Czech PPF selling Russian banking assets to local investor group, retaining bank in Kazakhstan

MOSCOW. May 17 (Interfax) - PPF Group and Home Credit have entered into an agreement on selling their banking assets and subsidiaries in Russia to a group of Russian individual investors led by former head of the RTS, Ivan Tyryshkin, the Czech group said in a statement.

The Kazakh Home Credit bank, a subsidiary of the Russian HCF bank, will be sold to shareholders and several senior managers of PPF and Home Credit as part of the deal.

"The deal will be conducted in an orderly and structured manner in order to ensure business continuity for Home Credit employees and customers in Russia and Kazakhstan," the group noted.

Tyryshkin headed the RTS exchange in 2001-2003. He is one of the founders and one of the largest shareholders of the SPB Exchange, and heads its board of directors.

The Russian HCF bank is a subsidiary of the Home Credit N.V. holding, which is part of the international PPF group. Its largest beneficiary was Czech entrepreneur Petr Kellner, who died in a plane crash in March 2021.

In the autumn of 2021, it became known that PPF had put the Russian HCF bank up for sale. According to a number of media reports, the Hungarian OTP Group, which owns the Russian OTP bank, as well as entities of AFK Sistema, were among the applicants for the asset. As the RBC newspaper wrote previously, there have been three applicants for the HCF bank, and they have been conducting due diligence on the credit institution since the fourth quarter of 2021.

PPF Group operates in 25 countries, and owns assets totaling 40.3 billion euros in various sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, media, biotechnology, real estate, and engineering.

According to the results of 2021, HCF Bank was 30th in terms of assets in the Interfax-100 ranking prepared by the Interfax Center for Economic Analysis.