Russian president puts Rolf assets under temporary management of Property Agency
MOSCOW. Dec 22 (Interfax) - President Vladimir Putin has issued a decree to place the assets of Rolf Group, one of Russia's largest car dealers, under the temporary management of the Federal Property Agency.
Under the decree, published Friday and which goes into effect upon publication, the agency will take over the management of shares owned by Cyprus-based Delance Limited in Rolf Group's main legal entity, JSC Rolf, as well as all stakes in Rolf Motors LLC, Rolf Estate St. Petersburg LLC and Rolf Tech LLC.
Until now, the mechanism introduced by the presidential decree of April 25, 2023 brought external management in only for companies whose ultimate owners were international concerns, such as Carlsberg, Fortum, Uniper, Danone, and Amedia.
The decree on transferring the car dealer's assets into state administration was published on Friday and was in force as soon as it was published.
Rolf has not yet commented on the transfer of assets.
Rolf is one of the largest car dealer holdings in Russia, with a portfolio of 30 car brands. The company's dealer network includes 59 showrooms and three used car megamalls in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The dealer sold about 100,000 cars in 2022, three quarters of which were used. The group's RAS revenue for last year totaled 160.7 billion rubles. (-36%), while net profit was 9.6 billion rubles compared to a 4.6 billion ruble loss in 2021.
The directors of Rolf, including founder Sergei Petrov, came under criminal prosecution several years ago in a case of illegal withdrawal of funds abroad on a particularly large scale as part of an organized group (Part 3 of Article 193.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
Investigators say that, in 2014, Petrov, along with ex-director of the Rolf business development department Anatoly Kairo, former general director Tatyana Lukovetskaya and director of the Cyprus company Panabel Limited Georgiy Kafkalia, along with unidentified accomplices, organized an illegal transfer of funds abroad. The funds, which came from the commercial activities of the car dealer, were transferred to the accounts of Panabel Limited using a false purchase-and-sale agreement from a Cypriot enterprise for shares in Rolf Estate companies at a massively inflated value of 4 billion rubles.
Petrov, who now lives abroad, was arrested in absentia and put on the international wanted list. He told Interfax that he denies involvement in any withdrawals of money from Rolf. His defense pointed to the absence of a crime due to the fact that the transaction, which the investigation used to form the basis of the criminal case, was a standard procedure for restructuring and consolidating assets.
At the end of 2021, the Prosecutor General's Office filed a lawsuit against Rolf in the Khimki City Court of the Moscow Region, demanding that the company recover 19.4 billion rubles from the company in favor of the state. The Prosecutor General's Office justified its demands by the fact that Petrov, while working as a State Duma deputy, managed the company and did not declare his true income. At the beginning of 2022, the claim was fully satisfied.
It was planned to sell the Rolf business at the end of 2021 to one of the largest Russian dealer holdings, Klyuchavto. The parties planned to close the deal in the first quarter of 2022, but it never took place. Later, it became known that the deal had been put on pause.