Private Murmansk sea port shareholders offering 63.53% of stock
MOSCOW. Aug 23 (Interfax) - Private shareholders in OJSC Murmansk Commercial Sea Port (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%) - have put their stakes up for auction, as announced in the paper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
The two companies are thus preparing to sell 47.65% of the port's charter capital, or 63.53% of shares.
Bids will be accepted from August 23 to October 10. Electronic trading is slated for October 12. The starting price is 7.5 billion rubles.
The bidding interval is 75 million rubles, the advance deposit 750 million rubles. Admitted to the auction will be private investors, legal entities, individual entrepreneurs, and foreign bidders observing the requirements established in Russian law pertaining to currency regulation and control.
Market operators report that Specialized Project Investments and Laterium Commercial Ltd. are controlled by entrepreneurs Nikolai Yegorov and Soslan Khorebov.
As reported, the founder and co-owner of oil trader Gunvor Gennady Timchenko discussed with Yegorov the sale of a controlling stake in the port's stock, but then reconsidered, deciding to put the emphasis on building a terminal from scratch together with SDS-Ugol and Kuzbassrazrezugol.
Head of the research agency InfraNews Alexei Bezborodov reckons the suggested starting price is "appropriate." "The price is not low, but not inflated, for this asset it is acceptable," he said. The port might mostly be interesting to coal companies, he added.
MCSP is the largest stevedore company at the port of Murmansk. The company specializes in transshipping coal, apatit and general cargo, including containers.
Gunvor is implementing projects to build a terminal for shipping oil products at Ust-Luga and a fuel oil terminal in Novorossiysk, jointly with Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port . It also owns Clearlake Shipping Ltd, which operates barges on Russia's internal waterways and loads tankers in the Baltic Sea and supertankers in East Asia. Gunvor entered the coal trading business in 2009.
MCSP's charter capital is 227,373,146 rubles split into 113,1600 ordinary and 37,718 preferred shares with par value of 1,507 rubles apiece.
The port's net profits to Russian Accounting Standards (RAS) contracted by two thirds last year to 337.1 million rubles. Net profits were down by about the same again in Q1 this year at 39.361 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.