CMS Bel­grade ex­perts headed by part­ners Ivan Gazdić and Milica Pop­ović provided full leg­al sup­port in every phase of this land­mark re­fin­an­cing, from the leg­al due di­li­gence re­view to full-scope ad­vice on mul­tiple reg­u­lat­ory, real es­tate, cor­por­ate, pro­ject fin­ance and oth­er leg­al is­sues and draft­ing of the fin­ance doc­u­ments. Oth­er team mem­bers in­clude Ksen­ija Bor­eta, Mar­ija Marošan, Ig­or Đorđević, and Teodora Vu­jošević.

Chapter 1: The frame­work boiled down 1. What are the rel­ev­ant laws which reg­u­late ad­vert­ise­ment in your coun­try? Montenegro does not have a sys­tem­ic law that reg­u­lates ad­vert­ising in gen­er­al. The only...

This art­icle was first pub­lished in CDR – Es­sen­tial In­tel­li­gence: The Belt and Road Ini­ti­at­iv­eThe One Belt, One Road Ini­ti­at­ive (the “BRI”) tends to de­vel­op polit­ic­al and eco­nom­ic co­oper­a­tion with European coun­tries, es­pe­cially those situ­ated in the Balkans, and Ser­bia is no ex­cep­tion. In fact, as its po­ten­tial has at­trac­ted many Chinese in­vestors, Ser­bia may be deemed as a lead­ing coun­try in terms of prom­in­ent BRI in­vest­ments that have oc­curred (and, con­sequently, one of China’s key part­ners), most of which are in the in­fra­struc­ture and en­ergy sec­tors.