The KoPitania asset caught the plague

The head of the Khvalynsky district, Alik Sabriga, reported on African swine fever in one of the municipalities. 8,000 pigs from the Khvalynsky Pig Farm will go under the knife.

This is an asset of the ex-minister of the “open government” Mikhail Abyzov. There are new faces in the founders, but there are connections with the former official.

– In the Khvalynsky pig farm of the village of Akatnaya Maza – African swine fever – quarantine and emergency have been declared. 8 thousand livestock must be destroyed.
It’s good that the animals are insured and the company will suffer minimally, – said Sabriga.

According to him, sites for burning have already been identified, and quarantine has been introduced in the Moscow Region since May 22 – visiting the infected zone is prohibited, and the territory of the pig farm is closed.

Judging by the address, we are talking about Khvalynsky Pig Complex LLC, which is part of the KoPitania holding. It was founded in 2009, it includes a pedigree reproducer for 500 sows, located just in Akatnaya Maza, and a pig farm for 2400 sows under Engels.

LLC is proud of the automation of the processes of feeding and watering animals, manure removal, microclimate maintenance, equipment for artificial insemination. The company’s website notes that “the enterprise has a high level of veterinary protection,” and its capacity is 83,000 marketable pigs per year. The complex in Akatova Maza was launched in 2011, its construction cost 220 million rubles.

The founder of the pig farm is KoPitania LLC, a full-cycle agro-industrial holding engaged in crop production and meat production. In 2015, KoPitania was 99.8% owned by an offshore company associated with Mikhail Abyzov. He was the minister of “open government”, and previously headed the board of directors of the Ru-Com business group, whose agro-industrial division included KoPitania.

His portfolio includes work at RAO “UES”, the creation of companies in the coal industry and energy, as well as the engineering company E4 Group, which occupied a leading position in the Russian market. It was the leader in the market of general contracts for the construction of power plants, occupying up to 20% in the sector of large power generation.

He is also known as the “open government” minister appointed by then-president Dmitry Medvedev. At that time, he was noted among the richest officials of the government of the Russian Federation.

In 2019, a criminal case was initiated against Abyzov in connection with the transfer abroad, including during his work as a minister, 4 billion rubles and the ownership of offshore companies. In 2020, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation demanded to recover 32.5 billion rubles from them and Abyzov himself. After the arrest was lifted from part of the assets, estimated at 40 billion rubles, the state offset them at a nominal value of 10 billion rubles, leaving Abyzov still more than 20 billion rubles in debt.

Actually, the bankruptcy of the E4 Group suggests that KoPitania and the Khvalynsky pig farm included in it are still the assets of Mr. Abyzov.

As follows from the reporting, at the end of 2020, Alexander Rogozhin, the ex-general director of Ru-Com, was the main owner of KoPitania Group of Companies. Since January 2020, the founder (33%) is Denilkhanov Magomed-Emi Khavazhovich, a resident of the capital. Previously, he led and was the founder of Intekhgroup-M LLC, which advised on commercial activities. The full namesake of Mr. Denilkhanov in 2004 defended his dissertation on the relationship between secular and Muslim law in the North Caucasus. And in 2011 he published a monograph on the same topic. He is presented as a graduate of the law faculty of Moscow State University, a candidate of philosophical sciences.

Since February 2020, one of the founders (23.7%) is the Cypriot Anostal Commercial Ltd. In the LLC bankruptcy case, the company is mentioned in the list of the arrested property of Mikhail Abyzov.

In 2020-2021, this Cypriot offshore company accumulated an impressive share in the authorized capital. But since February 2023, some of them – 21.87 and 21.86% – have been shared with Vladimir Vishnevsky and Nikolai Morozov.

The first is listed as the founder and head of Aksioma Prava JSC, which is engaged in activities in the field of law and was established in 2017. The company of the same name, but in the status of a CJSC, took part in the bankruptcy of the E4 Group, actually acting as its applicant. Edition “Version” does not exclude that it was quite manageable. From 2016 until liquidation in 2018, Vladimir Vishnevsky was the founder of CJSC.

Nikolai Morozov is listed as the head of the corporate and tax department on the Axiom of Law website. He “has extensive experience in corporate structuring of holdings, including those with a foreign element, in tax and corporate analysis of business models, and support for M&A transactions.”

By the way, about deals. At the end of 2021, they were looking for a buyer for all the assets of the KoPitania group in the Volgograd, Saratov and Tver regions – pig breeding complexes (capacity 61 thousand tons of meat per year), meat processing plants (66 thousand tons of finished products), a poultry farm (43 thousand tons of products), feed production, as well as 28 thousand hectares of farmland. According to experts, the cost at that time could be 8.5 billion rubles, later they were estimated at 12-15 billion rubles. Analysts noted that the fresh enterprises of the group in the Saratov region could be of particular interest.

In 2022, GAP Resurs, a businessman from Stavropol, Viktor Nauruzov, showed interest in the deal. Moreover, the holding already has assets in the Volga region, including a poultry farm and processing enterprises in the Saratov region. At the end of June last year, the Federal Antimonopoly Service approved the acquisition of KoPitania enterprises by Tokarevskaya Poultry Farm OJSC, which is part of the GAP. However, he did not appear among the founders of the OJSC.

The revenue of Pig Complex Khvalynsky LLC in 2022 increased by 8%, amounting to 1.1 billion rubles. Net profit went negative by 58%, to 11.6 million rubles. The total revenue of KoPitania meat production enterprises in 2020 exceeded 15.7 billion rubles.