| Ruspromavto is going to completely buy out the car plant in Chelyabinsk The Ruspromavto holding, controlled by Basic Element, is ready to become the sole owner of the Ural automobile plant, specializing in the assembly of all-wheel drive off-road trucks. As Igor Zolotukhin, the bankruptcy trustee of UralAZ (on whose balance sheet the car plant's securities are listed), said last Friday, at the end of September the Ruspromavto holding made an offer to acquire 49.14% of the shares of Ural, as well as 48.5% of the shares of OJSC UralAZ-energo. However, no one doubted that Ruspromavto, the owner of a controlling stake in the plant, would eventually buy out the remaining stake. However, from the moment Oleg Deripaska's structures arrived at Ural, four years passed before this decision - during which time the price of the securities fell several times.
The Ural Automobile Plant (UralAZ) has been under external management since 1998. At that time, its total accounts payable exceeded 3 billion rubles. Two years later, on the basis of the effective business of UralAZ, the Ural automobile plant was created. The entire existing production of the Ural plant was transferred to a new, debt-free enterprise (the size of the authorized capital is now 3.8 billion rubles). A year later, the Ruspromavto holding company became interested in this production, which, as part of an additional issue, bought 31% of the company’s shares and then increased its share to 51%. “It’s immediately clear that these guys have come here for a long time, one might say, forever,” concluded Chelyabinsk Governor Pyotr Sumin during Oleg Deripaska’s visit to the region last year. In 2001-2003, Mr. Deripaska’s structures invested 830 million rubles in the technical re-equipment of Ural. With a design capacity of 34 thousand trucks per year, last year Ural produced 6.5 thousand. The plan for the current year is 8 thousand vehicles.
All this time, the remaining 49.14% of the shares of Ural were listed on the balance sheet of the bankrupt UralAZ (the company’s accounts payable in 2003 already amounted to 4 billion rubles). Initially, it was planned to transfer 25% plus one share of the plant to the state and thereby pay off the debt of UralAZ » to the federal budget in the amount of more than 600 million rubles, and sell 24% of the shares at auction in order to pay off a debt of 270 million rubles. to extra-budgetary funds. However, due to the lack of a mechanism for transferring the enterprise into state ownership, it was decided to put the entire package up for auction.
Even before the auction date was set, representatives of Ruspromavto officially announced that they intended to participate in it, expressing their readiness to also buy out the plant’s energy-generating capacities, allocated to a separate legal entity - UralAZ-Energo. However, at the end of July there was an open auction, in which 49.14% of Ural shares were put up at a starting price of 356 million rubles. and 48.5% of the shares of UralAZ-Energo at a starting price of 44 million rubles were disrupted due to lack of applications.
At the end of September, both packages were put up for auction through a public offer at a price 20% lower than the starting price at the auction. Yesterday, Mr. Zolotukhin noted that “the price (indicated in the September offer of Ruspromavto - Ed. ) is almost two times less than what was offered last time at auction through a public offer.” So far, the committee of creditors has not responded to Ruspromavto’s proposal. The review, according to Mr. Zolotukhin, is scheduled for October. However, given the shortage of offers, it can be predicted that it is unlikely that Mr. Deripaska’s structures will be refused. Yana GODOVANAYA |
|
