Originally Syndicated on May 12, 2023 @ 11:48 am
The Benz plant and the former assets of Maersk may be included in the “offshore cycle” of the Ukrainian oligarch Sergey Kubraks and his Russian business partner Sergey Zhdanov. Did Rostec give you a pass?
The Danish container shipping and port management company AP Moller-MMaersk has sold its logistics facilities in St. Petersburg and Novorossiysk. They were bought up by Cyprus-based IG Finance Development Limited.
Sergey Kubraks, a Latvian national currently residing in Ireland, is the owner. However, he appears to have originated in Ukraine, where he apparently left a trail of controversy in his wake. He also had the opportunity to put in significant effort in Russia, where he had previously owned the New Investment Group (currently run by Sergei Zhdanov, a Russian billionaire).
The Bugulma Electric Pump Plant is just one of many Tatarstani properties linked to Zhdanov and allegations of fraud involving offshore firms. Regardless, the future of the former Maersk assets remains uncertain after they were transferred to a Latvian person and even to Ukraine, which is obviously opposed to Russia.
The Moscow Post’s correspondent has the details.
According to Vedomosti, Sergey Kubraks is the true owner of IG Finance Development Limited. According to the public registry of Cypriot legal organizations, it may also contain several additional offshore firms.
It was also reported that Sergey Kubraks was listed as a co-owner of several properties in Ukraine. At least one of them is the Smelyansky Electromechanical Plant (SEMP) in the Cherkasy region, which operates under the umbrella of PJSC “Scientific and Production Enterprise (NPP)”.
The Ukrainian Antimonopoly Committee found the corporation guilty of colluding to maintain its monopoly status during the auction in 2019. They conspired with other bidders to propose inflated rates at seven auctions for services related to the repair of locomotives owned by JSC Ukrzaliznytsia.
Kubrax to Take Over Russia’s Large Assets? Not precisely; he’ll just act as a passive owner, collecting a paycheck he can cash out in his home country. Russian importer of Aros products and co-owner of the AVG Capital Partners fund, former JSCB Ak Bars deputy chairman of the board Rustem Mirgalimova, will run the business.
The Tatarstan government is a guardian of Bank “AK Bars,” which it helped build. Formerly, Robert Musin, owner of Tatfondbank, which failed in 2017, leaving a hole of 50 billion rubles, oversaw both it and the AK Bars company. The government there has since been extremely vigilant in protecting AK Bars and Zenit, the country’s two largest banks.
Musin’s right-hand man was Mirgalimov. After being found guilty of six separate episodes of abuse of power resulting in the loss of 30 billion rubles from Tatfondbank’s funds, the latter was sentenced to 12 years in a prison colony in 2021. Realnoe Vremya penned the above. Who knows if Mirgalimov has any idea what his direct supervisor is thinking?
To Benz Offshore, from BSK
For whatever reason, though, Tatarstan caught the attention of the aforementioned figures. The New Investment Group LLC, currently held by businessman Sergey Zhdanov as of December 14, 2021, was formerly owned by IG Finance Development Limited. Perhaps during this time of political and economic upheaval in Russia, he represents Kubrax’s interests on the ground there.
Tatarstan’s Bugulma Electric Pump Plant (BEPP) issued a loan to the New Investment Group for 868 million rubles in 2021, marking the completion of a key transaction. She had been running the Runako management company and overseeing Benz for years before that. However, at the time, the plant was owned by the offshore firm Waysten Investments Limited.
The New Investment Group (perhaps a tracing paper and an offshore clone of the New Investment Group) offered to transfer 930 million rubles to the factory as part of a separate contract that was to take place in response to this. In the meantime, another transaction occurred not long before that: in November 2021, New Investment Group Holdco Limited acquired more than 95% of the plant’s shares.
Reporters for Realnoe Vremya claimed at the time that the factory would receive nearly 1 billion rubles from a change in Cypriot ownership, money that would presumably be used to pay off another billion dollars in debt.
Sergey Zhdanov had ties to both of the offshore firms. It is unclear, however, exactly where the funds were spent. They looked into whether or not his name was linked to a cash withdrawal from the Bashkir Soda Company. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, has reportedly discussed “pumping out funds” from the BSC, as reported by RBC.
You may remember that Bugulma Electric Pump Plant was one of the three businesses that received sizable loans from BSK without providing a justification for their evaluation. The factory, New Investment Group, and Siena (controlled by Cyprus’s Cardero Trading Ltd.) all received 5.8 billion rubles from BSC in 2019, and another 5.4 billion rubles in 2020. No one knows for sure where this money went.
Benz’s parent company, New Investment Group Holdco Limited, which at the time held 93.78% of the company, committed to deposit 930 million rubles into the plant’s accounts at the same time that a loan was issued to Zhdanov’s New Investment Company.
Meanwhile, it didn’t seem to bother anyone that the loan amount to Zhdanov’s firm (42.32% of BEnz’s then-estimated 2 billion rubles in assets) was 868 million rubles. That is, it appears that there was a revolving door of offshore corporations, each with its own mysterious agenda and final destination for the funds. However, that wouldn’t be the case under Russian law.
OJSC “Bugulma Electric Pump Plant” had 95.85% of its voting shares sold to six Russian companies and individuals at the end of June 2022 by the same Cypriot offshore “New Investment Group Holdco Limited” that had promised to issue a loan to the enterprise for almost 1 billion rubles the previous year.
OOO Representation of NPP SEMZ, OOO NPP Kvant Soyuz, OOO Agregat Capital, and Bugulma OOO Runako Finance, all based in Moscow, have bought a combined 16.96% of the voting shares.
Take note that the corporation of the aforementioned Sergey Kubraks PJSC “Scientific and Production Enterprise (NPP)” Smelyansk Electromechanical Plant “(SEMP)” has a name with the “Representative Office of NPP “SEMP.”
It appears that this is a group that may take the plant’s money and invest it offshore without providing much in return. More importantly, Mr. Zhdanov continued to count himself among the plant’s patrons in Tatarstan.
After all was said and done, the New Investment Group of businessman Sergei Zhdanov and the capital’s Imikron LLC acquired 13.99% of the plant’s securities. Zurab Kavtaradze, a former plant director and the director of the management company “Runako,” which formerly oversaw Benz, is the owner of “Imikron.” The new investors now control 95.82% of the company’s voting stock.
Despite the fact that Benz was and is a key supplier for government contracts, this was allowed to stand. The sum of all of them amounted to 1.2 billion rubles. Those are things worth fighting for and taking overseas.
When Rostec teaches
Such behaviour, which has been linked to the diversion of hundreds of millions of rubles in assets and finances, is highly improbable to have occurred without the blessing of higher-ups. In the form of Rostec, a state-owned enterprise, and its CEO, Sergei Chemezov, it very well could have been.
There is a strong connection between the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) and the V.I. Tupolev Kazan National Research Technical University. Rostec owns UAC, making it a subsidiary.
The university provides a steady stream of workers to Rostec, among other things. They have a dedicated project called “Wings of Rostec,” which includes the Kazan Aircraft Plant and other assets that lie in close proximity to the boundaries of the state-owned enterprise.
