Croatian entrepreneur to offers free villas to Hollywood stars

Croatian Times
Hollywood stars are set to get luxury villas worth millions for free at a new, luxury resort in  southern Croatia.

The Croatian company Profectus and its business partners have presented a plan to develop an 800,000-square-metre resort close to Dubrovnik.

The project, called Croatian Dream, would consist of a totally new town with hotels, luxury villas, a marina, an airport and a golf course northwest of Dubrovnik.

"We will give ten luxury villas to top Hollywood stars to promote the place, which will be the  most-luxurious resort that exists," young entrepreneur Vicenco Blagaic, the owner of Profectus Group, said last weekend while organizing a presentation of the project for the world's 50 top architects in Dubrovnik.

"We have not yet completed the list of Hollywood stars whom we will offer villas to for free or with a huge discount, but many of them have already visited Dubrovnik, like director George Lucas this past summer, or Tom Cruise, Catherine Zeta Jones, Steven Spielberg, Gwyneth Paltrow and others in the past", Blagaic added.

Profectus Group has already bought tens of thousands of square metres in the area and said on Sunday it expected to complete the paperwork for building permits by the end of the year.

"Once we get the building permits, we will be ready to start building at the site within six months", Blagaic commented. He is set to tour the world soon to present the project.

"I've visited all the most-luxurious resorts around the globe, and I'm positive we have an opportunity to build the most-prestigious resort in the world with the pure nature we have in southern Croatia," he added.

Croatian architecture exhibition to open in Amsterdam

Croatian Times
An exhibition called "Continuity of the Avant –Garde - Fragments of Croatian Architecture from Modernism to 2009" will open in Amsterdam on Friday.

It will run from 19 September until 7 November at Architectuurcentrum Amsterdam (ARCAM) in that Dutch city.

The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Croatian architecture magazine Oris.

It features projects from three periods: the thirties, the fifties and sixties and the nineties up to 2009. The focus is on villas, housing blocks, schools, churches, monuments and infrastructure projects in cities such as Zagreb, Split and Dubrovnik, with work by Frane Cota, Stjepan Planic, Nikola Dobrovic, Ivan Vitic, Kazimir Ostrogovic, Hrvoje Njiric and 3LHD, among others.

Those projects give the outsider an idea of what has taken place in Croatia over the past century and raises the question of how it was that, in an unsettled period with so much war, there was so much architecture of such high quality?

The exhibition is accompanied by an English-language catalogue with a foreword by Andrija Rusan, the publisher and editor of Oris.

A symposium about Croatian architecture in cooperation with Croatian architects who work in the Netherlands will be held at the exhibition’s venue on its opening day this Friday

An excellent opportunity to purchase a genuine first row property for a reasonable price in one of the most beautiful parts of Croatia. The sea is just several meters away from the property and accessible by a small path. There is a beautiful beach below and the sea is crystal clear blue.

The apartment block are newly built, the object was finished earlier this year 2009. In the first building there are 5 units available all with stunning unobstructed sea views. Two apartments are 84.21 m2, the other three are 82.71m2. Each apartment has a terrace and two balconies and comes with a parking space.

About the location

The apartments are located in the small village of Pisak which is one of the most picturesque towns along the central Dalmatian coastline. It is a twenty minute drive to the lively coastal tourist town of Makarska and about the same to Omiš, which has some of the best outdoor activity opportunities anywhere in Croatia.

Pisak is about an hour’s drive from Split airport and has a few restaurants, shops and bars

Croatia Could Enter EU In First Half Of 2010

Croatia's entry into the European Union could occur within the first half of 2010, according to statements made Wednesday by European Commission and Croatian officials. The ex-Yugoslav republic's entry into the European Union has been stalled this summer, largely due to a longstanding maritime border dispute with neighboring Slovenia. Official comments on Wednesday suggested the delay may be close to an end.

European Commissioner Olli Rehn cited several conditions that Croatia must meet, such as resolving the border dispute with Slovenia, improving its judiciary, cooperating with the International Criminal Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia and reforming its dockyards. If these conditions are met, "We can envisage completing negotiations in the first half of 2010," Rehn told the European Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee in Brussels on Wednesday. Croatian Chief Negotiator Vladimir Drobnjak said in an interview on Wednesday much of the work aligning Croatia's legal framework with European Union standards has already been completed.
"I can say with confidence we have entered the final stage of the process," Drobnjak said. Once the dispute with Slovenia has been worked out, Croatia will be able to wrap up the accession process in well under a year, he said. Croatia has been a candidate country for the European Union since 2004 and accession negotiations began in October 2005.

Drobnjak declined to comment on specifics of negotiations with Slovenia, citing the two governments' decision this summer to employ a "silent diplomacy." Croatia has faced a tougher acceptance process than previous candidate countries, including a more formalized system of meeting benchmark measurements. In its most recent progress report, the European Commission praised Croatia's advances but highlighted the need to make its judiciary system more transparent and efficient and reduce political corruption. In October 2008 the chair of the Committee for the Prevention of the Conflict of Interest, Desa Mlikotin Tomic, resigned following corruption allegations. Last year Croatia implemented a new system for monitoring corruption. Drobnjak said wiping out all misuse of power is a tall order in any country.
"It's a chapter where you can never be perfect," he said. "It's impossible because you deal with human nature."
Croatia's last major hurdle will be preparing its agricultural sector to compete within the larger European market.
"We have a rather traditional sector. Farms are small and disintegrated," said Visnja Samardzija, head of the European Integration Department at the Institute for International Relations in Zagreb. Drobnjak acknowledged farmers' unease, but said Croatian goods will fare well in the larger European Union market so long as they are high-quality and fairly priced. "If your product is competitive then you can survive nicely regardless of the size of the market. If the product is not competitive, you will perish," he said. Many Croatians view the accession process and its accompanying legal and economic changes as more important than the country's formal entry into the European Union. "It brings a certain kind of motivation to do the reforms," Samardzija said. Leading Croatian entrepreneur Nenad Bakic said the process imposes new standards on a country still shaking off the habits of its Communist past.

Louis Frankopan, director of the real estate company, Zagrebacki Neboder, said joining the European Union is in line with the country's mercantile past and its position on the Adriatic Coast.
"We have an expression," he said, "'finger in the sea and friends with everyone.'"
-By Kristina Peterson, contributing to Dow Jones Newswires