Eskadra JSC, the owner of the Nevis office complex, located in the center of Moscow, on the street. Shchepkina, near the Prospekt Mira metro station, in December 2022 closed a deal to sell the facility to a structure associated with LUKOIL.
This was told to Vedomosti by two consultants who worked with the Nevis business center. They did not give the name of this structure. Another consultant claims that the buyer was not the oil company itself, but one of its top managers, but he did not specify who it was. The interlocutor does not exclude that the object was bought for the accommodation of LUKOIL employees. The representative of the oil company did not respond to Vedomosti’s request. Contact “Squadron” and its CEO Elena Munasypova “Vedomosti” failed. A request to the company “Intersectoral Implementation Center” Impulse “(it is also headed by Munasypova) remained unanswered. Representatives of the Commonwealth Partnership and CORE.XP, whom market participants call consultants for this transaction, declined to comment.
Now the main office of LUKOIL is located in Ulansky Lane near the Chistye Prudy metro station. There, the company built a 44,800 sq. m back in 2011. She also bought the nearby Ulansky business center (7200 sq. m) from London & Regional Properties. The company itself specializes in oil and gas production, its net profit for January-September 2022 according to RAS reached 647.9 billion rubles, revenue – 2.33 trillion rubles. (Last published IFRS financials for 2021: revenue – 9.44 trillion rubles, net profit – 775.5 billion rubles). The main shareholder of LUKOIL is Vagit Alekperov.
Nevis with a total area of 15,013 sq. m was built back in 2011. For 12 years, the business center has changed owners several times. Initially, under the name Prism, it was part of the portfolio of the Capital Group development company. But she ended up selling it to “non-public people associated with one of the government agencies,” consultants said several years ago. In 2014, the business center was transferred to the O1 Group by the former shareholder of Otkritie FC Boris Mints. It was at the suit of this bank, which was initially reorganized by the Central Bank, that in 2017 this complex was seized, as well as the shares of the parent company O1 Properties (it was also controlled by Mints then). FC Otkritie contested the purchase of bonds by O1 Group Finance LLC, as well as early termination of loan agreements.
All this eventually led to the bankruptcy of the legal owner of Nevis LLC Semela. At the end of 2021, his property was bought out by Eskadra, which was the company’s mortgage creditor. The property’s consultants then connected the new owner to O1 Properties’ current major shareholder, Riverstretch Trading & Investments. A representative of O1 Properties told Vedomosti that the company had nothing to do with the property. However, earlier he said that the new owner of the facility is a non-professional player in the real estate market, so he decided to transfer the functions of commercial management, leasing and operation of the business center to the management company O1 Standard. Her representative declined to comment.
The market value of Nevis can now be about 3 billion rubles, says Alexey Novikov, managing partner of NF Group. Natalia Tishendorf, managing partner of Alto Real Estate Fund, believes that the business center could cost the buyer more – 5.5 billion rubles.
Director of Sales and Acquisitions, Ricci | Offices Dmitry Antonov does not rule out that the facility will be used for the needs of LUKOIL. According to him, according to its technical characteristics, the building assumes the use of the facility by one user: it is small, which is ideal, including for a subsidiary of the group.
Nikolai Goryunov, Director of the Capital Markets and Investments Department at IBC Real Estate, recalls that there are already several LUKOIL divisions in the northern part of Moscow. In addition, there are residential and social infrastructure facilities near Nevis, as well as Olimpiysky Prospekt and the Third Transport Ring, says Novikov. Given the shortage of high-quality office space, this is a good acquisition for a company that can accommodate about 1,500 of its employees here, sums up Andrei Kukhar, director of the office real estate sales department at Nikoliers.
Recently, large companies are increasingly buying free-standing buildings to accommodate their offices, consultants remind. In particular, the metallurgical holding Novostal-M last year bought one of the buildings of the Stone Towers business complex with an area of 14,000 square meters from the Stone Hedge development company. m. And the Sibur petrochemical holding acquired the Negociant multifunctional complex (22,688 sq. m) from Otkritie Bank on the street. Big Yakimanka. The owner of the mansion with a total area of 4244 sq. m in the 1st Kazachy lane near the metro station “Polyanka” in April 2022 was the trader “Metallservice”. Russian Railways, in turn, agreed to acquire the former headquarters of VEB.RF (35,400 sq. m.) on Akademika Sakharov Avenue, not far from the Krasnye Vorota metro station.
