Rusagrotrans majority holders and partners look to set up holding - Kommersant
MOSCOW. May 4 (Interfax) - Majority shareholders in one of Russia's biggest railway grain operators, CJSC Rusagrotrans, Yury Grigoryev and Konstantin Sintsov's, plan to set up a joint transportation and machine-building holding with businessman Dmitry Amelin and his family, Kommersant writes.
The partners "are creating a holding structure that will unify controlled railway assets," the paper reported on Friday, citing its own sources. Grigoryev and Sintsov are beneficiaries of LP Trans, which via LLC Rustranscom owns 54% of the stock in Rusagrotrans.
Rusagrotrans is not the entrepreneurs' only asset. Together with Amelin, they own Gruzovaya (freight) Company, which has 3,000 open-top railcars (it had 7,000 railcars rented from OJSC Russian Railways (RZD) subsidiary OJSC Freight Two last year). The entrepreneurs also own the operator A-Trans, which has 4,000 flatbed cars.
"Considering that Rusagrotrans itself manages 30,000 grain hoppers, the holding's total fleet will be around 40,000 railcars. By 2014, it should be operating 60,000 railcars, occupying 80% of the market for agricultural cargo forwarding, 75% of that for alumina, and 15% of the transportation of mineral fertilizers and cement," the paper writes, citing internal company documents.
"The owners of Rustranscom want to build a company that would work in the field of freight-forwarding and specialized rolling stock," one of the paper's source said. This is Rustranscom's logic for a tender for the sale the state's tanker car operator for the movement of liquefied gas - SG-Trans (Rustranscom is prepared to pay some 13 billion rubles for it), as well as a tender for Sergei Generalov's FESCO group's Transgarant (preliminarily estimated at 20 billion rubles).
During the past two years, the Rustranscom owners (who are identified on the market as being close to RZD Vice President Vadim Morozov and Andrei Krapivin, advisor to RZD president Vladimir Yakunin) have strengthened their position, Kommersant writes. At the beginning of last year, there was an additional Rusagrotrans share issue that lowered in their favor the stake held by OJSC Freight One (which then belonged to RZD) from 51% to 46%. Now, Kommersant says, the Rustranscom owners are negotiating the purchase of the rest of the Rusagrotrans shares held by Freight One.
Freight One's privatization ended with it being controlled by structures associated with Vladimir Lisin.
At the end of 2011, Rustranscom won an auction for RZD's OJSC Roslavl Railcar Repair Plant with an offer of 2.4 billion rubles against a starting price of 1.2 billion rubles.
Kommersant's sources confirm that Rusagrotrans' current general director, Konstantin Zasov, will leave his post in the wake of the reorganization for a job with the parent company. He might be replaced by the deputy chief of Ukraine's state railway transport administration, Viktor Sukhorukov.
Rustranscom documents indicate that if the plans for setting up the holding are carried out and it achieves its targeted indicators, then there could be an additional issue in 2013-2014 that might be "sold on capital markets." Rusagrotrans has declined to comment.