A.Galeev

"Our partners terminated the agreement on the deal because they did not agree on the seller's guarantees for the quality of the land asset," Igor Khudokormov, president and main co-owner of Prodimex, told Vedomosti. On Wednesday, a source close to one of the parties to the deal said that difficulties had arisen. A source close to Euroservice confirmed yesterday that Neftegazmontazhservis and Prodimex had refused to purchase "due to the difficult financial situation of the company as a whole." Including "there are problems with the registration of the land bank," he confirmed.

A significant part of the land bank of Euroservice, according to Khudokormov, is in the registration stage: “This process sometimes lasts quite a long time, and it is desirable that it be completed by the same people who started it.” Khudokormov refused to disclose the size of the land bank of Euroservice and the share of unregistered land in it.

According to the Agroinvestor magazine, Euroservice controls 350,000 hectares of agricultural land. A top manager of one of the agroholdings estimates the company's land bank at 260,000 hectares. According to market participants, registering agricultural land as property can take more than a year, and the total costs of this procedure can reach half the price of the plot.

The owner of Euroservice, a source close to the company says, would still like to exit the business. "There are interested parties for individual parts of the business, so it is possible that the company will be sold in parts," he says. The largest business in the group's structure, according to financial statements, is sugar (OOO Sakharnaya Kompaniya and OOO Euroservice-Agro): last year, its revenue was $848 million. The revenue of the meat business (OOO Myasnaya Korporatsiya Euroservice), according to preliminary results for 2007, was $458 million. The revenue of the entire group for 2007 under IFRS was more than $1.3 billion, EBITDA - $132 million. As of August 1, the debt of all companies in the group, according to two sources, was about $600 million.

A month ago, the CEO of Neftegazmontazhservis, Aleksandr Semenov, and Khudokormov announced that they had agreed to purchase 100% of the Euroservice group. It was planned that Neftegazmontazhservis would become the owner of the group, and Prodimex would manage its business and receive an option to purchase 51% of the group. Konstantin Mirilashvili is considered the owner of Euroservice. According to several market participants, he left Russia and put the company up for sale.

There will be no sugar pipe