Petrom CFO, about Petrom City: We had to wait and search for best solutions during shifted economic times

Oil company OMV Petrom, which inaugurates its new Petrom City headquarters on Thursday, December 2, says it was not easy to continue the real estate project during the crisis. “As CFO, I must say it has not been easy to continue a project of such a scale, during a time when the economic environment proved to be unbeneficial. The project started before the first signs of the crisis, so we had to wait and search for the best solutions to ensure funds in an economic environment which had completely shifted,” said Reinhard Pichler, the OMV Petrom CFO. The real estate project in Straulesti area of Bucharest, which required a EUR 130 million investment, was also the biggest ecological revamping process of a land plot in Romania. The land plot where the project was built was a fuel deposit and was bombed during the second world war, so the damaged reservoirs had contaminated the soil. The investment in the ecological revamping was of EUR 16 million. Petrom City will host Petrom’s 2,500 employees from the seven former Bucharest and Ploiesti headquarters, who are expected to gradually move in until spring next year. The construction is made of 5 buildings – two administrative office buildings, a classical shaped high raised building, a data center and a power plant. Petrom City will have a total gross floor area of 100.000 sqm. The street infrastructure in the compound – which includes 1.7 km of roads and bicycle lanes, required an investment of EUR 6 million. The compound buildings are energy efficient, also having its own power plant and the work space has been tailored to the needs of the employees through environmental branding, according to Petrom. Petrom is the biggest Romanian company, with a yearly turnover of EUR 3 billion in 2009 and an EBITDA of EUR 696 million. editor@romania-insider.com