S. Porter / Vedomosti

The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has approved a petition from a small Podolsk-based Promsberbank to purchase 100% of the shares in the authorized capital of SK Oranta, the agency reported on Friday.

Since 2008, Oranta belonged to the Dutch insurance group Achmea. The company had been making losses for two years in a row: in 2013, the loss increased by 1.5 times to 902.6 million rubles. In September 2014, Achmea announced the sale of the insurer to the Russian insurance group Kompanion. The reason was Oranta's unprofitability, said Achmea representative Bert Rensen at the time, and "Achmea's inability to influence the growth rate of the business due to Russian rules and the regulatory system." Rensen specified that the buyer received FAS approval for the deal on August 25.

In September 2014, Expert RA lowered Oranta’s rating by three positions at once due to a change in the company’s owners and the uncertainty of the strategy for further development.

According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Oranta has belonged to the insurance agent OOO Green Card since September 18, 2014. Legally, Green Card is not connected to Kompanion, as follows from SPARK data, but the company is managed by Igor Fedyaev, deputy director for the Siberian Federal District of Kompanion. Fedyaev refused to answer Vedomosti's questions. And a Kompanion employee insists that Fedyaev is not a top manager of the company, and therefore the sale of Oranta is not a related-party transaction. Currently, a significant portion of Oranta's employees are Kompanion managers, confirms one of the insurer's counterparties.

It was Green Card that approved the deal with the FAS, says a source close to Kompanion, because formally the insurer was sold to it. Olga Sergeeva, head of the FAS financial markets department, found it difficult to confirm this information. There is no information on the FAS website about the approval of the deal, but the service does not post information on all petitions on the website, says Sergeeva.

Promsberbank is not connected with Kompanion, says a Kompanion employee. It was not possible to clarify with its employees why the bank needs an unprofitable insurance company. Promsberbank is a small Podolsk bank, which ranks 277th in terms of assets in the Interfax ranking according to the results of 2014. The main co-owner of the bank (20%), according to its website, is OOO SMU-888, which belongs to Anna Smirnova.

Smirnova became a shareholder of the bank in the fall of 2012, when the bank's owners changed 65% of shares, and Vladimir Putin's cousin Igor joined the board of directors. However, he left the board a year later.

At one time, Promsberbank consolidated the resources of industrial enterprises in the region, which is how it survived, recalls an employee of one of the rating agencies who previously collaborated with the bank.

He found it difficult to assess the essence of this deal, noting that, as a rule, during a crisis, banks do not launch retail, for which the insurance business would be relevant.

Representatives of the bank and Oranta could not be reached over the weekend. Kompanion's first deputy general director Boris Semin declined to comment.

Insurance company "Oranta" may be sold again