There will be no deal for Whoosh Holding to purchase Urent for at least 6 months - CEO

MOSCOW. March 10 (Interfax) - There will be no deal for PJSC Whoosh Holding (the parent company of Whoosh Group, the operator of the eponymous kick-sharing service) to purchase the Urent service (UrentBike.ru LLC, part of the portfolio of the Erion holding which is owned by PJSC MTS ) for at least six months; afterwards, the company will assess its feasibility and potential synergy, the head of Whoosh Holding Dmitry Chuiko said.

"There is no deal now. You saw that we withdrew the petition. So you can consider that there is no deal and definitely there will be no deal in the next six months, or even longer," Chuiko said at a meeting of the company's senior management with analysts and investors.

"Further on, we will see how possible it [the deal] is, how possible it is to get the regulator's approval, how interesting it is for the business, how feasible the synergy from this deal is, and so on. That is, the idea is that one plus one should equal something more than two," he said.

The abandonment of the deal is related to the position of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), he said.

"We received the FAS's opinion that the deal in its current form cannot be approved. Therefore, we decided to withdraw the petition, having understood that the position is like this," Chuiko said.

Whoosh Holding is not currently preparing a new petition to the FAS regarding this deal, he said.

The FAS reported on a possible merger of kick-sharing projects at the end of January. At the time, the FAS said that it had issued a "conclusion on the circumstances regarding the companies' petitions," emphasizing that the deals could lead to restrictions on competition in the scooter rental market. It was not reported exactly how many petitions were involved or the configuration of the deal.

Whoosh Holding confirmed at the time that negotiations were underway regarding the acquisition of UrentBike.ru, emphasizing that no binding documents had been signed.

In mid-February, Whoosh Holding announced that it had withdrawn its petition to acquire Urent, while not ruling out the possibility of submitting a new one.