Vasily Pozdyshev rolled away from Nabiulina

What will the deputy chairman of the Central Bank do after clearing the banking sector under the new scheme.
23.12.2019
RBC
Origin source
Vasily Pozdyshev leaves the Central Bank to the Banking Sector Consolidation Fund, which was created with his direct participation. Reorganization of the largest private banks was carried out through the fund. Now the task of the Central Bank and Pozdyshev is to sell them.

Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Vasily Pozdyshev leaves his post: he will move to the management company of the Banking Sector Consolidation Fund (FCSB), where he will head the board of directors. This was announced to reporters by the Chairman of the Bank of Russia Elvira Nabiullina, the correspondent of RBC reported.

Permutations will occur in early 2020. The Central Bank is completing the active phase of clearing the banking sector and will now concentrate on selling rehabilitated banks, Nabiullina explained. At the FSCS, Pozdyshev will be in charge of the day-to-day management of banks sanitized by the Central Bank, organizing their sale, as well as preparing claims against former owners and organizing the process of asset recovery.

“We need to tighten control over the banks that the Central Bank will reorganize, and organize work to sell them,” Pozdyshev explained. “I am infinitely grateful to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation for eight years of hard, but very interesting work,” he said.

The head of the Central Bank did not announce a new distribution of responsibilities in the Central Bank. According to her, the position on which Pozdyshev worked, while no one takes.

Responsible for reorganization

Vasily Pozdyshev oversees the Central Bank of the Department of Banking Regulation and Financial Recovery, as well as the risk analysis service. He joined the Central Bank in 2012, until 2014 he headed the department of banking regulation. After the Central Bank headed Elvira Nabiullina and he became a mega-regulator of the financial market (from September 1, 2013), a large-scale cleansing of the banking sector began: the Central Bank massively revoked licenses from banks or transferred them to reorganization to other credit organizations, the Agency for Rehabilitation participated deposit insurance (DIA).

In 2014, Pozdyshev became deputy chairman of the Central Bank, and since June 2015, he joined the Board of Directors of the Bank of Russia. Initially, the issues of bank rehabilitation and financial recovery were not under the jurisdiction of Pozdyshev - he was only developing approaches to banking supervision and regulation, working under the supervision of former first deputy chairman Alexei Simanovsky. The curator of banking supervision at the Central Bank was replaced in October 2016, when Simanovsky's powers passed to the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, Dmitry Tulin. Pozdyshev, who changed his immediate supervisor, also received new responsibilities: the creation of a new mechanism for bank reorganization, the creation and development of a banking sector risk assessment service, as well as issues of remote and inspection supervision of banks.

It was under the supervision of Pozdyshev in 2017 that the FKBS was created - reorganization through the fund provided that the Central Bank itself would not be engaged in the rehabilitation of the collapsed bank. The first banks sanitized through the fund in the same year were the largest private credit organizations that themselves previously acted as sanators - Otkrytie (August), Binbank (September) and Promsvyazbank (December). Later, several more banks went to the FKBS; after recovery, the regulator sets the goal of selling them. The scheme with the FKBS differed from previous readjustments of banks, many of which were recognized as unsuccessful: the Central Bank was directly included in the capital of a credit institution, writing off the shares of previous shareholders to 1 ruble.

How did the rehabilitation work according to the Pozdyshev scheme

The reorganization of the largest private banks through the Federal Securities Commission was a surprise to the market, but the problems in these credit organizations were known. In the summer of 2017, Sergey Gavrilov, director of affluent clients at Alfa Capital, sent a letter to clients stating that the “situation” with Otkrytie, Binbank, Promsvyazbank and Moscow Credit Bank “could be finally resolved this fall” ( As a result, three banks went to the FKBS; the ICD works with the previous owners). Later, the Central Bank called the letter an example of unfair practices, and Alfa Capital recalled it.

The problems of Otkrytie, the first of the sanitized banks, became known in July 2017, after the ACRA rating agency, created on the initiative of the Central Bank, assigned it a rating below the level that allows placing budget and pension funds in the bank. The rating, in turn, caused a negative reaction among the bank's customers - individuals, which exacerbated the situation.

The improvement of the three banking groups cost the Central Bank more than 2.5 trillion rubles: the regulator directly contributed money to their capital, and also provided them with deposits. After the sanctions, the Central Bank had claims against the former owners, their fate was different:

The Investigative Committee (SK) has opened a criminal case on embezzlement of 34 billion rubles. in Otkrytie, the former head of the bank, Evgeny Dankevich, who left Russia, became his main person involved. There are no criminal claims against the former main owner of the bank, Vadim Belyaev, but the bank requires its former owners to reimburse 289.5 billion rubles, which the Central Bank directed to improve the bank.
Binbank was affiliated with Discovery. The state agreed with its ex-owners through the non-core asset bank Trust, which had previously been sanitized by Otkrytie and is now used to recover claims against the former owners of banks. In November, Trust concluded a deal with billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev, a minority shareholder of Binbank, for 135 billion rubles. The bank is also in negotiations with the former controlling shareholder of Binbank, Gutseriev’s nephew Mikail Shishkhanov, who did not participate in this agreement.

It's time to sell

“Pozdyshev, a superprofit, did a lot of things important for Basel [the implementation of international standards for banking supervision in Russia], but he was responsible for the execution issue,” says a top 20 bank manager. The Central Bank has been repeatedly criticized both for the implementation of stringent capital requirements for Basel III and the reform of the risk assessment of borrowers, as well as for the reorganization of banks.

The main critic of the Basel III capital premium was Andrei Kostin, the head of VTB Bank. For VTB, the “issue price” for increasing capital adequacy allowances in 2017, 2018 and 2019 is 450 billion rubles, or 4.5 trillion rubles. unpaid loans, he complained in the fall of 2018, indicating that tightening was taking place against the backdrop of Western sanctions, when banks that fell under them were cut off from foreign capital markets. The state went forward: the Central Bank extended the deadlines for introducing allowances, which were primarily needed by VTB and Gazprombank, and the Ministry of Finance reduced the requirements for paying dividends.
The main complaint against the reorganization mechanism was the nationalization of the banking sector: after the transfer of private banks to the regulator, the state's share reached a record 70%. The chairman of the board of directors of the private Alfa Bank, Peter Aven, directly called the decisions of the Central Bank a mistake. Rehabilitated banks need to be sold faster, even if they are cheap, the whole sector will benefit from this, the Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin has repeatedly stated that the Central Bank should not own commercial banks. It is necessary to limit the period during which the Central Bank can keep these banks at home for five to seven years, recommended Andrey Kostin.

The Central Bank plans to put up for sale banks even earlier than five to seven years later, Pozdyshev said in response, but time limits could lead to the regulator being forced to sell good assets for nothing, which is wrong. The regulator already has negative experience: at an auction in March 2019, he was not able to sell the Asian-Pacific Bank sanitized in 2018. Losses of the Central Bank from sanitation Pozdyshev estimated in the amount of 750 billion to 1.4 trillion rubles.

New work front

“Now the strategic tasks of the regulator are shifting from the sphere of revoking licenses or reorganization to the sphere of selling sanitized banks,” says Olga Ulyanova, vice president of Moody's. “It is logical that a person who was previously deeply immersed in the process of improving banks, now, as we assume, will directly engage in their preparation for sale to investors.”

The largest of the sanitized banks are really getting closer to the sale (it doesn’t threaten except to Promsvyazbank, from which the state made a strong defense bank). "Discovery" in the summer came out of reorganization. The regulator prepares it for sale in 2021, while it is only about 20%. “At this stage, the most important work in preparation for the sale is the implementation of a three-year business strategy. You can prepare a lot, but if what you sell costs money, you will sell it. And if a product does not cost money, no matter how sophisticated you are, it will not be sold, ”said Mikhail Zadornov, head of the Discovery, in an interview with RBC.

“Given the overconcentration of the sector in the state, it is necessary to assess the possibilities and prospects of privatizing banks, if there is a goal - to support the position of the private segment of the banking sector. Further, the structuring of such transactions in itself is a complex and lengthy process that requires a coordinated assessment of the cost of sanitized banks, ”explains Yuri Belikov, Pozdyshev, managing director for validation of the Expert RA rating agency.

Another aspect of the future work of Pozdyshev is the return of the assets of the former owners of the sanitized banks to partially compensate the losses incurred by the Central Bank. Work in this direction is carried out both through arbitration proceedings, and in the criminal plane. Representatives of Otkrytie, Trust, and DIA declined to comment.