Translated material
The doctor said: "To the morgue"
Creditors are making Yukos bankrupt
YUKOS creditors at their meeting yesterday decided to petition the arbitration court to declare the company bankrupt and introduce bankruptcy proceedings. The court, by law, must render a verdict based on this decision. Thus, bankruptcy, quite possibly, will follow the previously planned scenario, according to which on August 1, at a meeting of the arbitration court, YUKOS will go bankrupt.At the same time, Gazprom, which wants to acquire Yukos assets at a low price before the trial, seems to be facing difficulties. A representative of the disgraced company told Interfax yesterday that it is unrealistic to complete the deal before August 1: “In such a short time, the assessment and preparation of the necessary documents cannot be carried out; this will take two to three months.” And the company's official representative, Claire Davidson, said yesterday that in addition to the 20% stake in Gazprom Neft, Gazprom intends to acquire other assets (apparently, we are talking about Tomskneft), but chose not to talk about whether YUKOS management would agree for urgent sale: “The company, which received last week an offer from Gazprom to begin negotiations regarding the purchase of these assets, has concluded that in order to beneficially continue the negotiation process, it is necessary to seek the permission of the arbitration manager, Mr. Eduard Rebgun, as the first instance before starting any negotiations,” it says in her statement. However, Mr. Rebgun told Vremya Novostei last night that he had not received such requests. “This issue is controversial,” he said. - If you do this (sell any assets. - Ed. ), you need to rewrite thousands of pages of materials before the court hearing (August 1. - Ed. ), and not sleep at night. I will deal with this issue when I receive the relevant documents, for now they are only agitating the public, and nothing more.”
Yesterday, after a five-day break, a meeting of YUKOS creditors continued, as a result of which it was decided to petition the court to declare the company bankrupt and begin bankruptcy proceedings. Creditors who control 94% of YUKOS's debts voted for this. In his speech, Mr. Rebgun stated that the amount of the company's accounts payable, taking into account penalties and fines, approved by the court, amounts to 491.5 billion rubles. ($18.2 billion), and assets, according to his experts, are worth no more than 477.1 billion rubles. ($17.7 billion). That is, YUKOS, according to the arbitration manager, is not able to pay off its debts.
Representatives of YUKOS in their speeches continued to insist that the company is worth much more than the arbitration manager estimates it. Financial Director of Group Menatep Ltd. Tim Osborne said during a meeting of creditors that YUKOS assets amount to $37.7 billion. “It is obvious that YUKOS is solvent,” he is confident. At the same time, the company's management believes, said lawyer Zach Clement, that Yukos is able to pay off all debts through the sale of some assets and after that will remain a solvent company with a capitalization of more than $15 billion.
However, Mr. Rebgun told Vremya Novostey that the assessment of YUKOS assets he named was contained in the materials of the company itself: “This is the balance sheet data that the company writes in its official statements.” Mr. Rebgun’s advisers said in their speeches that when valuing Yukos, the liquidation value, rather than the market value of assets, was used, with a discount ranging from 15% for refining capacities to 40% for a package of 20% shares of Gazprom Neft.
Even if Gazprom offers more for YUKOS assets than what is declared in Mr. Rebgun’s report, this is still unlikely to be enough to pay off all the debts of the disgraced company. “491 billion rubles. “These are only debts confirmed by the court,” says the arbitration manager. - These are debts to those 20 creditors who immediately went to court. And according to the balance sheet, YUKOS has accounts payable of 787 billion rubles. ($29 billion - Ed. ). After all, with the introduction of external surveillance, the company did not disappear, it continued to work. With the start of bankruptcy proceedings, if the court introduces it, all creditors, and there are more than 200 of them, can come. And it is this figure that needs to be understood. The difference between 491 and 787 billion rubles. “This is about $10 billion; it can hardly be covered through the partial sale of assets.”
Obviously, in this case, from the point of view of creditors, it is not profitable to sell assets to Gazprom cheaply. “Moreover, if you are a foreign shareholder of YUKOS, and YUKOS is now selling assets cheaply, what will you do? That's right, you will go to an American court. And the American court is a terrible thing!” - scared Mr. Rebgun.
However, it is obvious that Gazprom is well aware of the prospects arising from the purchase of YUKOS assets for relatively little money, and therefore does not officially comment on anything and repeats the words of Claire Davidson that Mr. Rebgun’s sanction is necessary to continue negotiations with YUKOS.
The fate of Mr. Rebgun himself was also decided yesterday. As you know, at the end of last week, many sources suggested that he was unlikely to sell off YUKOS property. The fact is that the agenda of the meeting of creditors included the issue that the Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO) of Arbitration Managers under the Chamber of Commerce and Industry should nominate a bankruptcy trustee to the court. And the creditors voted for this item yesterday. Informed sources claimed that Mr. Rebgun (who is believed to be loyal to the Rosneft team led by the chairman of its board of directors, deputy head of the presidential administration Igor Sechin) will most likely be removed from the process of selling off Yukos property, and his place will be taken by a bankruptcy trustee who agrees with the ideas of another Kremlin group, under the leadership of the head of the board of directors of Gazprom, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
However, this did not happen. Mr. Rebgun yesterday, at a meeting of YUKOS creditors, decided to take advantage of the amendment to the law “On Insolvency (Bankruptcy)” that came into force at the end of last week and proposed to approve him as a candidate for bankruptcy trustee. According to the amendment, if creditors nominate a bankruptcy trustee, the court is obliged to approve it (if, of course, it meets the requirements for bankruptcy trustees), and not the proposed SRO. The creditors agreed with Mr. Rebgun’s proposal and also decided to recommend to the court that the manager’s remuneration be set at RUB 8.6 million. ($319 thousand) monthly. However, in May, representatives of creditors asked the court to pay Mr. Rebgun 20 million rubles, but the judge considered a salary of 300 thousand rubles sufficient.
As of yesterday, YUKOS shares collapsed on the MICEX Stock Exchange by 26.7%, to 15.9 rubles. per piece (the minimum price - 13.5 rubles - was fixed in the spring of last year), and in the RTS - by 35.4%, to 53 cents per piece.