The Moscow Cotton Printing Factory (MSNF), which owns the Novospassky business district on Derbenevskaya Embankment, has filed a bankruptcy lawsuit with the Moscow Arbitration Court. As follows from the materials of the case, the application of this company was registered on May 4, no meetings have been scheduled at the moment.
MSNF is part of the PSN Group (now Progress-N). The latter was created by the former owners of Promsvyazbank Dmitry and Alexei Ananiev, until 2019 it was considered one of the largest rentiers in Russia. At the end of 2018, it was ranked 27th in the Forbes magazine’s rating of the “kings of the real estate market” of the country with an annual rental income of $65 million. “Pravda”, projects of residential complexes “Domashny”, Sreda and so on.
Four years ago, the Investigative Committee of Russia accused the Ananievs of embezzling the property of Promsvyazbank. At the same time, he imposed restrictive measures on the property and securities of the PSN. Vedomosti failed to contact her representative. A request to Novospassky remained unanswered.
By all appearances, Sberbank is the largest lender to MSNF. At least on May 2, the latter filed a lawsuit with the same Moscow Arbitration Court to recover 13.26 billion rubles from this company. This statement has been accepted for proceedings, the hearing on the case is scheduled for early July. It follows from court materials that MSNF stopped paying debts under a loan agreement opened back in 2018. In this regard, Sberbank asks to foreclose on the company’s property, which is pledged to it. Judging by the information on the Federal resource, the bank also intends to file an application with the court to declare bankrupt the owner of the MSNF – Progress-N JSC. A spokesman for Sberbank declined to comment.
Novospassky consists of 22 buildings with a total area of 112,000 sq. m. Among its tenants are BBDO Group, Castorama, Softline, Renaissance Insurance, the Rigla pharmacy network, and so on, the complex’s website says. In 2019, the Chinese corporation Huawei planned to acquire this business district, but the deal did not take place. The structure of the PSN filed a lawsuit for its own bankruptcy just a few days after the statement of Sberbank, lawyers interviewed by Vedomosti say. Due to the fact that the bank’s claim is based on the terms of the loan agreement, the prospects for satisfying this claim are quite high, points out the lawyer of the law firm Rustam Kurmaev and Partners, Yaroslav Shitsle. According to Alexander Bolomatov, a lawyer at the Yust law firm, a timely application for declaring the company insolvent in this case allows the owners of the company to minimize the risks of bringing them to subsidiary liability for obligations to the creditor.
If MSNF’s claim for its own bankruptcy is satisfied, then all enforcement proceedings against it will be suspended, lawyers say. Schitzle warns that collateral often does not cover the full amount of claims. However, according to Denis Platov, director of the capital markets department at Nikoliers, the market value of Novospasskoye is now 15 billion rubles. The two consultants specify that there are two other small plots adjacent to this site, where housing was previously supposed to be built, they are also owned by MSNF. So the price of the assets of this company may be higher. However, according to them, all of them are still under arrest. This may become an obstacle to the actual recovery of funds until the completion of all investigative measures and the removal of interim measures, recalls Schitzle.
Novospassky is one of the few remaining assets of PSN. In 2019, the company sold 0.6 hectares on the 1st street of Yamskoye Polya to the developer Stone Hedge for the construction of a business center. Two years later, Andrey Birzhin’s Glorax bought a site from her at 28, 1st Yamskoye Polya Street, where the Glorax Aura Belorusskaya residential complex is now being built. The completion of the Sreda residential complex is carried out by the Akvilon group, and the Domashny complex is going to be completed by the Samolet Group.
Sberbank acted as a creditor for several other PSN projects, such as the Pravda apart-complex on the street of the same name in the north of Moscow and the elite residential complex Polyanka/44 on Yakimanka in the center of the capital.
But last year, Yofoura Holding Limited, which is a shareholder of O1 Properties investment company, bought the rights of claim on these objects from him.
