Onexim disposes of 5.25% stake in Vozrozhdenie Bank
MOSCOW. July 15 (Interfax) - Onexim Group no longer owns a 5.25% stake in Vozrozhdenie Bank, according to materials the lender disclosed on Tuesday evening.
Earlier on Tuesday Vozrozhdenie disclosed that Mikhail Prokhorov's Onexim Group had become the owner of such a stake in the bank. Representatives of Vozrozhdenie and Onexim were not available for comment on Tuesday.
Newspapers Vedomosti and Kommersant reported earlier that Vozrozhdenie has seen several changes in shareholders and that the buyers of these shares were companies controlled by Promsvyazbank (PSB) .
Vedomosti reported that U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase, which owned 9.88% through JPM International Consumer Holdings, and Vladimir Kogan's Tamur Holdings, which held 4.3%, have sold their shares. The paper reported an acquaintance of two Vozrozhdenie shareholders as saying that the buyer had not only made offers to JPMorgan and Tamur Holdings, but also to other minority shareholders, including a BNP Paribas fund, which owned 1.5% directly and was the nominal holder of another 4% that belonged to other minority shareholders. He said these 5.5% of shares were sold to PSB companies.
PSB companies could therefore have bought more than 20% of Vozrozhdenie shares by the end of last week, the paper said. These companies are also continuing negotiations with a group of nongovernmental pension funds, a source close to PSB shareholders said. Nine pension funds and management company Investment Standard hold 5.05% of shares in Vozrozhdenie. A financier who works with Investment Standard said that the funds agreed to sell and the deal with their stakes has already been closed.
If all of these transactions have been closed, PSB companies own 24.73% of shares in Vozrozhdenie, which is close to a blocking stake, the paper said. With the acquisition of 25% plus one share, the new owner would have the right to block Vozrozhdenie's merger with Absolut Bank . A spokesman for PSB said that his bank is not buying up shares in Vozrozhdenie.
At the end of May, Vozrozhdenie shareholders received an offer from the Blagosostoyanie pension fund, which controls Absolut Bank, and began to prepare for a merger with Absolut. Vozrozhdenie's shareholders are supposed to respond at the end of July.
Vozrozhdenie, which is traded on the Moscow Exchange , and Absolut were respectively Russia's 39th and 38th largest banks by assets at the end of the first quarter of 2015, according to the Interfax-100 ranking of the country's lenders. PSB ranked eleventh.