Business

Tisno to Wait at Least Another 3 Years for 95 Million Euro Luxury Hotel

By 13 November 2019

The island of Murter will have to wait at least a further three years for its first luxury hotel complex to be built in the Municipality of Tisno. The project's investor is Russian Aleksej Frolov.

As Novac/Dora Koretic writes on the 12th of November, 2019, back at the end of October, an investor, Aqua Relaxio, asked the Municipality of Tisno to extend its planned construction start date by three years, which, by a contract signed with Tisno back in 2014, had been defined by the end of 2019.

By that date (according to the contract) Aqua Relaxio was to start realising its 95 million euro luxury five-star luxury hotel in the Prisliga-Jazine area, where Frolov's company had purchased a land worth 30 million kuna from the Municipality of Tisno.

Their official request, which was publicly announced on the local self-government unit's website, explains that the inability to start construction from the contract was due, among other things, to the delayed process of conceptual design of the complex. The conceptual design was originally designed by an architect from nearby Šibenik, Nikola Bašić, but the investor later decided to choose architect Boris Podrecca, a Slovene-Italian architect, after Bašić apparently "could not make the necessary and required adjustments" to the design.

Therefore, Podrecca's design solution turned out to be a better concept for the investor, but, as was clarified later on in the explanation provided, its cost exceeded the budget of around 30 million euros, which is why the investor ordered a revision of the concept.

"As all of the above required additional time and because of the impossibility of obtaining concessions at the planned maritime domain intervention, as well as the impossibility of defining a concession area with the Ministry of Maritime Affairs, we were unable to obtain the relevant building permits for the request," the company's statement explained, but its director, Anastasia Petričević, didn't want to comment on it officially.

The Municipality of Tisno's Ivan Klarin has more or less confirmed the above statement, claiming that the deadline for the beginning of construction has been extended and because changes to the urban plan have to be done.

''The extension of the deadline was approved because of the illogical request that the bypass, which is to be built by the Municipality of Tisno, be included in the urban plan of the project, which has never been a practice because it's unclear why something built by a local government unit would enter the UPU of a private project. However, the municipality will comply with this request, we'll initiate a new modification of the UPU under a shortened procedure, but it will take us five to six months,'' Klarin said.

The request that pushed back the deadlines for the hotel's construction came from Šibenik-Knin County, which is run by HDZ, which of course has caused people in some circles to suspect that the extension of the deadling for the implementation of the construction of the first luxury hotel on the island is actually due to politics, because the Tisno Municipality is run by SDP.

Either way, it is more than likely that the project will not be completed in 2020 as was initially planned.

The conceptual design was presented to the councilors in Tisno back in June 2018 when the construction of a complex which will boast 80 rooms, 50 apartments and 25 luxury villas was announced. The project also included the construction of a harbour with 25 berths, and in addition to tourist facilities, the complex should also offer its guests health services such as detoxification, weight management programs and anti-stress programs.

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