(Bloomberg) -- Vienna Insurance Group AG disclosed a previously unreported stake in Austrian commercial property firm S Immo AG after Bloomberg reported last week that it's trying to sell the shares.
The insurer currently owns 6.64 million shares in S Immo, about 10 percent of the outstanding stock, via special funds managed by Erste Asset Management GmbH, S Immo said Monday. The fund manager has exercised the voting rights attached to the shares, S Immo said.
Vienna Insurance is trying to sell the stake in a deal that could affect S Immo's planned combination with Austrian peer Immofinanz AG, people with knowledge of the offer told Bloomberg last week, asking not to be identified because the talks are private.
The disclosure is surprising because Vienna Insurance said a year ago that it sold its entire stake in S Immo, not mentioning the special funds at the time. Today's statement “serves to clarify” an eight-year-old previous notification by Erste Asset Management, S Immo said.
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Erste Asset, owned by Erste Group Bank AG, has said that it holds about 13 percent of S Immo. A small part of that stake is held by public funds, while the bulk is owned by special funds, the company has said without identifying the client who owns those special funds.
To contact the reporter on this story: Boris Groendahl in Vienna at bgroendahl@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Andrew Blackman, Iain Rogers
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