SBU-Ugol to receive control of Murmansk Commercial Sea Port - paper
MOSCOW. Dec 9 (Interfax) - SBU-Ugol (SBU-Coal), part of the Siberian Business Union holding that belongs to Mikhail Fedyaev and Vladimir Gridin, will receive control of the Murmansk Commercial Sea Port (MCSP), Kommersant reported.
The deal should be wrapped up by next week, the paper said.
The seller is LLC Garsiya, a little-known St. Petersburg-based company that acquired 63.5% of MCSP's shares at an auction on November 2. Garsiya originally represented the interests of SBU-Ugol, the paper said.
Garsiya's founder and general director Anton Uchitel told Kommersant that the company merely acts as an agent "of one of the largest coal companies," but he declined to name the company. The shares transfer to the final buyer began last week for the same price that Garsiya paid at the tender (7.65 billion rubles). The deal should be complete within roughly a week, he told the paper.
According to one of Kommersant's sources, after its acquisition of MCSP, SBU-Ugol could return to negotiations on selling part of the coal company to Gennady Timchenko's structures, which have expressed interested in both MCSP and SBU-Ugol.
OJSC Murmansk Commercial Sea Port (MCSP) is the largest stevedore company at the port of Murmansk. The company specializes in transshipping coal, apatit and general cargo, including containers. MCSP's charter capital is 227,373,146 rubles split into 113,160 ordinary and 37,718 preferred shares with par value of 1,507 rubles apiece. In 2010, its net profit fell 66.7% to 337.1 million rubles.
The company is a strategic enterprise and is part of Russia's privatization program for 2011-2013. The government holds a stake of 25.5% of charter capital (34% of ordinary shares). That stake was expected to have been sold at the end of last year, but no actual auction date has yet been announced.
At the end of August, private shareholders in MCSP - Specialized Project Investments B.V. (34.87% of charter capital and 46.63% of ordinary shares) and Laterium Commercial Ltd (12.68% and 16.9%) - put their stakes up for auction. Specialized Project Investments and Laterium Commercial Ltd. are controlled by entrepreneurs Nikolai Yegorov and Soslan Khorebov.
In January-September 2011, SBU-Ugol produced 14.2 million tonnes of coal. It sends over 60% of its production for export.