"Rosimushchestvo" does not value private owners

Eirunion risks being unincorporated

The founding meeting of Eirunion OJSC, scheduled for today, may end in vain due to disagreements between Rosimushchestvo and the private shareholders of the aviation alliance of the same name regarding the valuation of assets intended for transfer to the new OJSC. An anonymous source close to private shareholders told RIA Novosti yesterday. As AirUnion told Vremya Novostey yesterday, the alliance still hopes that the meeting will make a decision on the creation of the OJSC. A source in the Ministry of Economic Development unofficially confirmed to our newspaper that this department also does not support the asset valuation proposed by Rosimushchestvo. “At least until last Friday, there were discrepancies between us and Rosimushchestvo regarding the valuation of Eirunion’s assets; it is quite possible that they have not been resolved to this day,” he said.

Valuation of assets has been a stumbling block in the process of creating a new major player in the Russian civil aviation market for more than a year now. Airunion OJSC should unite the airlines Domodedovo Airlines (DAL), Krasnoyarsk Airlines (Crasair), Samara, Omskavia, Siberian Air Transport Company, as well as Airunion Air Gee LLC (created to operate projected regional aircraft Suhoi SuperJet-100). Although the merger initiative belongs to the private shareholders of the airlines, in the first three of these enterprises the state owns large blocks of shares: in DAL - 50.04%, Krasair - 51%, Samara - 46.5%. Accordingly, the question arises about the relationship between private and state ownership in the share capital of the merged airline. As Vremya Novostei was told yesterday by the AirUnion alliance, which unites the private co-owners of all merged airlines, there are at least four answers to this question (that is, four options for asset valuation), but none satisfies all partners.

On May 2, 2007, Vladimir Putin signed a decree “On the open joint-stock company “Eirunion”. According to this document, the Russian Federation should receive at least 45% of the capital of the new airline. The draft constituent documents, prepared on the basis of the assessment of Rosimushchestvo, meets this requirement with a large margin. The department estimated the state share in the future company at 4.36 billion rubles. out of a total cost of 7.52 billion rubles, i.e. in 58%. Private shareholders believe that more than 50% of the shares of the future OJSC should belong to them. The Ministry of Economic Development supports them in this.

The results of asset valuations published on the Rosimushchestvo website do not make it possible to understand how much, according to officials, each of the merged airlines is worth. These results are grouped by asset owner. And they are mainly represented by unknown legal entities. Of the well-known figures of the alliance in this list, one can distinguish only the president of AirUnion, Alexander Abramovich, and the first deputy general director of Krasair, Vladislav Vychuzhanin, with relatively modest contributions - 3.11 million rubles. and 33.02 million rubles. respectively. The rest of the businessmen involved in the creation of Eyrunion will today measure their wealth behind closed doors.

Mikhail KUKUSHKIN