Vladislav Sviblov plays a strange game in the gold mining market: he buys up assets, then abruptly withdraws from them, leaving behind corporate conflicts and criminal cases.
According to The Moscow Post correspondent, Vladislav Sviblov’s Vostok GeoService won the auction for the Kultuminskoye polymetallic deposit in Transbaikalia. It is one of the largest in the country. The businessman received the right to mine more than 125 tons of gold, 976 tons of silver, as well as copper and other resources.
At the auction, Vladislav Sviblov outperformed another major businessman, Roman Trotsenko. The mining structure of the last GeoProMining lost, while Vostok GeoService took just one step in bidding to win. As a result, the initial price of the site increased from 2.42 billion rubles to 2.638 billion rubles, and the lot went to his company.
Experts noted the strange ease with which Mr. Trotsenko refused to further participate in the auction. There were suggestions that Mr. Sviblov has an ambiguous reputation in the market, and he could well agree with Trotsenko in order to further resell the asset. Especially since this has happened before.
Analysts recall the situation with the gold-mining giant Petropavlovsk Group of Companies, part of the shares of which Roman Trotsenko once acquired. Then the company Aeon Mining, owned by Trotsenko, turned out to be 22.4% of the Petropavlovsk Group of Companies – by the way, the fifth largest gold mining company in Russia. Subsequently, this stake was sold in favor of the Yuzhuralzoloto company of the Chelyabinsk billionaire Konstantin Strukov.
Vladislav Sviblov himself is a big earner. In addition to Vostok GeoService, he is a major shareholder in a number of other large Russian exploration, mining and industrial assets, including his main company Highland Gold, as well as Lake Mining Company and Ecopolis Corporation.
Nevertheless, Sviblov can play in favor of Strukov on the market, remaining in the shadow of the major showdowns associated with the latter’s name. Perhaps it is Strukov who will become the ultimate owner of the rights to develop the Kultuminskoye field. He himself, apparently, could not take part in the auction due to huge debts and claims against him from the Federal Tax Service.
Operation “Petropavlovsk”
Konstantin Strukov is a longtime business partner of Vladislav Sviblov. It was the latter who was considered by many to be the initiator of the “multi-move” to take over Petropavlovsk. Sviblov also had a 4.62% stake in Petropavlovsk.
It is strange that after the deal on “Petropavlovsk” Trotsenko and Sviblov are declared for the same plot, and Sviblov gets it almost without a fight. And he, we recall, comes from the infamous Rosbuilding company, which has been repeatedly accused of raiding.
In the press, these people are called “Raiders of All Russia” without any reverence – for example, the publication “The Secret of the Firm” wrote about this, recalling hostile takeovers – from buying up collapsing collective farms to ruining retail chains of prestigious metropolitan brands. There, Mr. Strukov was supposed to work closely with another prominent entrepreneur, co-founder of Rosbuilding, and now co-owner of the PIK Group of Companies, Sergei Gordeev.
That is, Sviblov, even before he went on a solitary voyage, had to perfectly study the predatory laws of the market, get an idea of hostile takeovers and fairly participate in corporate conflicts.
And they often appear where Sviblov appears. The same thing happened with the aforementioned Petropavlovsk Group of Companies. When Strukov and Sviblov received their shares in Petropavlovsk after Roman Trotsenko left the capital, they immediately began to change the management of the structure. There was a large-scale corporate conflict, as a result of which the founder of Petropavlovsk Pavel Maslovsky, financial director Danila Kotlyarov and minority shareholders close to them were actually removed from the management of the enterprise.
Rumor has it that Konstantin Strukov (pictured) is acting on the market at the instigation of Vladislav Sviblov – the latter is greatly helped by the skills gained back in Rosbuilding
At the time of the vote, Sviblov still controlled 4.62% of Petropavlovsk. And then immediately sold most of the stake, reducing the share to 0.55%. Thus, he retained access to Petropavlovsk’s documents intended for shareholders.
He himself called the acquisition of a share an investment in an undervalued asset. You can believe this too. After all, as the “Herald of the Gold Producer” wrote, the businessman managed to triple his investments in the shares of the State Corporation.
Now the noise from the takeover of Petropavlovsk and the conflict in the board of directors has subsided. And in order to make the founder of the structure Pavel Maslovsky less “noisy”, a criminal case also appeared. He was suspected of fraud – embezzlement of the funds of a subsidiary of “Petropavlovsk” – JSC “Pokrovsky Mine”.
Another scandal was associated with this company, when people representing the new owners in the person of Strukov and Sviblov showed up at the Pokrovsky office in Moscow. We wanted to get some documents. They took a whole brigade of young men with them, and the recently appointed head of the Petropavlovsk Group of Companies, Maxim Meshcheryakov, led the procession.
As a result, an attempt to enter the office was stopped by law enforcement officers, and Meshcheryakov was suspected of arbitrariness. RBC wrote about this. Painfully, a visit to the Pokrovsky office was reminiscent of an attempted raider takeover in the style of the 90s. Just in the style of Rosbuilding, where Vladislav Sviblov worked in those years.
As a result, Denis Alexandrov turned out to be the head of the Petropavlovsk Group of Companies – 100% person of Vladislav Sviblov
The most interesting thing is that after this scandal, Mr. Sviblov decided to act, almost without hiding. After Meshcheryakov, Denis Alexandrov was appointed the new general director of Petropavlovsk. He is one of the top managers close to Vladislav Sviblov, the former general director of his main asset Highland Gold Mining. This appointment raised the question even more urgently: who really manages Petropavlovsk – Strukov or Sviblov?
Shuffling assets
In recent years, we are talking about a whole series of Sviblov’s transactions in the gold market. In parallel with Petropavlovsk, in 2020, he bought the Gold of Kamchatka mining structure, which was previously 75% owned by the Renova Group of Companies owned by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The latter wanted to sell the company for a long time, but could not find a buyer.
Rumor has it that Strukov had no intentions to develop the asset, and the only goal could be to eliminate a competitor from the market.
Sviblov continued cooperation with Konstantin Strukov. In the same way – in the status of “dealer”. Almost two years ago, in the summer of 2020, Sviblova’s Vostok Zoloto LLC bought Uryumkan LLC from Konstantin Strukov. But after a few months got rid of this asset.
Now Uryumkan LLC belongs to Nergeoprom LLC, the founders of which are Vladimir and Anna Zabelin. The first one owns 99.3% of the shares, this share belongs to VTB. Zabelin is most likely a figurehead, as he owns 40 companies in total. He can hold the asset in the interests of VTB, which is a shareholder of the PIK group of Sergey Gordeev.
The shares of the structure are pledged to the bank, and at the end of 2020 there is a hole in the finances: the company showed a loss of 1.3 billion rubles. In this sense, the change of owners did not benefit her – they could simply withdraw money from the company. But these are no longer the problems of Strukov, who got rid of the asset in time.
After Sviblov’s intervention in the activities of Uryumkan LLC, things only got worse there
To the east of the Ural Mountains, there are almost no regions left in which Sviblov would not have his own interests. So in Buryatia, Sviblov, apparently, has already decided to start developing the Ozernoye polymetallic deposit.
Since 2004, the license for the Ozernoye field has belonged to the structures of IFC Metropol, Mikhail Slipenchuk. In the 2000s, Metropol’s partner in this project was the international company Lundin Mining, Slipenchuk announced an IPO of one of his structures to finance the project. However, the company never started construction.
The authorities of Buryatia, dissatisfied with the delays, came out in favor of changing the subsoil user. And already in February 2019, Alexey Tsydenov announced that a new investor had appeared. It was assumed that we are talking about the PIK group of companies.
Previously, the group promised to develop the Nazarovskoye gold deposit, the Talinskoye brown coal deposit and the Ermakovskoye fluorite-beryllium deposit. Oz Management was supposed to manage all the assets, the founder and general director was Vladislav Sviblov, who at that time was a member of the board of directors of PIK Group of Companies.
But soon the information about the PIK group of companies was refuted. This was reported by Regnum. And Vladislav Sviblov personally entered the arena. He promised to reach full design capacity by 2024. VTB became Sviblov’s main partner, with whom Gordeev also has good relations. VTB issued a loan of 70 billion rubles to Sviblov’s company.
And the agreement on financing the construction of the GOK with Sviblov was personally signed by the head of the bank, Andrei Kostin, in the presence of the head of Buryatia, Alexei Tsydenov.
Now they say that the Ozernoye deposit in Buryatia will be developed by “people from the Netherlands”. After all, there was a change of ownership in Ozernaya Mining Company LLC. Now the company is owned by a private limited liability company “Rose Mining B. V” – a Dutch offshore.
VTB and Ozernaya Mining Company have signed an agreement on the main conditions for providing financing for the implementation of the mining and processing plant construction project. All this looks pretty decent, if you don’t know that the Ozernaya Mining Company was created only in October 2018, and its authorized capital is only 10 thousand rubles. The head of the company is the same Vladislav Sviblov.
Thus, he gained access not only to the deposit, but also to significant credit resources. Whether the project will be implemented by 2024 is a question. It is possible that Sviblov will formally withdraw from the asset, retaining a decisive influence on it, as happened in the case of Petropavlovsk. In any case, it is hard to believe in the future of Ozernaya Mining Company, because at the end of 2020, the structure went into negative territory by 74 million rubles.
Where is VTB’s money?..