Poultry house for demolition: Andrey Kosilov is trying to get rid of the asset

The long-suffering “Sredneuralskaya Poultry Farm” from the “Ravis” holding of the Ural businessman Andrey Kosilov was finally put up for sale. But most likely, it will go for a penny – potential buyers are not interested in production, but in the land under it …

In recent years, the factory has become a real epicenter of scandals that almost influenced the politics of the region. How the situation with the factory developed – in the material of The Moscow Post correspondent in the Sverdlovsk region.

The amount at which the owners of the poultry farm valued their asset is not called – they will agree on this with the buyer. Meanwhile, according to rumors, the owners allegedly expect to gain about 1.3 billion rubles for the asset. I must say, a very modest amount, given that in recent years alone, about one and a half billion have been invested in the factory.

At one time, the government of the Sverdlovsk region, to which it, in fact, belonged, almost “brought to the handle” the production. Due to the large number of debts and the subsequent bankruptcy, it was decided to sell the structure.

In 2015, one of the largest banks in the country put up for auction its debtor, the Sredneuralskaya poultry farm, for 556 million rubles. The property complex included a land plot and 40 poultry houses. The bankrupt enterprise was bought by the Ravis agricultural holding.

Get rid of the “toxic” asset

At the same time, many people still believe that the administration of the governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev brought the factory to its knees. After all, the factory belonged to the region earlier, and more specifically, to the Ministry of State Property Management of the Sverdlovsk Region (MUGSO).

Its sale, and even at a very low price, took place against the backdrop of criminal proceedings. Actually, the whole assumption is that by selling the factory, Kuyvashev could take the members of his own team out of the blow.

Since 2015, investigators have been checking the top management of the factory for involvement in causing damage to the poultry farm in the amount of more than 76 million rubles. At the end of 2019, the investigation was terminated due to the absence of corpus delicti in their actions. This was written by Kommersant.

The investigation believed that the damage of 76 million rubles was formed due to the fact that the persons responsible for the enterprise provided benefits for a number of companies – Agropremium LLC, Project-A LLC, Sibtranscom LLC, and others.

In particular, the poultry farm bought from them raw materials for compound feed at an inflated price, and sold the finished products to its counterparties at lower prices, as a result of which the poultry farm received less than 31.7 million rubles.

According to experts, the former management of the enterprise, namely Sergey Shirokov and Alexander Vinogradov, who are allegedly close to Kuyvashev, the decision of the investigators to stop the investigation may help to avoid subsidiary liability for the poultry farm’s debts.

This plays into the hands of the Kuyvashev officials themselves. The industry itself in the mid-10s was supervised by Alexander Sambursky, the former deputy head of the MUGISO, who later left to work as the Minister of Natural Resources and Property Relations of the Orenburg Region.

In addition, the then Deputy Minister of Agro-Industrial Complex Dmitry Degtyarev, who later became a minister in the government of Kuyvashev, could have been involved in the company’s dubious transactions. Only to find out from Degtyarev the details of the life of the factory in those years will no longer work – the official died in 2020 of a coronavirus infection.

In any case, if there were some frauds at the factory, which led it to bankruptcy, then the situation has long cooled down. But Mr. Kosilov obviously did not suit the leadership of the region as a new owner – often, as they say, showed his teeth.

According to evil tongues, the factory could first be bled, and then simply “shed off” Kosilov in the hope that he would not “dig” who did what at the enterprise before him, but would increase production. The governor of the Sverdlovsk region, Yevgeny Kuyvashev, could personally be behind such a decision. But if there was such an “exchange”, it brought the region much more problems than benefits.

Now 98% of OOO Poultry Farm Sredneuralskaya is owned by Ravis-Poultry Farm Sosnovskaya (98%), another 1% each belongs to Andrey Kosilov and Igor Serbinov. In 2021, the revenue of Sredneuralskaya Poultry Farm LLC fell by 82% and amounted to 215.6 million rubles, the net loss amounted to 238 million rubles.

A photo: Rusprofile.en

At the same time, the value of the assets of the structure is minus 655 million rubles. That is, the company still has to hang large debts. At the same time, over the past years, Chelyabinsk residents have invested more than 1.5 billion rubles in the poultry farm – Andrey Kosilov called this figure last summer.

A photo: Rusprofile.en

The entrepreneur complained that despite this, the control and supervisory authorities did not give the factory a green light. Although the money, according to him, went to the construction of treatment facilities. But the administration of the city of Sredneuralsk allegedly did not agree on their commissioning – Pravda UrFO writes about this.

“Dirty” business

The need for the construction of such structures was really there. As we have already said, the factory is the generator of a whole series of scandals, in which outrages of an ecological nature stand apart. Last spring, the factory was fined 11.8 million rubles for soil contamination. The prosecutor’s office of the Sverdlovsk region reported that the company illegally dumped waste on agricultural land. E1 writes about it.

This is not the first such case. After the acquisition by Ravis, the adjective “dirty” was assigned to the factory. In November 2019, the Ravis poultry farm and Andrey Kosilov were brought to administrative responsibility for violating legislation on the protection of the environment and atmospheric air. As a result, the company was fined 120,000 rubles, and its head – 12,000 rubles.

In January 2020, the Sredneuralsk Poultry Farm was accused of draining sewage into the forest, and local residents noticed violations of sanitary standards. The experts found that the area of ​​contamination was two hectares. The damage caused was estimated at more than 10 million rubles. Ammonium nitrogen, potassium, sulfur and phosphorus were found hazardous to health in the soil.

The business owner was charged with illegal storage of hazardous waste and environmental pollution. Supervisory authorities ordered him to install treatment facilities. Which, in fact, was done later, but the factory did not help in any way.

At the same time, Kosilov can be indignant at the decisions of environmental departments as much as he likes. After all, the local residents themselves claimed that allegedly Kosilov ignored the orders of law enforcement officers. At least in 2020, the factory allegedly continued to drain waste, they said. The Izvestia newspaper wrote about the situation.

In the case of a fine of 11.8 million rubles due to soil pollution, Andrey Kosilov himself denied the violation. Moreover, he claimed that it was the authorities who created problems for the factory, unbearable working conditions. E1 writes about it.

UMMC is close

It is not clear for what purpose Kosilov may be hindered, however, there is an assumption that large developers who support the current governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev could covet the land of the factory.

Actually, even now the main asset of the factory itself is called not production, but the land under it, which can float away into the hands of large players. Various structures are named among the possible buyers, but one sounds most often – this is the UMMC of the Ural oligarchs Iskander Makhmudov and Andrey Bokarev. E1 also reports on the possible interest of these entrepreneurs in Kosilov’s asset.

UMMC has a separate development division – a subsidiary of UMMC Developer. The factory itself has long become toxic to the authorities of the region, not to mention the intractability of Kosilov himself.

At the same time, Bokarev and Makhmudov remain key industrial players in the region, along with Dmitry Pumpyansky’s Sinara group and Viktor Vekselberg’s structures. It is quite possible that unbearable working conditions were really created for Kosilov in order to further sell the asset into the hands of UMMC.

By the way, the current beneficiaries of the factory, like other market participants, do not hide the fact that it is the land under the asset that is of the greatest value, and not the production itself.

Andrey Kosilov is convinced that his business was put in the wheels. Photo: ekaterinburg.bezformata.com

For this decision, Messrs. Bokarev and Makhmudov could theoretically support Yevgeny Kuyvashev in the upcoming elections in September, and at the same time get rid of all problems with control and supervision bodies and other law enforcement officers who were frequent guests at the factory. What will become of the staff of the structure, which is now, in fact, dispersed, is probably the tenth question for them.

However, the factory still needs to be sold. And taking into account Kosilov’s former requests (about 10 billion rubles), the epic with chicken and eggs in Sredneuralsk will most likely continue.