The Amur court ordered Baring Vostok to give Artem Avetisyan control over Vostochny Bank

The Arbitration Court of the Amur Region predictably sided with Artem Avetisyan in the dispute with Baring Vostok and ordered the fund to transfer 9.99% of the shares of the controversial Vostochny Bank to Avetisyan’s company. Now the only thing that separates the loss of control over Baring Bank is the time frame for considering the appeal.

What's happened. The Arbitration Court of the Amur Region upheld the claim of Avetisyan's company Finvision Holdings for the exercise of a call option to sell it a 9.99% stake in Vostochny Bank. Now the controversial shares belong to the Cypriot Evison Holdings, controlled by the Baring Vostok and Russia Partners funds. If the deal is completed, Avetisyan and his partners will be able to gain control of the bank. Baring Vostok will challenge the court's decision in the near future.

Now Finvision Holdings and Avetisyan’s partners in Uniastrum Bank own 40.2% of Vostochny Bank, and Evison Holdings - 51.6% of the shares. After the court decision is executed, Finvision's share will exceed 50%.

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Agreement and court. The option agreement between Avetisyan’s structure and Baring was concluded in 2016, before the merger of Avetisyan’s Uniastrum Bank with Vostochny, which was controlled by Baring. Under the terms of the agreement referred to by Avetisyan’s company, Evision undertook to sell 9.99% of Vostochny to the plaintiff for 750 million rubles, but subsequently refused to fulfill the agreement. The founder of Baring Vostok, Michael Calvey, explained this by saying that after the transaction, the fund found out that Uniastrum shareholders were withdrawing assets from the bank.

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• The option agreement provided that all disputes between the parties would be resolved in the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA). It is in it that Evision is trying to challenge the withdrawal of assets from Uniastrum before the deal with Vostochny. In March, the LCIA ruled that Finvision had indeed violated the terms of the shareholders' agreement and Avetisyan must refuse to exercise the call option.
• Despite the ban issued by the LCIA, Finvision moved the trial on the exercise of the option to the Amur Region. Avetisyan’s company argued this with a clause in the agreement: if the LCIA does not meet the requirements of Russian law, each party can replace it with another court that would comply with Russian laws. Since the agreement, the law has changed to recognize arbitration awards only if the court has government accreditation, which the LCIA does not, the company's lawsuit said.
• The LCIA, in its March decision, allowed Evison to appeal to the English court if Finvision violates the ban on transferring the proceedings to Russia, since “given the actions committed by Finvision, this case is truly exceptional.”
• In the Amur court, Finvision Holdings asked the court not only to ensure the execution of the call option agreement, but also to block the additional issue of Vostochny Bank, agreed with the Central Bank, which could reduce the weight of the controversial package. The additional issue provided for the issue of 500 billion ordinary shares worth 5 billion rubles, which would have increased the bank's capital by 1.6 times. But the court refused to ban the bank from carrying out an additional issue agreed with the Central Bank.

What they say at Baring. A representative of Baring Vostok said that the company considers the court's decision to be unfounded and will challenge it; they plan to file an appeal in the near future. According to the representative, the court did not give a “proper assessment” to all the evidence provided by Evision: we are talking about six thousand pages where schemes for withdrawing money from Uniastrum before the merger with Vostochny Bank were outlined.