| Alexander Livshits: “My movement is not related to the movement of money” Bank Soyuz, owned by Oleg Deripaska's structures, will be strengthened by the best personnel of the Basic Element group. In the near future, the deputy general director of Russian Aluminum, former Minister of Finance of Russia and one of the most authoritative lobbyists in the country, Alexander Livshits, will join the bank’s supervisory board. Mr. Livshits notes that he will be an independent director at Soyuz, and the bank will be independent of the cash flows of RUSAL and Basel.
Soyuz is the successor to the Ingosstrakh-Soyuz bank, which in the fall of 2003 acquired three Basic Element banks: the Moscow People's Savings Bank, the Nizhny Novgorod Avtogazbank and the Irkutsk Sibregionbank. The holding planned to create a full-fledged universal bank, which could bring up to 10% of its shares to the market at the end of 2004 - beginning of 2005. The task is extremely ambitious, and it, of course, required ambitious personnel decisions.
“I accepted the offer to combine work at RUSAL with work on the board of Soyuz Bank,” Mr. Livshits told the Vremya Novostei newspaper yesterday, “the bank needs to be taken to a new level, not only in Russia, but also in the world. The opinion of Basic Element shareholders was that I could help with this, and I am always interested in fundamentally new tasks.” Mr. Livshits was one of the ideologists of Russian economic policy in the second half of the 1990s, holding the posts of head of the Ministry of Finance and deputy head of President Yeltsin's administration.
In 2000 and 2001, Alexander Livshits worked for several months as chairman of the board of Russian Credit Bank, and in June 2001 he accepted Mr. Deripaska’s offer to become deputy head of Russian Aluminum. He oversees the company's foreign and special projects. In particular, the most frequently mentioned issue recently is the settlement of controversial issues surrounding RUSAL's property in Ukraine - the Nikolaev Alumina Refinery.
Alexander Livshits claims that he is joining the bank as an independent director. “I remain at Russian Aluminum, but I am an independent person, and, obviously, the shareholders understand this too,” he says. In addition, he assures: “Neither RUSAL nor Basic Element are going to make Soyuz an internal “pocket” bank. “Soyuz” is an absolutely independent business unit; it does not sit on any streams and will not sit on any streams. My movement is not related to the movement of money” (now the aluminum holding is mainly serviced by MDM Bank, Alfa Bank and Sberbank).
Meanwhile, according to Mr. Livshits, the personnel strengthening of Soyuz will not be limited to his figure: “Another fairly well-known person will appear in the bank, and we will try to establish the bank in a new capacity.” He did not specify who he was talking about, but Soyuz reported that any day now they are waiting for the completion of all official procedures for the approval of the new chairman of the board. Yuri VERETENNIKOV |
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