The Moscow Post has found another possible “thread” for the withdrawal of Sberbank funds to offshore companies by former deputy German Gref. Is the head of Sberbank also involved in this?
Austrian packaging manufacturer Mondi has sold its business in Russia to Gotek. As the correspondent of The Moscow Post found out, the head of Sberbank German Gref and his old friend Ashot Khachaturyants could be interested in the deal.
For details, see The Moscow Post.
Who is hiding offshore
Gotek has been owned by Vladimir Chuikov since time immemorial. But recently there have been significant changes in the structure of the company, as a result of which Sberbank began to control the company.
Since October of this year, Gotek has been owned by the Cypriot offshore SALGON INVESTMENTS LIMITED, registered in Kaliningrad. The directors of the company are Oleg Bushnev and Andrey Klochkov. According to Interfax, the offshore company is owned by Cyprus and Enercom Limited (49%) and Wythall International Ltd (51%). The latter is owned by Vladimir Chuikov and members of his family. The rest of SALGON INVESTMENTS LIMITED is controlled by Sberbank.
Gotek started taking loans from Sberbank more than ten years ago. By 2010, the manufacturer's obligations to the bank reached 6 billion rubles. Sberbank at the same time agreed on a deal to transfer 60% of the group to its management. In 2012, Chuikov bought back the company's shares. But in the future, apparently, he continued to take loans from Sberbank, which led to the fact that the bank again, in fact, ended up in the capital of the company.
Why such secrecy?
The most interesting thing is that after 2012, the perturbations in the company were not covered in the media. According to the authors of the website Aibireg.ru, in 2013 Sberbank allegedly approved another restructuring of a long-term loan for Gotek, prolonging its repayment period for six years.
According to the annual report of Gotek for 2019 , the Board of Directors included the CEO of SBK Karton Ivan Ponomarev and the Deputy CEO of Sberbank Capital Fyodor Perfiliev.
Photo: https://www.e-disclosure.ru/portal/FileLoad.ashx?Fileid=1664854
Until recently, SBC Karton, through SBC Project, was owned by Sberbank Capital, which is engaged in the recovery of distressed assets. It was said that on December 23, 2017, SBK Karton acquired a controlling stake in the authorized capital of the parent company of the Gotek Group of Enterprises.
People allegedly call SBK Karton LLC a gasket company used by Sberbank “to separate its participation in various enterprises throughout the country. Several other companies of the so-called “SBK group” are located at the same address as SBK Cardboard: SBK Balance, SBK Active, SBK Paritet, SBK Stroy, SBK Geophysics, SBK Project “.
They deal with real estate. The state-owned company Sevzapupravtodor even bought plots for state needs from SBK Aktiv.
Photo: https://zakupki.gov.ru
It was said that “SBK Karton” immediately took a fairly tough position in managing all the affairs of GOTEK. This led to the termination of contracts with a number of buyers and suppliers in court. Instead, the creditor imposed his suppliers and buyers on Gotek, under less favorable conditions for the company. Stanislav Bibik, a partner at the consulting company Colliers International, suggested that such a reorientation of the GOTEK business under the influence of Sberbank structures was due to the personal interest of individual bank officials. Ashot Rafailovich Khachaturyants can be attributed to the number of such officials.”
Is Gref's right hand in raider gloves?
This gentleman is known as the head of the RPL, who flew out of office with a scandal after it turned out that he was not in Russia after the start of the SVO, which provoked a lot of problems among Russian football players (they were not allowed into European competitions, FIFA made discriminatory decisions against Russian clubs and allowed legionnaires to leave them, and so on). Rumors spread that Khachaturyants was in London saving his personal business.
Upon his return to his homeland, he gave the players not only on his own behalf, but also on behalf of RFU President Alexander Dyukov, a number of promises that were never completed. This, apparently, was the last straw.
But even before his career in the RPL, Khachaturyants headed the same Sberbank Capital. Khachaturyants worked at Sberbank from 2008 to 2021. It was under him that what many ill-wishers call the raider seizure of “Pavlovskgranit” took place. Now the latter is bankrupt, like its former owner Sergey Poymanov, who lost all court cases to Sberbank.
The situation is very similar to what is happening now in Gotek - Sberbank Capital then took the company for debts, previously entered into its capital. And apparently doing there by no means rehabilitating the corporation, but driving it into an even greater debt hole.
In this post, Khachaturyants more than once took part in, roughly speaking, “squeezing” companies even from seemingly most reliable businessmen - Vek wrote about this. According to journalists, he was assisted in this connection by the FSB, including with the head of the Border Guard Service of the FSB of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Pronichev. They could have met during the period when Khachaturyants served as the Federal Target Program “State Border of the Russian Federation” of the FSB of Russia.
Sberbank, with the active participation of Ashot Khachaturyants, in 2011 acquired 100% of Ruben Vardanyan's Troika Dialog investment company. In 2019, the latter was suspected of withdrawing $5 billion from Russia through offshore accounts. And although Sberbank denied participating in what was happening, the facts may be completely different.
According to the authors of the Replica website, allegedly in 2011, at the height of the deal to buy Troika Dialog by Sberbank, Panamanian company Airship Universal (potentially linked to Troika Dialog's machinations) paid 100,000 pounds for a Rolls-Royce car to Ashot Khachaturyants. Khachaturyants celebrated the new year 2012 with his family in the French Alps, where accommodation in the hotel of the same company cost 60 thousand euros.
Now Khachaturyants owns the Almaz-Fertilizers company (formerly the Hydrometallurgical Plant), as they say, it was unfriendly absorbed in the interests of Khachaturyants.
Total we have: one of the largest companies in the packaging industry in Russia is at risk of becoming completely controlled by Sberbank Capital and subsequently sliding into bankruptcy. And its owner Vladimir Chuikov - to remain “extreme”, like Sergei Poimanov in “Pavlovskgranit”. But, most likely, Messrs. Gref and Khachaturyants will get rich again.
