The owner of Uralsib, Vladimir Kogan, has died

The owner of Uralsib Bank, Vladimir Kogan, died at the age of 56, according to the bank’s website. The cause of death was not specified, but in the summer of 2018, Vedomosti reported that Kogan was seriously ill and suffered a stroke.

• Kogan bought 82% of the shares of Uralsib, which needed additional capitalization, in 2015, when the Central Bank decided to sanitize the bank. After this, the Deposit Insurance Agency allocated loans to the bank for 81 billion rubles. As of mid-March 2019, Kogan owned 81.81% of the shares of Uralsib, the former owner of the bank Nikolai Tsvetkov - 11.35%. At Uralsib, a lot rests on Kogan, first of all, the surname is the clients, sources among bankers told Vedomosti.
• At the end of the first quarter of 2019, Uralsib Bank ranked 19th among all Russian banks in terms of the number of assets with 523 billion rubles.
• In 2019, Russian Forbes estimated Kogan’s fortune at $750 million. In 2018, the businessman managed to become a dollar billionaire.

Story. In the 1990s, Vladimir Kogan was the most influential St. Petersburg banker, Forbes wrote in a large article about him in 2013. Among his acquaintances, the magazine listed many high-ranking people - deputy prime ministers, ministers, heads of state banks and other participants in the Forbes list.

• Already in the 90s, Kogan received the nickname “The Great” and was known as one of the “owners” of St. Petersburg, organizing the purchase of shares and taking control of the St. Petersburg Promstroibank (PSB). In 1996, he became chairman of the PSB supervisory board and in the same year joined the Russian government council on banking issues.
• Among the bank's clients was Vladimir Putin, head of the mayor's committee for external relations, who owned a small stake in PSB (less than 1%). At the same time, Kogan was actively establishing connections with the entire current nomenklatura: from the deputy head of the city property management committee German Gref and the chief of staff of Vice-Governor Putin Igor Sechin to the “bloc of security forces” - the then head of the St. Petersburg FSB department Viktor Cherkesov and vice-governor Ilya Klebanov .
• In the early 2000s, Kogan and his Promstroibank partner David Traktovenko began selling off assets. The largest transaction was the sale of Promstroibank, for which VTB paid $577 million. Then the partners sold off almost all the remaining assets of the St. Petersburg Banking House, a holding company that managed the assets of PSB shareholders. Among them were various enterprises: a controlling stake in the Zenit football club, the Kronverk cinema chain, and the Baltic Leasing leasing company. Kogan and Traktovenko could earn more than $1 billion from the sale of their largest assets alone, Forbes estimated.
• Kogan later went to work for the Federal Agency for Construction and Housing and Communal Services, and in 2012, for several months he was Deputy Minister of Regional Development as the head of the Federal Agency for Construction and Housing and Communal Services (Gosstroy) - where he was responsible for the construction of the so-called “Putin dam” ", or "Complex of protective structures of St. Petersburg from flooding".

What will happen to Uralsib next? Kogan said back in 2015 that he planned to leave the bank as an inheritance to his children - sons Evgeniy and Efim, but they had to take control of the business empire ahead of schedule due to their father’s stroke.

• After Vladimir Kogan’s illness, Uralsib was actually headed by his eldest son Evgeniy, says Forbes. He has been working at the bank since the first day of reorganization. Opinions about him vary - while some say that he can ruin the bank with his excessive self-confidence, others describe Evgeniy as a calm person of a “conservative type.”
• Uralsib employees respect him, says a former bank manager: “Every top manager wants Evgeniy Kogan to be present at his meeting, in the hope of receiving a mandate for decisive action.”
• Among the issues that Kogan’s eldest son resolved during his father’s absence were problems with servicing the loan of Yugros-Product, one of the largest problem debtors of Uralsib with claims of about 6 billion rubles, an increase in profit according to IFRS to 16.8 billion rubles against 9.5 billion rubles of loss a year earlier in the first year after the reorganization, the sale of the problematic pension fund to the O1 group of Boris Mints for 1.8 billion rubles and the insurance company to Vasily Trokhin and the active increase in assets - up to 523 billion rubles in 2019, as in 2015 and planned by Vladimir Kogan.

Find out more. You can read in detail about the rise of the businessman, his connections and transactions here and here.