VTB to make offer to Bank of Moscow shareholders before new share placement
MOSCOW. Nov 8 (Interfax) - The VTB , which owns 80.57% of shares in Bank of Moscow , plans to make an offer to a restricted circle of minority shareholders to buy out their shares in the troubled lender, VTB vice president Herbert Moos told reporters on Monday.
Moos said the offer would be made to all minority shareholders of Bank of Moscow except Andrei Borodin, its former president.
Moos added that VTB plans to make its offer before Bank of Moscow carries out a new share placement, which the VTB group is supposed to buy out before the end of 2012.
Bank of Moscow senior vice president Gennady Soldatenkov said last week that under current legislation VTB is not obligated to make an offer to minority shareholders when increasing its stake in Bank of Moscow.
Soldatenkov cited Point 14, Article 7 of the Federal Law No. 175 On Additional Measures to Strengthen the Stability of the Banking System, which he said provides an exception to shareholder legislation for cases where shares are being acquired as part of measures to prevent the bankruptcy of the bank.
Bank of Moscow shareholders voted on October 26 to increase charter capital by issuing new shares. The bank plans to place 100 million common shares with par value of 100 rubles each at a price of 1,111.77 rubles per share. The offering could therefore raise up to 111.177 billion rubles.
The shares will be placed in a private offering to VTB Pension Administrator, a division of the VTB banking group.
Bank of Moscow is in the midst of a financial bailout under which in late September it received a ten-year loan of 294.8 billion rubles from the Deposit Insurance Agency.
The loan from the DIA was preceded by the consolidation of 80.57% of shares in Bank of Moscow by the VTB group, which bought out stakes from Vitaly Yusufov's Losanp Trade (19.91% of shares were bought in the spring from the bank's former president, Andrei Borodin and his adviser Lev Alaluyev) and Stolichnaya Insurance Group, whose stake shrank to 3.19% from 17.32%.
Borodin owns 4.51% of Bank of Moscow shares through the firm Plenium Invest, a source close to the bank said in early October.
Bank of Moscow was ranked sixth by assets at the end of the third quarter of 2011 in the Interfax-100 ranking of Russia's biggest banks, while VTB placed second.
