The owner of the largest trading network in Siberia “Holiday” twice experienced the bankruptcy of his business, and then his own – as a legal entity. Despite multibillion-dollar debts that cannot be repaid on their own, they also want to hang subsidiary responsibility for one of the subsidiaries on Nikolai Skorokhodov.
State of insolvency
The bankruptcy trustee of Holiday Production Company Limited Liability Company Stepan Lyutov filed an application to bring to subsidiary liability the persons controlling the activities of this company – Nikolai Skorokhodov, Eduard Korshikov and Holiday Company LLC. At the same time, the case file indicates that at the time of filing the application, it is “not possible” to determine the amount of subsidiary liability.
The first person on the list is Nikolai Skorokhodov, the head of the Novosibirsk group of companies Holiday, once the largest trading network in the Siberian Federal District, covering the network of Siberian regions. It was included in the TOP-200 largest private companies in Russia according to Forbes magazine. However, in 2018, bankruptcy proceedings began due to the filing of more than 250 lawsuits for hundreds of millions of rubles. A year later, the organization was declared insolvent, and bankruptcy proceedings began on it. And in 2020, a two-year proceeding to declare bankrupt Skorokhodov himself at the suit of Alfa-Bank ended. His amount of debt to creditors is 14.2 billion rubles, although initially the credit institution demanded a little more than 347 million from him. This is due to the fact that the manager, in his personal capacity, acted as a guarantor for the loans of the supermarket chain he heads. However, financial requirements for Skorokhodov are still being received. For example, in May of this year, one of the creditors demanded an additional 17.5 million rubles from him, including interest for using other people’s money.
Failed to agree
By court decision, Skorokhodov also got a financial asset manager – Oleg Khvorostinin, a member of the Association of Arbitration Managers “Siberian Center of Crisis Management Experts”. He immediately demanded to temporarily ban the merchant from leaving the Russian Federation, and also challenged the debtor’s attempts to urgently sell expensive property on their own – a Lexus RX 350 car and a Browning Gold hunting rifle.
It is known that during the proceedings, Skorokhodov himself proposed a restructuring plan. It was supposed to receive money from the sale of pledged and unmortgaged property of Kora-TK LLC, Holiday Company LLC, as well as Omsk Gastronomy LLC, the salary of Skorokhodov himself and funds received from NSK Holdy LLC. However, at that time, over the course of three years, only 7.4 billion rubles in debt was managed in this way, that is, a little more than half. As a result, such a plan was rejected by the court.
Then a second restructuring plan was proposed. According to it, by the end of 2022, Skorokhodov intended to repay about 950 million rubles from the income of the Holdi retail chain, and 8.2 billion rubles from the sale of property. At the same time, it was noted that the restoration of the network’s turnover would take about a year. However, it was also decided to abandon it – creditors did not see reliable sources of debt repayment.
However, over the past three years, no reports have been found on the sale of the property of Skorokhodov himself.
What can be taken from it
To save the company, Skorokhodov transferred non-residential premises, employees and goods from the Holiday company to the NSK Holdy company, which was registered in advance in 2017. Trademarks “Holdy Discounter” and “Farmer Center” were also transferred here. This caused the expected reaction from creditors: Alfa-Bank, Premium Food, Eurotrade, Baltika Brewing Company, then went to court. However, in the fall of 2021, the Federal Court of the West Siberian District ruled in the cassation instance that such a transfer of assets was legal.
However, this company was also declared bankrupt in 2021. Moreover, the bankruptcy management process then faced unforeseen circumstances – the manager could not get access to accounting documents, allegedly they were damaged by hackers.
Nevertheless, Skorokhodov today, according to the Seldon Basis database, is listed as the sole owner of NSK Holdy. He also owns 99% in Holiday Real Estate LLC and 33% in AquaLand Plus LLC. Both of them are engaged in real estate management. At the same time, the first of them has shown zero reporting in recent years, and the second has been operating at a loss for many years.
In a word, the transfer of assets between legal entities did not help the owner of the supermarket chain to maintain business and escape bankruptcy. Perhaps, on the contrary, attracted additional attention. Now Nikolai Skorokhodov has the risk of incurring additional financial responsibility, despite the fact that he has already been declared insolvent. It remains to be seen how many more unreasonably inflated businesses in Siberia will burst in the near future and what tricks their owners will use, bearing in mind the unsuccessful experience of Holiday.