Source Bank “Trust” sold the assets of the agricultural holding “Rostagro” for 30% more than the original price. TrustAgro-Niva 1 LLC, TrustAgro-Niva 2 LLC, TrustAgro-Niva 3 LLC, TrustAgro-Elevator LLC, Kurganovsky LLC and Rostagro Management Company LLC, together with shares of the Capital Investments rental mutual fund and the right to claim “Trust” to the management company “Rostagro” and “Kurganovsky” for 2.2 billion rubles were sold for 18.7 billion rubles. The buyer was Aeon Agro LLC from Roman Trotsenko's AEON holding. The initial price of the lot was 14.4 billion rubles.
In total, 3 applications were submitted for the auction, the names of Trotsenko's competitors were not named. In Aeon Agro, he owns 80%, another 20% – the share of the director of CJSC Federation Tower Mikhail Smirnov.
“Rostagro” went to “Trust” with all the lands and tractors in July 2018, when Mikail Shishkhanov's Binbank was sanitized. At the time of the transition to Trust, the group was unprofitable despite huge assets and a place in the TOP-15 latifundists of the country. The land bank of Rostagro at that time was 300 thousand hectares. For 4 years, Trust has turned the agricultural holding into a profitable one, Rostagro's revenue in 2021 reached 5 billion rubles.
“Today it is a ready-made structure that will continue to ensure a continuous production cycle after the transaction. The sale price of the company is in line with our expectations,” Trust representatives say.
Now Rostagro manages 240,000 hectares of farmland, the main land mass is in the Penza and Saratov regions. More than 80% of Rostagro's land is the property of the holding, and another 10% is on a long-term lease. Wheat, sunflower and soybeans are grown on these hectares. The storage capacities of Rostagro, also included in the lot, amount to 145,000 tons of finished products, including 75,000 tons of elevator capacities. Together with the lands, 650 units of agricultural machinery were sold. The forecast for revenue in 2022 is 6.2 billion rubles.
It is not completely clear which Saratov lands were included in the lot. About 48 thousand hectares of land in the Balashovsky and Fedorovsky districts were accumulated in TrustAgro-Niva 4 LLC, and shares in this company were not sold. Although it is possible that the hectares were transferred to another company, because TrustAgro-Niva 4 itself, registered in Balashov, was also the property of Trust.
Experts predicted the participation of large market players in the auction for Rostagro lands, including Cherkizovo, GAP Resurs, Miratorg and Vadim Moshkovich, Rusagro Group of Companies. But Cherkizovo eventually bought from Trust another asset associated with Shishkhanov, Russian Grain Ufa. It was sold at auction on December 5, the deal amounted to 6.37 billion rubles.
Reference. Roman Trotsenko is a well-known Russian businessman, billionaire, ranked 63rd on the Forbes list as of 2021. His fortune is estimated at 2.4 billion dollars. Chairman of the Board of Directors of AEON Corporation. The corporation includes the Novaport holding, which controls 14 Russian airports, including the air harbors of Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Perm, Novosibirsk and Magadan, the Moscow River Shipping Company, the Southern and Volgograd river ports, and the Kemerovo Azot Group of Companies, one of the largest in country of producers of nitrogen fertilizers. For 2021, Trotsenko made plans to start building a port in the Arctic, in Indriga, the project was estimated at 300 billion rubles.