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Articles & publications
11.05.2010
Svyazinvest appoints company to manage its cellular assetsInterfax
Svyazinvest has appointed a company to manage its cellular assets, the holding’s director general Evgeny Yurchenko told Interfax.
“The managing company for cellular assets has been set up. A press release about this will be issued sometime during May. The name of the company is Mobitel, a company which exists historically, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Svyazinvest”, Mr. Yurchenko said.
According to Mr. Yurchenko, Mobitel is a managing company but it is not a company which holds equity positions in other joint stock companies, and it is not a holding structure such as Svyazinvest. This will be an entity that employees people who sit on the boards of directors of all our cellular subsidiaries, he said.
According the head of Svyazinvest, no cellular assets can be spun off until the merger process is complete. “That is why the managing company is being set up, in order to work out a certain strategy to be used for all of our cellular assets. But we are not entitled to perform any actions involving mobile assets until the merger is wrapped up, so that minority shareholders do not sustain any losses’, Mr. Yurchenko said.
Svyazinvest controls 13 regional mobile telephony operators.
As reported earlier, the concept for the reorganization of Svyazinvest provides for a merger with Rostelecom (RTS: RTKM) on the basis of which the holding’s assets are to be folded into one of the Big-3 players or a fourth federal operator is to be launched. Former MegaFon (RTS: MEGF) manager Alexey Nichiporenko was invited last summer to spearhead the rollout of Svyazinvest’s mobile assets.
At the end of last year and the beginning of this year Svyazinvest was engaged in negotiations with Alisher Usmanov, who holds a 31.13% stake in MegaFon on merging Rostelecom and a cellular operator.
However, the negotiations were suspended, the general director of Telecominvest (which has a 31.3% stake in MegFon) Ivan Streshinsky recently told Interfax.
A hiatus in the negotiations is due to the fact that the management of Svyazinvest is in the process of resolving internal issues, including the key restructuring issue. In addition, Mr. Streshinsky does not rule out that Svyazinvest is considering other options to roll out its cellular business without the participation of MegaFon.
“The most recent decision was worked out as follows: we’re freezing the negotiations until a decision is adopted on establishing the merged company (Mobitel – Interfax). That is, at the end of June we’ll resume negotiations with Telecominvest about MegaFon. Hopefully this is the way it will work”, Mr. Yurchenko told Interfax.
Earlier another option for rolling out Svyazinvest’s cellular assets was under consideration, i.e. merging the cellular assets of Svyazinvest’s regional telecommunications operators (RTOs) to those of Sky Link, and after that the RTOs would be merged on the basis of Rostelecom.
On May 5, RF Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a resolution on divesting the 23.3% stake owned by Svyazinvest in Moscow City Telephone Network (MGTS) as part of a transaction with AFK Sistema (RTS: AFKS). According to the document, the MGTS stake could be swapped for a 50% interest in Sky Link owned by Sistema Inventure (a wholly owned AFK subsidiary), paying the difference in market price as determined on the basis of a report by the independent appraiser”.
Swapping Sky Link for MGTS is part of a deal to exchange telecommunications assets between the state and AFK Sistema as a result of which the Russian would regain its status as the sole owner of Svyazinvest, while Vladimir Evtushenkov’s holding would have its debt to Sberbank (RTS: SBER) and a large minority shareholder in MGTS written off.
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