Artem Avetisyan climbed onto Vostochny Bank with difficulty

Baring Vostok considered it senseless to try a new board of directors and a meeting of shareholders.
19.06.2019
Vedomosti
Origin source
The Baring Vostok investment fund refused to demand, through a court, to hold the annual meeting of shareholders of Vostochny Bank, as well as approving a new board of directors. On 18 and 13 June, the court granted the request for revocation of the two lawsuits filed by the controlled fund by the Cyprus company Evison. She owns 51.6% of Vostochny.

Baring Vostok withdrew the lawsuit because in May the Amur court in unprecedentedly short terms, ignoring the ban of the London court on the proceedings in Russia, deprived the fund of control in the bank in favor of the "raiders", commented the representative of Baring Vostok on June 18 - those who went to prison innocent people. “In the absence of control, the implementation of this lawsuit is meaningless for us,” he stated. And he promised that the fund would continue to actively defend its rights in the courts of Russia and England. Calling the sale through court of his right to an option, confirmed in two judicial jurisdictions, by a raider seizure, is nonsense, the representative of FVIsn parries.

On May 20, the board of directors of Vostochny appointed the annual general meeting of shareholders for June 28 and approved the list of candidates to the board of directors. In the list of 14 names, including the founder of Baring Vostok, Michael Calvi, partners of the fund Vahan Abgaryan and Philip Delpal, director of investments Ivan Zyuzin, are all now under arrest. The list of candidates was formed before their arrest, in January.

“Unfortunately, our opponents are satisfied with the situation in which the bank is left without a normally functioning board of directors, so they disrupt the voting on the new list of candidates,” the fund representative said. “Finvizhn” Artem Avetisyan, which owns 32% of the shares of the bank “Vostochny”, is not against changing the list of candidates if necessary, said its representative.

Michael Calvi linked the prosecution with the corporate conflict of the fund with Avetisyan and his partner Sherzod Yusupov (owns 4.8% of Vostochny shares). Avetisyan and Yusupov, according to whose statement the “Baring case” was initiated, deny this version.

The corporate conflict between shareholders of the bank erupted last year. “Finkvizh” is fighting for the exercise of the option: Evison in 2017 refused to exercise the option and sell Finvizh a 9.99% stake in the bank. The option was concluded before the merger of Uniastrum Bank Avetisyan and Vostochny. Baring Vostok explained this with the withdrawal of assets from Uniastrum before joining, but lost the option dispute - in May, the Amur Arbitration Court ordered Evison to execute it. The fund now hopes to recognize the option agreement as invalid in the London Arbitration, which will consider this issue in January 2020.

Also, the bank's shareholders are arguing about an additional issue of 5 billion rubles: it was agreed with the Central Bank and was scheduled for 2018, but Baring Vostok cannot now hold it, in early June, the court banned it at the request of Finvizhn.

After the execution of the option “Finvizhn”, Avetisyan, Yusupov and Yuri Danilov will increase the share from 40.2% to the control one, but an additional issue would have eroded the option package from 9.9 to 6.1%, Finviz was afraid.

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