KYIV. July 3 (Interfax-Ukraine) – ICU investment group has launched Ukraine Recovery Fund to invest in Ukraine distressed assets and seeks to raise around $200 million to the fund, ICU Managing Director and Partner Makar Paseniuk has said.
“Fundraising is rather good. We want to raise around $200 million,” he told reporters in Kyiv last week.
Paseniuk said that the fund was registered in May 2017 on Cayman Islands.
He said that the fund will operate for seven years. The smallest sum for investment is $1 million.
He said that Ukraine Recovery Fund will focus on investment in medium- and large-sized businesses. The size of investment in one project is restricted with 20% of the fund capital. The key directions are agriculture, FMCG, food and specialized retail, mining and property.
Paseniuk said that ICU sees the Individuals Deposit Guarantee Fund, banks that are optimizing their portfolios, including international banks that want to remove ‘Ukrainian risk’ from their balance sheets, as key sellers of these distressed assets.
Asked about the expected yield, he said that expectations from these investments in the world are 15-20%, and for Ukraine the minimum figure for entering a project is 20%.
ICU Group was established in June 2006. It provides services for trade in securities, investment banking services, and manages the assets of joint investment institutions. It includes Investment Capital Ukraine LLC, AMC Investment Capital Ukraine, Bank Avangard and AMC Troika Dialog Ukraine (all based in Kyiv). Previously the co-owner and the head of the board of directors in the group was Valeriya Gontareva, whom, at the proposal of President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, the parliament approved at the post of head of the National Bank of Ukraine in June 2014.
Afterwards Gontareva sold her stake in ICU, while the main partners of the group remained Makar Paseniuk and Kostiantyn Stetsenko with the shares of 41.7%, as well as Oleksandr Valchishen and Volodymyr Demchyshyn, who headed the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry of Ukraine, who own 6.58% and 9.99% respectively.
