Sofia municipality plans to become an important player on the capital's real estate market, the ambitious goal of the draft strategy for management of municipal property for 2009/11, published on the Sofia municipality website.

City hall aims to create a "strategic real estate portfolio" of properties that could be sold. To make the properties more lucrative, city hall will build up the infrastructure, road networks, electric grid system, and water sanitation and disposal networks.

The strategy comes at a time when the prosecution is investigating dozens of suspicious deals allegedly conducted by the notorious Sofia municipality's real estate company Sofiiski Imoti. Data gathered from the subsequent investigation appears to show that the Sofia municipality lost hundreds of millions of leva through dozens of deals, some of them featuring the most prominent and strategically-located parcels throughout the city, that saw property sold for reduced prices at a devastating loss.

The creation of a municipal real estate bank would re-galvanise the city's economic development and increase the municipality's revenue several fold, according to the draft strategy. City hall envisions a special unit that will manage the properties under the umbrella of the Sofia municipality. City hall owns 18 000 properties, of which more than 1700 are not used, according to Dnevnik daily.

In the last five years, the municipality has sold more than 6500 properties, of which 99 per cent were sold without an auction due to "specific legal clauses", Dnevnik said.

Another strategy for the years ahead is to create new parks spreading on 2000ha. The future green belts, however, are currently located mostly over private property and their restitution would require more than a billion leva.

Sofia chief architect Petar Dikov said on February 4 that as many as 320ha of Zapaden Park would be torn up and allocated to construction to "compensate citizens from the borough of Souhodol" for the re-opening of the refuse dump near the borough.

Further demolition of Zapaden Park is also possible, although, initially, the total area meant for compensation was pegged at 32ha, Dnevnik said.