The money of Ellipse Bank depositors was passed through the schemes

Sanitators of the Nizhny Novgorod Ellipse Bank lost 10 billion rubles in it. This is almost the same as in a bank deposit. Under the previous leadership, this money was spent on non-performing loans to agricultural enterprises, and the collateral for them went to a closed mutual fund, where their value was inflated tenfold. The schemes themselves are not unique - the surprising thing is that even though they existed, the bank was still sanitized. This reduces the already low chances of bringing those responsible for the incident to justice.

The details of the withdrawal of assets from the Nizhny Novgorod Ellipse Bank, which was sanitized at the end of December last year, for the rehabilitation of which the state allocated 5.36 billion rubles, were told to Kommersant by the bank-sanatorium, Russian Capital. “When the bank was sanitized, it turned out that about 10 billion rubles were withdrawn from it, with the volume of citizens’ deposits amounting to 11 billion rubles,” Vyacheslav Oreshkin, vice president of Russian Capital, told Kommersant. According to him, for the last six to seven years the bank has been actively lending to enterprises in the agro-industrial sector controlled by the management and owners. Moreover, the size of the loans was incomparably larger than the scale of business of these companies, and the “extra” money was washed away between the accounts of enterprises affiliated with the bank, he clarifies. “As a result, the bank had numerous borrowing companies, new loans to which were used to repay old ones, and thus a kind of pyramid was formed, which collapsed as soon as the previous management of the bank lost the opportunity to issue new loans immediately after being removed from management of the bank,” says Mr. Oreshkin.

According to his estimates, such problem loans make up about 90% of the corporate loan portfolio (as of December 1, 2013, that is, the last reporting date before the reorganization, it amounted to 8.1 billion rubles - Kommersant). Of these, the main debt on loans of about 30 agricultural enterprises and grain traders amounts to almost 5 billion rubles, despite the fact that their combined annual turnover barely reaches 400 million rubles, as calculated by Russian Capital.

Non-performing loans to “their own” provided only part of the damage, the rest of the potential “hole” - another several billion rubles - was formed using share schemes - inflated estimates of the bank’s investments in the closed mutual fund "Agrocapital" under the management of the management company "Eurotrust". “Its assets consist of collateral received by the bank for non-repaid loans, mainly land,” says Vyacheslav Oreshkin. “To inflate the value of assets, the closed mutual fund was put on the stock exchange, where transactions with its securities were made among a closed circle of people.” A preliminary revaluation of the assets of the closed mutual fund during the bank's reorganization showed that their value was inflated tenfold and in reality amounted to only 714 million rubles.

The DIA confirmed a large number of questions to the management and owners of Ellipse Bank. “Schemes for the withdrawal of assets have indeed been identified at Ellipse Bank, and a corresponding application for an inspection has been sent to law enforcement agencies,” said First Deputy General Director of the DIA Valery Miroshnikov. At the same time, it is not the schemes that raise questions - they are quite common, but the scale of abuses in the bank, which received a chance for reorganization.

In such a situation, there are two main questions: whether the bank is subject to rehabilitation and whether anyone will be held accountable for what happened to it. The sanatorium intends to reduce the hole in the balance sheet using the assets remaining in the closed-end mutual fund. “Their analysis showed that the value of part of the land can still be increased if they are profiled not as farmland, but given for real estate development,” explained Vyacheslav Oreshkin. “But, as a rule, there are no utilities on agricultural lands, their construction requires time and large investments, just like the construction of real estate, so this process will not be quick,” says Agvan Mikaelyan, general director of AKG Finexpertiza. The question of criminal liability of the management and owners of banks has long been rhetorical, and even more so in the absence of bankruptcy. It was not possible to obtain a reaction from the management and owners of Ellipse Bank. A member of the bank's board of directors, Dmitry Mironov, did not answer calls or messages at the phone number available to Kommersant. It was not possible to find the mobile phone number of the main beneficiary of the bank - and in the sanatorium bank they consider it to be the once chairman of the board of the bank, Mikhail Gurevich. The Nizhny Novgorod branch of the State University Higher School of Economics, where he works, reported that Mr. Gurevich will appear only in May.

Olga Shestopal

Clarification

In the article “Deposits in a circle”, published in N57 of the Kommersant newspaper on April 4, an inaccuracy was made. According to Dmitry Mironov, named in the article as a member of the board of directors, he is not on the board of Ellipse Bank. According to the annual report of Ellipse Bank for 2010, Dmitry Mironov was on the board of Ellipse Bank from January 1 to May 18, 2010. In addition, as indicated in the list of affiliated persons dated January 28, 2010, the grounds for inclusion in the list arose in June 2008.

Finance department

Contributions in a circle