The EBRD has extended the rouble equivalent of a €117.5 million loan to fund part of the cost of building four additional hypermarkets in Russia’s regions by Germany’s family-owned Globus group. The remainder of the financing for the group’s investment programme will be attracted on a parallel basis.

The Bank’s 10-year loan to the Russian arm of Germany’s Globus Holding GmbH & Co. KG, will fund some of Russia’s most energy-efficient hypermarkets – with the first two to be built in the towns of Korolev and Krasnogorsk in the Moscow region. Two more will be built later, one in Tver in the adjoining Tver region and another in Zelenograd (Moscow region).

This will bring the total number of Russian regional hypermarkets run by OOO Hyperglobus, a fully owned subsidiary of the German group, to nine, including those built with an earlier EBRD loan of EUR 134 million in July 2008.

Globus’s Russian hypermarkets operate to EU hygiene standards and the group has positioned itself as the country’s first retailer to target for all of its suppliers to comply with HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) standards over the next five to seven years. Over 90 per cent of Globus’s suppliers in Russia are local.

The new stores will also support Globus’s initiative to become the first retailer in Russia to implement an active waste management system, both at the customer and company level. This will include waste separation and proper waste disposal, as well as the recycling of plastic drinks bottles into re-usable pellets.

The project will thus set an example for the rest of the Russian retail sector. Retail is, after oil and gas, one of the main growth drivers of the Russian economy.

The new hypermarkets will use advanced energy efficiency techniques, including LED (light-emitting diodes) lighting and recovering the heat used by ventilation systems, in order to achieve carbon gas emissions cuts of over 7,000 tonnes a year and annual energy savings of over 20,000 MWh.

Since the EBRD was launched in 1991, the Bank has directly committed more than €7 billion in over 450 agribusiness projects across central and eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.