The application was received in February of this year from the co-owner of the company, Roman Nesterenko. There is no information about the amount owed in the application.
The hearing was postponed several times. No statements have yet been received from the second owner, the author of the idea of the international route, Alexander Ryazanov. But in December last year, the businessman himself sued his business partner. Ryazanov asked the court to exclude Nesterenko from Meridian.
As explained in the case file, from mid-2021 he lost interest in the company’s business activities, refused to finance it, no matter what method of financing he was offered, “systematically blocks the adoption of corporate decisions that are significant for the Company and achieve the goals of the Meridian project, and also unmotivated abstains or votes against decisions on issues related to the current activities of the Company”.
Because of this, Ryazanov said in a statement, the company cannot continue to work on the project and is forced to work for more than a year and a half in a state of complete uncertainty and increasing debt obligations.
In particular, Nesterenko was reproached for blocking the approval of the company’s annual reports and balance sheets, refused to approve the budget for the 4th quarter of 2021, refrained from approving the deal to receive the services of the Analytical Center under the Government of the Russian Federation when assessing the forecast traffic of the highway, did not agree on the decision on the payment of an advance to the Tambov Regional Land Fund, although an advance was required for the purchase of new plots for the highway. This was not the end of the matter. Nesterenko sued and demanded 95.3 million rubles from Meridian under loan agreements.
The reason for this, as follows from the materials of Ryazanov’s lawsuit against Nesterenko, was the disagreement of the founders. Both businessmen own the company in equal shares. In February of this year, Nesterenko was sent a proposal for mediation and settlement of the dispute amicably. He agreed, but after the plaintiff himself avoided discussing specific conditions and offered to buy out the defendant’s share for 50% of its value, all peace negotiations came to a standstill.
As Nesterenko explained during the trial, he regularly sent letters to the management of Meridian demanding to provide the company’s documentation, asked for clarifications on commercial decisions, in a word, he did not lose interest in business activities. As for the rejected report of 2021, as Nesterenko pointed out, it lacked a financial analysis of the company’s activities and information about the reasons for inaction in relation to Meridian’s major debtor, Velesstroy LLC.
After hearing both sides, the court ruled on May 10 that since Meridian is an active entity and both co-owners are interested in it, Ryazanov’s claim should be dismissed.
And already on May 22, the company received from Velesstroy a bankruptcy claim without a specific amount of claims. It was accepted for consideration in the framework of the Nesterenko v. Meridian case, which has been ongoing since February.
Velesstroy is a Moscow construction company that has been operating since 2008, with an unknown staff, but with a large authorized capital – 150 million rubles and even more revenue – 174.4 billion rubles in 2022. Its main owner with a 99% share is the international company Waveform Investments LTD, registered in Kaliningrad. In turn, the international company is 92.5% owned by SCF Closed Mutual Investment Fund and another 7.5% is managed by PNP Overseas Investments Limited from Hong Kong.
Velesstroy is mainly engaged in the oil and gas and electric power sectors. The company is laying pipelines in the Arctic and on the Amur, is engaged in industrial construction. However, there are also civilian objects. This year the company is working on schools in Novy Urengoy. And in 2020, by order of the Talent and Success Foundation, she built a concert hall on the federal territory of Sirius in the Imeretinskaya lowland.
In 2012, the federal press called the owner of Velesstroy a businessman from Croatia, Mikhailo Perenchevich. The company still has a branch in Zagreb. However, as in Almaty (Kazakhstan). According to Vedomosti, the company also acted as a tenant of the notorious VIP complex in Gelendzhik on Cape Idokopas.
In October 2022, Velesstroy sued Meridian for 78.8 million rubles – a debt under an agreement concluded back in 2015. It turns out that he acted as a contractor for the Ryazanov company when design and survey work was carried out on the Meridian. The front of work is almost half of Russia, from the junction with the M-1 highway at the intersection with the border of Belarus to the border with Kazakhstan. The total cost of the work was 400 million rubles, payment was made in stages. The defendant acknowledged the debt.
Alexander Ryazanov has been trying to launch the Meridian track project for several years now. It is known that almost all the land needed for it was bought by the Russian Holding Company, which was created specifically for this project. But the main issue with financing the construction has not been resolved. In September last year, it was announced that it had finally been found: Russian Holding Company (51%) and China National Chemical Engineering and Construction Corporation Seven LLC (49%) created a joint venture Meridian – CC7 LLC. At that time, the route was already estimated at 600 billion rubles. It was supposed to pass through several regions of the Russian Federation, including the Saratov region, and a bridge across the Volga was also planned as part of the route.
The Avtodor State Corporation also joined the project and ordered a comprehensive feasibility study of the project. But in May of this year, Avtodor announced that the construction of Meridian was being postponed. In the first place are the bypasses of Aksai near Rostov-on-Don and the Far Western bypass of Krasnodar.
Ryazanov’s opponent Roman Nesterenko is known as a co-owner of the consulting firm First Element LLC, which he owns equally with Kliment Rusakomsky. With Ryazanov, Nesterenko has a gravel mining company Nerud-M. The first company appeared in 2021 and has not yet shown results. The second has no revenue for several years or it amounts to thousands of rubles.
The former top manager of Gazprom, Alexander Ryazanov, comes from the Saratov region. He owns shares or fully controls 24 operating companies with a wide range of activities – from agricultural production to oil production. in the Saratov region, he owns Russian Kolos JSC, which owns orchards in the Romanovsky district (revenue for 2022 is 39.2 million rubles), Geofizmash LLC, which produces seismic equipment (revenue is 249.9 million rubles), RHC-development LLC (revenue not reported). And the young company RHC-Road Technologies, connected with Ryazanov through RHK-invest, received at the end of 2022 a contract for 600 million rubles for the construction of a highway near Teplovka and is building an asphalt mix plant, in which it has already invested 200 million rubles.
Help “BV”. LLC “Meridian” was registered in 2013 with an authorized capital of 1 million rubles. The company has 34 types of activities, the main one is the construction of roads and highways, in the state at the beginning of 2023 there were 6 people. Meridian’s assets amount to 1.6 billion rubles, revenue for 2022 reached 3.3 million rubles with a loss of 63.4 million.
