Mendota Invest, a company owned by the Hungarian bank OTP, has obtained a final building permit to build the commercial section of the future Ljubljana Passenger Centre, known as Emonika. Construction is to begin this month.

Slated for completion by the end of 2026, the commercial centre will include retail space, two hotels, business premises and apartments. Mendota Invest values the investment at over €350 million.

The complex will be located at the intersection of Dunajska Road, Vilharjeva Road and OF Square, right next to the new Ljubljana Passenger Centre.

The hub will include an apartment complex with a total of 187 apartments and 15,000 square metres of office space, a high-rise building, which will be the tallest office building in Ljubljana, with 20,000 square metres of office space, a shopping centre housing 80 shops and two hotels.

One will be a three-star hotel with over 180 rooms and the other a four-plus-star with more than 200 rooms and suites.

New Ljubljana passenger terminal mockup. Photo: Emonika

The construction of Emonika will take place at the same time as the construction of the passenger centre, but the projects do not have the same investors, since the new train terminal will be funded and built by the state and the new bus terminal by the Slovenian Railways.

Meanwhile, the city of Ljubljana will fund a major upgrade of the area's road and utilities infrastructure, which is already under way.

"Emonika is the biggest investment of the OTP Group in Slovenia. It symbolises our respect for Slovenian society and deep belief in the future of the Slovenian economy. It also shows our commitment to efforts to promote mutually beneficial partnerships," OTP group chairman and CEO Sandor Csanyi was quoted as saying in a press release on 4 March.

He is confident that the project will create added value for the city and its citizens, while being an important contribution to the Slovenian real estate market, "since there has not yet been a commercial real estate project of such complexity and scale in the capital".

Mendota Invest director Pal Forgacs believes that Emonika will be an architectural achievement as well as a commercial and social hub. It will also be one of the first multi-purpose buildings in Ljubljana with the BREEAM sustainability certificate, according to the investor.

The project involving the new passenger centre and the commercial part was conceived in 2007 as a public-private partnership between the national railway operator and the Hungarian-Canadian group Trigranit, but the original project never took off and the partnership was dissolved after years of legal proceedings.

In 2017, it was decided that the public investment segment will be funded by the state, and OTP emerged as the new private investor in 2019.