No one has offered to buy Alfa Bank - Aven
MOSCOW. Sept 16 (Interfax) - No one has made an offer to the shareholders of Alfa Bank to buy Russia's largest private lender, Alfa Bank chairman and shareholder Pyotr Aven on the Main Actors with Nailya Asker-Zade show on TV channel Rossiya 1.
"No one has taken an interest in this. There were some legends here about [state bank] VTB . This is complete and utter nonsense. No one has made any offers to us, ever, and no one held any talks about selling the bank," Aven said.
He said the bank's owners have no plans to sell it. "We have no desire to sell Alfa Bank. Alfa Bank earns about 12%-15% on capital. This is a very big number, so right now this is our main source of personal income, we're not taking out money. Secondly, for us this is really, for all intents and purposes, our baby, with which it will be very difficult to part emotionally. For us this is a principal point of life, particularly for me, because I'm in Russia more than my partners, it is the second and the third. I think that there's no chance that anyone would buy it today, and no one has even expressed an interest," Aven said.
In January 2019, Alfa Bank disclosed in the Fedresurs registry information about a mandatory valuation of its shares done in December 2018. The market value of one common share in the bank was 5,764.15 rubles as of December 13, Alfa Bank said.
Alfa Bank's principal shareholders, through ABH Holdings, are Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Alexei Kuzmichev, Pyotr Aven, Andrei Kosogov, the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and Unicredit S.p.A.
Rumours about the sale of Alfa Bank circulated repeatedly in 2018, but the lender denied that its shareholders planned to sell. The most often rumoured buyer was VTB, whose head Andrei Kostin said last November that his bank had no such intentions. VTB has neither the "appetite" nor the capital reserves for such an acquisition, he said.
Alfa Bank was Russia's fourth largest bank by assets at the end of the second quarter of 2019, according to the Interfax-100 ranking of the country's lenders.