Built a plant? Sit down, five... or ten... years for fraud on an especially large scale. That's the term that the founder and former owner of Russia's largest independent Antipinsky oil refinery, Dmitry Mazurov, could get.

In 2006, in an open field, near the Tyumen-Tobolsk highway, the first stage of the Antipinsky plant with a capacity of 400,000 tons of oil per year appeared. The plant developed using its own and borrowed funds. In May 2012, it was already processing 2.5 million tons, in 2013 - 4 million tons of oil, and by September 2018 it reached its design capacity of 9 million tons.

The company's debt load grew at approximately the same rate. By the end of last year, it exceeded 20 EBITDA, traders refused to work with the plant on an advance payment basis, and the management, which was replaced with the help of Sberbank, was unable to keep the company afloat. In May, the new CEO of the plant had to file for bankruptcy. Two months later, the Chairman of the Board of Sberbank, German Gref, filed a statement against Mazurov for fraud.

Immediately after this, Vedomosti's interlocutors began vying with each other to tell how the plant sold oil products below cost to traders affiliated with Mazurov, and how part of the profits ended up abroad. "Do you know if he sold the plane?" one of Vedomosti's interlocutors asked, half jokingly, half seriously.

The investigation accuses Mazurov of failing to repay the bank $29 million on a $100 million revolving loan that the businessman took out in 2015. RBC wrote that Mazurov is also accused of embezzling $600 million. The plant's total debt is now more than $5 billion, of which Sberbank's share is about $3 billion.

Owners have always had problems with banks after the completion of major investment projects in Russia and will probably continue to have them. This was the case with Pavlovskgranit – Sergei Poimanov bought out the share of his former partner using borrowed funds from Sberbank and lost not only the crushed stone mining asset, but also his personal property, since he himself stood surety for the loan. This also happened with Igor Zyuzin’s Mechel after the construction of 321 km of railway to Elga (where coal is mined) using borrowed $2 billion. The company’s war with the banks died down after the sale of some assets and debt restructuring. This also happened with Vladimir Kekhman, whose company JFC, which controlled about 40% of banana imports to Russia, owed creditors more than 18 billion rubles. In 2012, it filed for bankruptcy. As a result, Sberbank bankrupted Kekhman himself, who was the guarantor for some loans.

Mazurov's representative in the court for the selection of a preventive measure stated that Sberbank "thoughtfully and consistently" led the refinery to a shutdown and default, "in order to gain control." Poimanov, by the way, had a similar formulation. Gref, Sberbank managers and other individuals "entered into a criminal conspiracy with the aim of a hostile takeover of Pavlovskgranit," he wrote to the Southern District Court of New York. It did not help .

The stories of businessmen in disputes with banks during bankruptcy end differently. Probably, it depends on whether the borrower bought an airplane with the bank's money. But this is not certain. As usual, the most humane court in the world will decide who is to blame. But borrowers will always have problems until, as Victor Pelevin wrote, "a chemical reaction occurs in the head of the person who started it all" and he orders an advertising clip for himself, which costs about a third of the loan.

The classic borrower's problem