Slovenia’s leading retailer Mercator is confronted with a possible hostile takeover bid with an unpleasant political connotation. The Slovenian newspaper Dnevnik wrote last week that Milorad Miskovic and Milan Beko, two controversial Serbian businessmen who acquired their wealth during the reign of the recently deceased Slobodan Milosevic, want to acquire the publicly traded Slovenian retailer. The takeover bid is said to be backed by Russian investors.

According to LebensmittelZeitung, both the management of Mercator and the Slovenian government are against the intended acquisition and the government is said to be prepared to do the utmost to prevent this. The Serbian government however stresses that freedom of enterprise should be guaranteed and that this attempt should not be thwarted. LebensmittelZeitung refers to Serbian business analysts who warned that Miskovic – who recently acquired Serbian retailer C-Market – will become too dominant in Serbia, might the attempted Mercator acquisition succeed. On a political level newspapers in Serbia already referred to all this triggering a trade war between Serbia and Slovenia.
In a press release issued yesterday, Mercator stated that up to now it had not received any information about possible takeover activities and that it was not familiar to the reasons for the sudden rise of its share price at the Ljubljana stock exchange.
Click here for the Mercator Retail Profile published in Elsevier Food International's November 2004 edition.