How the ex-co-owner of Yugra Bank, who is under arrest, makes money on real estate and returns his objects

Since the spring of 2019, the ex-owner of Yugra Bank Alexey Khotin under house arrest. The court is considering a case of embezzlement of 23.6 billion rubles against him and former top managers “Ugra”. At the time of the revocation of the license, the bank had about 35,000 “excessive” depositors, the amount of their claims, excluding insurance compensation, was about 16 billion rubles. And yet, four years after his arrest, Alexey Khotin remains one of the largest Moscow rentiers. How do the state and creditor banks fight in courts for his real estate? In October 2022, Nikolai Nikolaev from Yekaterinburg came to Moscow for a few days. Walking near the Kitai-Gorod metro station, he noticed a pile of papers lying in one of the offices by the window. On A4 sheets, the contact details of some people were written out with comments like “He will come to meet before the New Year” or “I am interested, afraid of everything.”

Nikolaev ended up at this office for a reason. Previously, there was a branch of Yugra Bank, which lost its license in 2017 and belonged to a once mysterious participant Forbes list Alexey Khotin. Now one of the premises is occupied by the Derby company, which pays money under cession agreements to Yugra depositors, whose deposits exceeded the state-insured 1.4 million rubles. Nikolaev himself is a member of the Yugra creditors’ committee and administers a group on VKontakte dedicated to the “exceeded”. In the documents that he saw in the Derby window, the results of communication with former investors of Yugra from Yaroslavl were recorded. Nikolaev took several pictures and posted them on VKontakte, urging the beneficiary of the Derby to “kick” the company’s employees for negligent handling of documents.

Since the spring of 2019, Alexey Khotin has been under house arrest. The court is considering a case of embezzlement of 23.6 billion rubles against him and former top managers of Yugra. In the first years after the license was revoked from the bank, its clients staged pickets, demanded that Khotin return their deposits and left unflattering comments about him on social networks. When Derby began to pay out money, the anger of the depositors turned to mercy – they even offered to soften the conditions of house arrest for Khotin.

At the time of the revocation of the license, the bank had about 35,000 “excessive” depositors, the amount of their claims, excluding insurance compensation, was about 16 billion rubles. According to the Derby website, claims for 10.2 billion rubles were transferred to the company, of which 9.6 billion rubles were paid. True, according to Nikolai Nikolaev, no payments have been made since October 2022, but the company continues to conclude cession agreements. So the amount of claims will still grow.

Catch me if you can

If the depositors of Yugra managed to return more than half of their money, then the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA), which manages the bankrupt bank, cannot boast of success so far. The DIA paid 172.9 billion rubles to Yugra’s depositors and now must reimburse this amount to the state. But so far, the claims of first priority creditors have been satisfied only by 4.57%, and the bankruptcy estate is 9.9 billion rubles.

After the revocation of the license from Yugra, DIA representatives claimed that companies associated with Khotin accounted for 98% of the entire loan portfolio. The DIA did not answer substantive questions for this article. The certificate sent by the agency’s press service says that it has filed claims for the recovery of funds from the bank’s debtors for 1.69 trillion rubles – of this amount, only 1.57 billion rubles were received into the bankruptcy estate.

The businessman himself several times offered the agency a debt settlement scheme, including through oil assets and real estate. His proposals were not accepted. Khotin is one of the largest Moscow rentiers, consistently in the top 10 of the rating rating “Kings of Russian real estate”. He owns almost 1.7 million square meters. m of class B and below offices, as well as commercial real estate in Moscow. Gross rental income in 2022 was estimated by Forbes at $185 million.

This empire Khotyn together with father Yuri has been building since the late 1990s, including with the help of forceful methods and hostile takeovers. And almost all of it is pledged under loans from creditor banks, including Sberbank, VTB, Rosselkhozbank, Alfa-Bank, VEB.RF and, of course, Yugra. Thanks to this, the DIA can claim, according to Forbes, approximately 420,900 sq. m. m in the business centers of Khotyn, such as, for example, IQ-Park, Mikhailovsky, ABC, as well as Kitai Gorod, in the building of which the Derby office is located.

How is everything arranged? Part of the business center “China City” is owned by the company “Solorent”. Back in 2015, she mortgaged the building under a credit line in Yugra. In December 2020, when the overdue debt exceeded 580 million rubles, the DIA filed a lawsuit to recover the building. The case is still under consideration – the DIA won in three instances, but Solorent protests each decision. In addition, it turned out that immediately after the opening of the credit line, Yugra took the building out of collateral. The bank can simply cross out the pledge entry from the contract or not submit information about this to Rosreestr. It was necessary to return the business center on bail in a judicial proceeding.

Forbes has studied dozens of court decisions against companies that own other business centers in Khotin. Almost all of them are in various stages of bankruptcy, but the property is subleased from other legal entities.

The DIA is trying to hold tenders for individual blocks of business centers, but mostly without success. In court, the agency is confronted by bankruptcy trustees who demand to invalidate pledge agreements. On what basis? Bank managers were aware that they were issuing a loan to an affiliated company, so the pledge of property did not make sense, the managers argue. Numerous companies join them, demanding to be included in the register of creditors and declaring their claims on the property of bankrupt debtors. Sometimes among such companies you can even meet the owners of other business centers in Khotin.

In the summer of 2022, the Supreme Court considered one of these cases against the Rent Estate Group, which owns the buildings of the Mikhailovsky business center. The bankruptcy trustee demanded that the pledge agreement be declared invalid. And representatives of independent creditors insisted that the DIA collect property directly from Khotin. All this fierce battle in the courts does not allow the DIA to get money quickly.

Almost all companies associated with Khotin are in bankruptcy, in each procedure, small independent creditors or managers are trying to challenge loan agreements, a representative of the DIA complained at the meeting. When asked by the judge whether Khotin continues to control such companies, the representative of the agency replied: “We cannot prove direct control as such. But in fact, all assets pledged in favor of Yugra Bank are controlled by him. Very active measures are being taken to invalidate all loan agreements, pledge agreements and guarantees in order to remove the DIA from the register and sell real estate at auctions at reduced prices.”

Buyer’s market

There are more exotic reasons for litigation. For example, the bankruptcy trustee of one of the companies that owns the IQ-Park business center filed complaints against the DIA, which did not support his proposal to increase the number of security guards at the facility.

IQ-Park is a good example of how complex the Khotyn business empire is. More than a hundred buildings with a total area exceeding 200,000 square meters. m, almost a dozen companies-owners, and pledges not only from Yugra, but also from the banks St. Petersburg and Trust.

So far, Trust is the only creditor of Khotin who has resolved the issue with his debts. The businessman owed the bank 9.8 billion rubles; Trust received these debts from Binbank and FC Otkritie, whose troubled assets it manages. In the fall, Trust put up for auction the rights of claim to four companies in Khotin at an initial price of 4 billion rubles. The loans were secured by space in IQ-Park, Cherry Tower, The Cube, Smirnovsky and Ochakovo business centers on Bolshaya Ochakovskaya Street. “Now the market is a buyer, not a seller. This means that, given the current market conditions, selling at a discount is a common practice in the sale of assets, including rights of claim,” Forbes said in the press service of Trust.

Documentation posted on the website of the Auction House of the Russian Federation testified that it would not be easy for the buyer to establish control over the mortgaged business centers. Each loan agreement was secured by cross-guarantees of a dozen companies, not all pledged objects were reflected in Rosreestr, and part of the premises is required to be demolished by the Moscow mayor’s office. And yet, a buyer was found for a difficult asset – the Gloria company paid Trust 3.5 billion rubles. Vedomosti, citing its sources, wrote that Gloria could act in the interests of Khotin. Its ultimate beneficiary, Nikolai Ocheretyany, previously headed one of the oil companies associated with the former owner of Yugra. Trust assured that they checked the buyer for affiliation with Khotin.

Another company that is actively interested in the real estate of Khotin is Severprom. She participated in the auction for separate buildings of the ABC business center and all the same IQ-Park. The owner of Severprom, Vladislav Ushkov, heads the Binshtokovsky company, which is the name of the oil field in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, which Khotin’s structures acquired in 2016. In one of the cases, Yugra was able to cancel the auction, in which Severprom was declared the winner, citing the fact that the procedure took place without the control of the bank.

Recently, the list of contenders for real estate in Khotin has been replenished with two large banks. Since the beginning of 2022, Rosselkhozbank has been trying to recover shares of companies that own the Orlikov Plaza business center and the Gorbushkin Dvor shopping center. On its territory, the Moscow mayor’s office allowed to build housing. And Alfa-Bank in the fall asked to declare Khotin himself bankrupt. The businessman owes Alfa $ 590 million, the Filion and Cheryomushki shopping centers and the Cherry Tower, Agat and Center-T business centers are pledged. Back in 2019, Alfa sued the Agat business center from Khotin, but in the spring of 2022, the court overturned this decision. In October 2022, the court ruled to collect and sell Filion (the original price is 7.4 billion rubles), but so far this has not happened. Alfa-Bank is known for its tough approach to debtors, but it seems that it will not be easy for him to get Khotin real estate either.

The first hearing on the criminal case on embezzlement took place in the spring of 2021. Since then, the case card testifies, meetings have been postponed more than 70 times for various reasons. But since the fall of 2022, Khotin has had to deal with other multibillion-dollar claims – the Prosecutor General’s Office believes that his oil group “Rus-Oil” has not paid taxes for 169.4 billion rubles, and demands to recover in favor of the state the shares of its companies. Forbes sent questions to Alexei Khotin through the Naryshkin and Partners Bar Association (its chairman Alexander Naryshkin represented Khotin in court). The request went unanswered.