The court of Luxembourg has imposed provisional measures on the share of “Rosnano” in the company OCSiAl. This is the first “unicorn” of the state corporation, in 2021 its valuation reached $2 billion. The decision to freeze was made at the suit of ex-YUKOS shareholders.
The Luxembourg court imposed interim measures on the shares of the company OCSiAl, owned by the state corporation Rosnano, at the suit of the former co-owners of Yukos, a source familiar with the situation at Rosnano told RBC. According to him, the corresponding decision was made at the end of 2022, and litigation is currently underway.
The fact of the arrest of a block of shares in OCSiAl was confirmed by a source close to Group Menatep Limited (GML; a holding company representing the interests of the former majority shareholders of Yukos).
OCSiAl, headquartered in Luxembourg, is the world’s largest producer of graphene nanotubes (according to its own data, the company produces 80 tons of nanotubes per year, which is 97% of the world’s capacity), the company was founded in 2010 in Novosibirsk by physicist Mikhail Predtechensky and businessmen Yuri Koropachinsky, Oleg Kirillov and Yuri Zelvensky. This project was supported by Rusnano, which in 2014 invested $20 million in it and acquired the company’s Eurobonds for another $40 million. its shares for $5 million, valuing the entire company at $1 billion. Then the state corporation had 17.3% of OCSiAl (later data is not available), and the founders had 47% and voting control.
In August 2021, the manufacturer of graphene nanotubes attracted more than $100 million in investments from a pool of international institutional and private investors led by the Da Vinci Capital investment fund, and the entire company was already valued at $2 billion. At that time, Rosnano said that the value of its stake in OCSiAl exceeded $300 million.
According to one of RBC’s sources, even before the decision of the Luxembourg court, Rosnano applied to law enforcement agencies with a request to take preventive measures to prevent the possible withdrawal of OCSiAl production facilities from Russia in order to organize production in another jurisdiction. “But in the end there were no such initiatives,” he notes. Another interlocutor who is familiar with the plans of the state corporation also knows about the relevant appeals to law enforcement agencies by Rosnano. “They asked for an audit,” he explained.
Why graphene tubes are needed
Graphene nanotubes are a layer of graphene rolled into a tube one carbon atom thick. Such nanotubes, which have increased electrical conductivity and strength (above steel), and can withstand high temperatures, are added to other materials to improve their properties. For example, their use in lithium-ion batteries increases battery life by four times. Adding them to glass, aluminum and a number of plastics enhances the strength of products. The use of technology in the production of textiles for workwear gives the materials antistatic properties, conduction appears in silicone with nanotubes and color is retained, grip and wear resistance are improved in tires. At the launch of one of the productions in Novosibirsk in February 2020, OCSiAl President Yuri Koropachinsky spoke about the growth in the consumption of nanotubes, which, according to him, “is directly related to the revolution in the field of electric transport.” At the end of that year, he announced that in three years every electric car in the world would have his company’s nanotubes.
An OCSiAl representative redirected RBC’s questions to Rosnano; the press service of the state corporation has not responded to a request since last week. RBC sent questions to the press services of the Prosecutor General’s Office, MTSPZ (an organization that provides legal support against foreign claims of former Yukos structures) and Marks & Sokolov (represents Russia’s interests in a case against Yukos Capital, one of the former structures of the liquidated Yukos group, which in 2021 sued for $5 billion in compensation), as well as representatives of GML and Gibson Dunn (representing the interests of Yukos Capital Limited).
The legal proceedings of the former shareholders of Yukos and Russia have been dragging on since the early 2000s. In 2014, the International Court of Arbitration decided that Russia had effectively expropriated the oil company and ordered Russia to pay the former shareholders more than $50 billion, including interest.
The Russian side argued that during the arbitration in 2005-2014, the plaintiffs deliberately withheld from the arbitral tribunal important information about the methods of appropriation of control over Yukos in the 1990s. In her opinion, the privatization of the oil company took place with violations of the law. The decision of the arbitration court was appealed, in November 2021 the Supreme Court of the Netherlands overturned it. But in February 2020, the Hague Court of Appeal reinstated Hulley Enterprises, Yukos Universal and Veteran Petroleum (their interests were represented by GML) in the rights to receive $50 billion from Russia. Taking into account the accumulated interest, the volume of claims of the former shareholders of the company against the Russian authorities reached $57 billion.
GML beneficiary Leonid Nevzlin said earlier that the plaintiffs would “use all available jurisdictions to recognize this decision in order to seize and recover funds and property of the Russian Federation abroad.” For example, in May 2020, ex-Yukos shareholders secured 18 brands of Russian vodka in the Netherlands, including Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya. But in December 2022, they were unable to sell them at an auction in The Hague, as only two bids were submitted for them, and the highest offered price was €200,000, which did not suit GML. Then the chief executive of GML, Tim Osborne, said that, despite the failure, the holding “remains optimistic.”
Earlier, Andrey Kondakov, general director of the MTSP, told a US court that Western law firms had refused to represent Russia’s interests in new trials in the international Yukos case. But Russia managed to agree on the involvement of the law firm Marks & Sokolov in the process.
Luxembourg lawyer Fabio Trevisan, partner at local law firm Bonn Steichen Partners, in January 2023, at the request of Marks & Sokolov, prepared an expert opinion in which he considered the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in Luxembourg.
Luxembourg is a party to the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, Trevisan said. As a rule, a judge in Luxembourg issues an exequatur (authorization to enforce an arbitral award) unilaterally without hearing the defendant and without analyzing the arbitral award itself, Trevisan points out. Based on the exequatur, the plaintiff may seize the assets. However, the defendant can file an appeal, during which the judge will have to consider the circumstances of the case de novo, that is, anew, the lawyer wrote. “He can take into account all the facts on which the arbitral award is based, not limited to a purely formal review,” he said.
