shareholders of the East European Financial Corporation

As Kommersant learned, at the end of March, shareholders of the East European Financial Corporation (EFC) completed a transaction to acquire another asset of the MDM banking group - the Udmurt OJSC Ural Trust Bank (UTB). The transaction amount is not disclosed. It is expected that the EFC will officially announce this after the meeting of shareholders of OJSC Ural Trust Bank, which is scheduled for May 18.
OJSC East European Financial Corporation (EFC) is a holding company that coordinates the activities and development of four commercial banks: OJSC CB Petro-Aero-Bank, OJSC Inkasbank, CJSC Ruskobank and OJSC Vyborg Bank ". Registered at the end of 2003. Currently, the network of EEFK divisions includes over 120 addresses in St. Petersburg and about 20 in the Leningrad region - in cities such as Boksitogorsk, Volosovo, Vsevolozhsk, Vyborg, Gatchina, Kirovsk, Kommunar, Luga, Primorsk, etc. Also banks corporations are represented in Moscow, Veliky Novgorod and Voronezh. The corporation's shareholders are several private individuals, on whose behalf the two main co-owners of this financial company, entrepreneurs Alexander Gitelson and Yuri Zipman, act.

Founded in 1993, OJSC Ural Trust Bank is one of the largest commercial banks in the Republic of Udmurtia. It has the status of an authorized dealer of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation in the GKO-OFZ market and is an authorized bank of the government of Udmurtia for transactions with securities and implementation of investment programs. In addition, UTB is the main settlement bank of the local payment system Izhkard. To date, UTB has issued about 50 thousand cards of the regional payment system. The bank has licenses to conduct all types of banking operations, except for the purchase and sale of precious metals and stones.
Structures of MDM Bank acquired UTB in the fall of 2002, at that moment the bank, trying to expand the geography of its influence, consistently bought up numerous regional credit institutions. Having accumulated an excess amount of regional assets, starting in 2003, the Moscow bank began to get rid of them just as consistently. At the same time, VEFK is more willing to buy regional banks from MDM than others.
The purchase of UTB is the fourth transaction between bankers Alexander Gitelson and Yuri Zipman, representing the interests of VEFK shareholders, with the MDM group. First there was the acquisition of the regional Vyborg Bank, then the purchase of Inkasbank, and lastly VEFC acquired the St. Petersburg processing center MDM (Kommersant wrote about this). Participants in the local banking market even greeted the news of the next purchase with a joke that if events continue to develop in this way, St. Petersburg financiers will successively buy first MDM Bank St. Petersburg, and then Moscow MDM Bank.
According to Kommersant's information, the transaction itself was carried out by Yuri Zipman on behalf of VEFK shareholders, and was supervised by Alexander Gitelson. The main condition was the preservation of the legal status of the UTB as an independent legal entity. All existing activities of the bank at the time of the transaction, agreements with clients, tariff policy and its development strategy will not undergo significant changes. The need for internal structural changes has not yet been considered. At the same time, the chairman of the board of UTB, Sergei Groshev, has already been dismissed, and the duties of the chairman are performed by his deputy Oleg Anfalov. Legally, the owners of the controlling stake in UTB were structures friendly to private shareholders of the EFC. Apparently, stakes in three or four LLCs were transferred to them, each of which a year ago controlled 20% of the shares of the bank, whose authorized capital then amounted to 300 million rubles.
IVAN MAKAROV

Newspaper "Kommersant St. Petersburg" No. 73 dated April 22, 2004, p. 4

MDM Bank surrenders assets