Queen's Astoria Design Hotel

In March 2009, with the Serbian government privatization agency's announcement of a tender auction in order to re-privatize Hotel Astoria, the original pre-nationalization owners, members of the Ninković family, staged a protest by symbolically occupying the property, entering it on 3 March at 11am.[6] Led by Đurđe Ninković, son of the hotel's owner Milorad Ninković, they occupied the hotel from March 3rd until March 30th employing the principles of direct action, unhappy at seeing the family property sold by the Serbian government without having passed a denationalization law or a restitution law for property seized by the FPR/SFR Yugoslavia communist regime. Instead, the government based the tender auction on the current privatization law, setting the hotel's initial price at €1.2 million.

The hotel occupation received significant media coverage, contributing to the public debate regarding the Serbian government's failure to compensate owners for property forcibly seized by the communists.[5][7][8][9][10][11]

Regardless, the tender auction went ahead as planned on 6 March and the hotel got re-privatized via Serbian government privatization agency selling it for RSD230 million (~€2.4 million) to the Mladenovac-based company Progres a.d. and the Podgorica-based company Montenegro Premier.[4][12] Under the purchasing agreement, the new owner also took on an obligation of investing RSD61.6 million into the property.[12]

On 9 March, the Politika daily published an op-ed commentary by Đurđe Ninković who disputed the Serbian government's inherited legal basis to handle Hotel Astoria, invoking a communist era law ('law on nationalization of leased buildings and construction land for commercial exploitation') that came into effect on 1 January 1959.[3] Among other things, he stated: "I invite everyone to try and derive their own conclusion about the fairness, legality, and finally, the price of the accepted bid at the auction that took place this past Friday. I only want to say that the hotel owners, represented by myself, would've never sold the hotel at that price. I remind everyone that Hotel Astoria was unlawfully nationalized and that the state never had a legal basis to make decisions about the hotel. Furthermore, all deadlines for the compensation payout because of nationalization are long overdue, and the last legally-set 50-year nationalization payout deadline expired on 1 January 2009 and since the state never paid the compensation in that timeframe it therefore forfeited the right to own that property, which it acquired illegally in the first place.... There are ongoing court cases in front of the Municipal Court and the Supreme Court. I'm going to invest all of my skill and experience, obtained over the 40 years of practicing law in Belgrade and London, in order to see justice done at those court cases by obtaining a court decision confirming the right of the Ninković family to run Hotel Astoria".[13]

The new owner closed Hotel Astoria in July 2009 for renovations. In late November 2010, it re-opened under a new name, Queen's Astoria Design Hotel. The hotel is still subject to a number of pending court cases disputing ownership.[14][15][16][17]