Minister Počivalšek has publicly maintained, on several occasions, that the state is striving to find a stable and long-term owner for Mercator, who would enable the company’s further growth. He said Mercator needs a partner, who would help it transform its business model, and enable long-term sustainability by restructuring its debts.

Mercator is otherwise owned by the Croatian Agrokor Group, which is controlled by the Croatian government. A change of ownership is possible with an agreement based on the sales contract. Počivalšek said that there is an open battle for Mercator ownership in certain debt collection procedures led by one of the bigger foreign banks in Slovenia. Talking to the online edition of daily Večer, Počivalšek said the bank in question was Russian Sberbank.

Mercator is to get a new owner in the coming months. If Agrokor’s creditors back the restructuring process – if a deal isn’t reached Agrokor faces bankruptcy – the new owner will then be a new Agrokor, to be established on the remains of the present operating system.

According to the Siol web portal, Agrokor already has a plan to sell the claims of any of the bank creditors which would refuse to give consent to Mercator’s change of ownership, to one of the international risk capital funds.

According to Siol’s unofficial information, the capital fund in question is managed by a US investment firm called the Elliott Management Corporation, which manages around 34 billion US dollars of funds. Its owner is Paul Singer, who in the past two decades has done business with a number of companies and countries in debt, including Argentina, Peru and Congo-Brazzaville. A number of media sources in the past have branded him as a "vulture".
Siol adds that there still hasn’t been any official information on which banks have already sold their claims to Mercator and at what price. In October, the web portal reported that the Quantum fund, managed by investor and billionaire George Soros, was also interested in the purchase of claims to Mercator. He was reportedly prepared to pay around 150 million euros for the whole package. The sum was a bit less than one fourth of its nominal value. Mercator’s parent company owns its creditors around 650 million euros.