During December 2015 alone, the partners filed claims for 700 million rubles against A5, one of the largest pharmacy chains in Russia. The plaintiffs believe that the network stopped making payments due to a change of owner and merger with “36.6”

"Payments suspended"

In December, A5 was hit by a wave of legal claims: pharmaceutical distributors, manufacturers and other counterparties filed about 30 claims against the network’s structures, as follows from the file of arbitration cases. The amount collected from the two main companies of the A5 group - A O "Trading network "Aptechka" and LLC "A5 Pharmacy" - according to SPARK, amounted to about 700 million rubles.

In particular, claims amounting to almost 300 million rubles. received in December from the Protek group, one of the largest distributors of medicines in the country. General Director of CV Protek Dmitry Pogrebinsky told RBC that until mid-November 2015, A5 did not have any problems with payment, but later, after information appeared about a possible merger with 36.6, payments for shipped goods stopped, the total amount of debt is 1.2 billion rubles.

Now A5’s contract with Protek has been terminated: the Pharmaceutical Bulletin about this the new general director of A5, Sergei Bicherakhov, told at the end of December . He clarified that the new important supplier for A5 was the GDP company part , of the 36.6 group.

Claims for more than 300 million rubles. were submitted in December by another distributor - Alliance Healthcare Rus. Managing Director of Alliance Healthcare Russia Sergei Shcherbinin explained to RBC that the essence of the claim is overdue accounts receivable: “Since the change of owners, which we learned about from the press, we have no understanding of when the A5 group of companies will begin to fulfill its contractual obligations.”

The president of the Hidalgo advertising group, Dmitry Solopov, said that he was also going to sue A5 - the amount to be recovered would be about 7 million rubles. “We were advertising for A5 and worked with the company for more than two years,” he says. — At the end of November - beginning of December last year, the company stopped paying under existing contracts. When we asked what was happening, we were told that the company was changing owners, so all payments were suspended.” Attempts to obtain explanations from the former co-owner of the company Roman Buzdalin and former general director Andrei Gusev did not yield any results, Solopov complains.

The A5 Group includes more than 1 thousand pharmacies under the A5, Norma and Farmadar brands and ranks fourth in the Russian pharmacy market with a share of 2.4%, according to the analytical company DSM Group for the first nine months of 2015. A5’s revenue in 2014 amounted to 26 billion rubles, Gusev reported to Interfax. In 2015, the group was going to increase revenue by 42%, to 36.9 billion rubles.

New market leader

A5 is indeed in the process of changing ownership: in December, Buzdalin and Sergei Solodov, who controlled 68.75% of the A5 group, sold their shares to the Rossium concern of businessman Roman Avdeev. This information was confirmed to Interfax by Buzdalin. The second co-owner of A5, the Baring Vostok fund (31.25% of the network), retained its share. True, according to the Cyprus register as of January 14, the main owners of Confeyia Limited, the parent company of A5, remain Buzdalin and Solodov.

In the future, A5 should merge with another large pharmacy chain, 36.6, the Vedomosti newspaper wrote in mid-December. The industry publication Vademecum reported about the possible merger back in November 2015.

Vedomosti's interlocutors noted that Baring Vostok always wanted to participate in a company that would be a market leader. In the fall of 2014, Gusev told Vedomosti that A5 was negotiating a merger with the Pharmaimplex chain.

Director of Corporate Finance at 36.6 Yuri Gusarov refused to comment on the information about the merger with A5. But indirect data confirms it: Confeyia Limited became the owner of 5.81% of the shares of the Pharmacy Chain 36.6 company, according to the 36.6 report dated January 12, 2016. Pogrebinsky from Protek is also aware that the merger is underway.

ago, 36.6 completed a merger with the Ave pharmacy chain, but, according to DSM, it still failed to overtake the market leader, Riglu A few months , with a share of 3.5%. At the end of three quarters of 2015, “36.6” had 3.3%, and A5 had 2.4%. Thus, in the event of a merger, “36.6” and A5 will become the largest player with a share of 5.7%.

Increased prices - close down

For repeated violation

Roszdravnadzor has developed a bill allowing to suspend the work of pharmacies that are repeatedly caught inflating prices for vital drugs. This was announced by the head of the Ministry of Health Veronika Skvortsova, TASS reports . “We are now introducing changes to the legislation that will allow us to suspend the activities of those pharmacies that are repeatedly caught inflating prices for vital drugs,” she said, noting that the initiatives are now being coordinated.

“We check and punish”

According to the minister, in 2015, prices for vital medicines stabilized, and in some months they even decreased. At the same time, prices increased the most for the cheapest drugs; on average, prices increased by 8.8% per year, Skvortsova added. She admitted that prices in the market segment have increased more, but the ministry cannot control them. “That’s why we specifically managed to expand the list [of vital drugs] in December, and now there are more than 23.5 thousand dosage forms for which we regulate prices. This means that we check and punish if they increase,” concluded the head of the Ministry of Health.

Medvedev approved

The preparation of a bill to suspend the activities of pharmacies became known back in August. At the beginning of January 2016, Medvedev approved the list of vital drugs. 46 drugs were added to the list.

In the A5 help desk, the RBC correspondent was asked to call directly to the company’s central office, and at the number provided, the answering machine replied that it was the “36.6” service, but no one picked up the phone.

Gusev promised to get in touch on January 18. Buzdalin refused to comment, explaining that he was no longer the owner of A5, and advised him to contact the new owner, whom he did not name, for comment.

The owner of Rossium , Roman Avdeev, declined to comment.

The president of the pharmaceutical company RIA Panda, Dmitry Dergachev (the company filed a lawsuit against A5 for an amount of more than 12 million rubles), told RBC that this is not the first time he has encountered a case where a company, which is in the process of changing ownership, stops paying under existing contracts.

A change of owner cannot be grounds for suspending payments, emphasizes Anton Babenko, partner at the Padva and Epstein law office. Nevertheless, the suspension of payments is a fairly common story when there is a change of owners, agrees Mark Karetin, a partner and lawyer at the Yukov and Partners Bar Association: “From the point of view of the law, this is illegal, but in business this happens often - new owners suspend all transactions in order to First, understand the documents and assess the legality of all recent agreements.”

Pharmacy chain A5 has stopped paying suppliers