Bankruptcy Formula

Will the ex-owner of Binbank Mikail Shishkhanov return to the Forbes tops?

Despite apparent economic difficulties, since the beginning of the year, the wealth of the richest Russians has grown by $13 billion and now stands at about $276 billion. But he was not among these lucky ones. Mikail Osmanovich Shishkhanov. Since 2018, he has been under US sanctions, and has noticeably lost money due to the payment of fines imposed on him by the courts. The other day, from the former owner and top manager of Bin Bank, Mikail Shishkhanov and Alexandra Lukina at the suit of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the court immediately recovered 283 billion rubles.

With a golden spoon

Mikail Shishkhanov was born in Grozny in a good family, being the nephew of Mikail and Sait-Salam Gutseriev. The omniscient Forbes for several years assigned this family the first place in the ranking of the richest clans. Family owned at least ten banks, two large pension funds, two prominent oil companies. Had three developers and 4 million sq.m. real estate.

Russian Forbes in 2017 estimated the total fortune of the Shishkhanovs at $ 9.91 billion. The fortune of Mikail Shishkhanov himself was also measured in multi-digit numbers, his share had to $ 2.3 billion. At 34, Shishkhanov took the position of head of the family Binbank, worked there from 1996 to 2017. This significant person in the financial market, his name regularly flashed in the news feeds.

tie

A few years later, a tight knot was tied in the Russian financial field (not without the participation of the Central Bank). The deeds of several not entirely prosperous banks that required reorganization intertwined, and the name of Shishkhanov began to be mentioned in the business press, not only in connection with success, wealth and social life.

Rehabilitation needed first Rost-bank. Binbank took part in this procedure. The funds allocated for the procedure (more precisely, to cover the imbalance between the value of assets and the amount of accumulated liabilities), as the investigation later found out, is about 35 billion rubles from Deposit insurance agencies. The “patient” joined the Binbank group as part of the financial recovery, but then Binbank itself demanded help, since the sanators embezzled and squandered the “treatment” money. As it was later noted in court, according to public reports, Binbank received a profit in the amount of 63 billion rubles in 2018, that is, higher than the volume of infusions of sanatoriums. Regulator could return all his “investments” are already in the first year of recovery, and a long ornate story could have ended at the same time.

In September 2017, Rost-bank entered the Binbank group as part of its financial recovery, and was subsequently merged with Trust Bank. On the basis of Trust, the Central Bank created a bank of non-core assets, where the bad non-core assets of the sanitized banks, including Otkritie and Binbank, were transferred. The Investigative Committee became interested in the course of the reorganization. In April 2021, former top managers of Rost-bank and Bina went to jail by court decision Kirill Lyubentsov (listed as unemployed at the time) and Alexander Lukin (he was already the general director of the large Chuvash poultry plant “Kanashsky”). The Investigative Committee considered them to be participants in the thefts committed by an organized group, the full composition of which the investigation had to find out.

TFR employees establishedthat Lukin and Lyubentsov, acting as part of an organized group with unidentified persons, developed “a scheme for the systematic theft of the bank’s assets entrusted to them. They organized the interaction of Rost-Bank with the Cypriot company Stratola Investments Ltd, as a result of which, from 2015 to 2021, bonds of Finstandard LLC, Vail Finance and Finstone worth more than 8.1 billion rubles were transferred to this offshore from the bank’s balance sheet. From the accounts of Stratola, the alleged participants in the theft transferred money and bonds to the accounts of other legal entities and disposed of them at their own discretion.

First, the former owner of Binbank Mikail Shishkhanov not mentioned in this context. Moreover, he was interested in other things.

In 2018, he became the owner of the Rodnikovsky pig farm in the Chelyabinsk region, having bought it from the same bank of non-core assets Trust. However, the pork did not go for the future: a year ago, they tried to sell the pig complex for 2 billion rubles, but there were no buyers.

On January 1, 2019, Binbank was merged with Otkritie Bank. A shareholder in this complex bundle of banks Mikhail Gutseriev paid about 14 billion rubles in order to settle the claims of the Central Bank, concluded an amicable agreement with the Central Bank and, in turn, began to demand compensation for losses inflicted by its Safmar group for 135 billion rubles.

denouement

In August 2021, Shishkhanov was also contacted: he became a defendant in a criminal case on embezzlement of 107 billion rubles. during the reorganization of Rost-bank JSC. The financier himself had the status of a witness and was already abroad. Now Trust has filed a lawsuit against Shishkhanov and the former top managers of Bina. As part of the case, Shishkhanov’s assets were seized for 306 billion rubles, almost the same amount was arrested from the defendant Lyubentsov, and 260 billion from Mr. Lukin.

The consideration of the case lasted two years. The final court session took place in November 2022. The Moscow Arbitration Court on the suit of the Bank of Russia decided to recover 71.2 billion rubles. losses from the former majority shareholder of Binbank, Mikail Shishkhanov (he owned 70% of the shares) and the former chairman of the board, Alexander Lukin. By the way, Shishkhanov is the only one among the defendants who did not dispute the status of the controlling person in Binbank during the process. The judge denied the other defendants’ claims. All appeals were dismissed. (A40-175605/2020).

But this is not the end of the story. Recently, a court decision on the suit of the Central Bank was announced. The defendants are Lukin, Lyubentsov, Shishkhanov. From the former owners and top managers of Binbank Shishkhanov and Lukin, 283.9 billion rubles were collected jointly and severally. Bank of Russia explainedthat the amount of the claim was calculated according to the formula from the bankruptcy law, based on the amount of losses caused by the reorganization of Rost-Bank.