Government will seek to raise bid for Hilton hotel

A MINISTERIAL committee will renegotiate a bid of £10 million to buy out the government’s 81 per cent stake in the company that owns the Nicosia Hilton Hotel, Commerce Minister Nicos Rolandis said yesterday.

Rolandis said he and Finance Minister Takis Klerides “will make an assessment and evaluation of the offer, and we shall renegotiate the price with the bidder. We are entitled to negotiate the price, and we feel we should get more.”

Louis Tours last Friday announced they had offered £10 million to buy out the government’s 81 per cent share in the Cyprus Tour Development Company (CTDC), which owns the Nicosia Hilton. The private sector already owns the rest.

Such a sale would solve problems for the government caused by Stock Exchange rules that now require it to reduce its holdings to below 70 per cent by September, so that the CTDC can stay listed on the exchange.

While Rolandis declined to discuss the identity of the bidder, he said the bid was based on “the capitalisation of the company today in the stock market.”

A successful private sale of the Hilton would realise Rolandis’ long-held aspiration to get the government out of the hotel business.

The other state-owned hotel, the Philoxenia in Nicosia, closed on Wednesday, after the government’s international tender for a private operator netted only two bids that preliminarily met the threshold for further consideration.

Rolandis said both bids were to operate the Philoxenia as a hotel, and that he would review both next week to see if either was acceptable.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.