Financial expert analyzes: Thousands of square meters of blackberry fields in Stieghorst as a real estate investment?

Stieghorst. By far one of the most lush blackberry fields in the city center is now thriving in Stieghorst. Over an area of ​​around 20,000 square meters, the wild tendrils have conquered terrain where construction work was actually supposed to begin ten years ago for an ambitious residential building project. What the hopeful sellers of the city-owned area could not have guessed at the time: the smart investor named Charles Smethurst bagged the area and left it at that, building nothing on the wasteland, instead continuing to collect real estate from municipalities and billions from investors drunk on returns.

After the massive bankruptcy worth billions, the public prosecutor's office in Hanover is investigating the former managing director of an empire of 200 nested companies, and in Bielefeld, the city's legal officers were preparing for the final legal dispute with the pseudo-investor Masoud Saadat, who received a handful of the real estate companies from Smethurst in 2018, virtually in return for unpaid bills. This includes two fallow areas in Stieghorst called the 5th EP Project Greifswalder Straße and 17th EP Project Detmolder Straße.

Agreement on settlement in February 2023

The current owner of the two areas has been called Anatolij Pokutnev for two years and runs a fitness studio in Sangershausen. The managing director with Ukrainian roots has also transferred some of his real estate companies to the small town with 25,000 inhabitants in Saxony-Anhalt - but the two Bielefeld "projects" continue to operate in Hanover, where all the wrangling and nagging about the development once began. The dispute, which the city hoped to win by taking legal action in 2021, has lasted almost ten years: since then, the law firms commissioned have sent long pages of written submissions back and forth.

The gap between the opponents seemed as unbridgeable as the current thicket was impenetrable - but then the parties suddenly agreed on a settlement in February of this year. This change of heart was apparently made possible by the request of a British investor who wanted to credibly assert in court that she also had claims to the properties. Her lawyer filed a complaint against the settlement, but the Higher Regional Court in Hamm rejected it - theoretically clearing the way for the purchase contract to be reversed under the conditions of 2013. This is the agreement under file number 5 O 241/21.

At that time, the city received a purchase price of around 2.3 million euros for the two-hectare wasteland in Stieghorst, although the land value was already 235 euros per square meter, which corresponded to a total value of the property of 4.7 million euros. According to the present settlement, the owner (city) and owner (5 EP project) agreed that the city would pay back the original amount and in return the Hanover company would have it deleted from the land register.

It's just that the execution is still pending, or the transfer, because when asked, the city said that there were no changes to the previous status quo and that everything was still in limbo. In the meantime, the standard land value climbed to an impressive 430 euros and the value of the property rose to 8.6 million euros. Property owner Pokutnev could not be reached for comment on his intentions with the blackberry fallow land and the preliminary building request.