The investment division of Alfa Group of Mikhail Fridman and partners – A1 company – found two buyers among large banks for 49% of the shares of Russian Standard Bank. A1 CEO Andrey Elinson told Reuters about it. In October A1 received the right to claim the majority of these shares in the bank.
The interlocutor of Vedomosti, close to Alfa-Bank, said that A1 had received a written readiness from the bank to purchase the stake at fair value or to receive it under management on “commercial terms”. He also knows that Gazprombank has expressed interest. The press service of Alfa-Bank declined to comment.
Elinson said that A1 is awaiting the completion of the courts on the bank’s debts, after which it may transfer 49% of the shares of Russian Standard to the management of one of the banks, or sell them. Elinson did not disclose the names of the banks, noting only that one of the applicants is a large state-owned bank.
A representative of the investment division told Vedomosti in October that A1 intends to sell the pledged shares of the bank in the event of a court decision. Then A1 had already started looking for strategic investors for the package. The A1 representative said that the company became the largest (over 30%) holder of default Eurobonds of Russian Standard Ltd., having bought them out from foreign investors. At that time, the entire amount of Russian Standard’s debt on default securities, taking into account the accumulated interest, exceeded $ 850 million, the representative of A1 said. Thus, the company transferred the rights of claim for $ 255 million.
The stake in Russian Standard Bank was secured by Eurobonds issued by the Russian Standard Ltd. holding registered in Bermuda. businessman Ruslan Tariko. The bonds were issued in 2015 for a period of seven years to restructure subordinated Eurobonds of Russian Standard Bank for $ 350 million and $ 200 million. The nominal volume of securities fell to $ 451 million, but investors then received 18% of the par and the bank’s shares as collateral. At the same time, they received assurances that in order to save the bank, it was necessary to write off part of the debt and postpone the timing of its return: coupon payments were to be resumed immediately after the recovery of the bank’s financial indicators. The company defaulted in October 2017 without paying the coupon.
Since 2018, various groups of Tariko’s creditors have been demanding that he return the debt, threatening to recover the pledged 49% of the bank’s shares and asking for help from the Chairman of the Bank of Russia Elvira Nabiullina. As a result, one of the bond holders – Pala Assets of the former co-owner of Mechel Vladimir Yorich – turned to A1 for help. The case immediately went to court: first, Pala Assets demanded about 3.6 billion rubles in court from Tariko, his companies and the bank’s board of directors. The fund’s claims were related to the fact that, due to a number of transactions between the bank and the companies of the Tariko Roust group, the value of the pledged shares of the bank decreased, which brought losses to the fund. But the Moscow Arbitration Court rejected the fund’s claims, the case reached the Supreme Court, but it refused to consider the claim.
Then the pledgee of the shares and at the same time the trust manager, London Citibank, applied to the court; he intended to collect 49% of the bank’s shares through a Russian court, and then sell them from public trading (the pledge agreement was concluded under Russian law). The first instance rejected the claim, and the appeal did the same. The proceedings are currently ongoing at the cassation instance.
.