The Concorde Capital investment group has won the second auction to sell assets used as collateral for commercial loans taken in the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), Deputy Managing Director of the Deposit Guarantee Fund of Ukraine Svitlana Rekrut has said.
“The auction was held on DebtХ (Delaware, the United States) on January 16, 2019. This is so-called “U.S. platform.” We sold the pool [of assets] for UAH 48.079 million. Only two bidders took part in the auction, and the winner is Concorde Capital,” she said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.
Concorde Capital CEO Igor Mazepa confirmed to Interfax-Ukraine that the company won the auction.
The final agreement has not yet been signed.
Rekrut also said that the anchor assets in this pool were the assets of Eurogasbank, including the Geneva Hotel in Truskavets, and other real estate. Literally two weeks before the auction at DebtХ, the ex-shareholder of Eurogasbank, through bankruptcy and the purchase and sale agreement, withdrew the liens.
“That is, the re-registration took place almost on the eve of the auction” Rekrut said.
According to a source of Interfax-Ukraine, the beneficiaries of the Geneva hotel in Truskavets are people’s deputy Andriy Lopushansky (Petro Poroshenko Bloc parliamentary faction) and ex-shareholder of Eurogasbank Oleksiy Ivchenko.
As reported on the website of the Deposit Guarantee Fund, the initial price of the pool of assets with the book value of UAH 6.5 billion was set at UAH 240.394 million. The assets were bought at the lowest price of the lot.
All assets pledged by the National Bank have repeatedly been put up for individual trading on the ProZorro platform and were not sold even after reducing their value to 20% of the book value. Then, these unsold assets were pooled and transferred to the DebtX and First Financial Network (FFN, Oklahoma City, the United States) to sell them using the Dutch model as part of a joint pilot project of the NBU and the Deposit Guarantee Fund. In this case, the specified pool of assets was already put up for auction at DebtX and FFN a year and a half ago.
Eurogasbank was founded in 2006. The largest shareholders in the second quarter 2014 were Oleksiy Ivchenko with 39.6296% of shares, Halyna Ivchenko with 31.9574%, and Khrystyna Ivchenko with 17.7778%.
The NBU on November 17, 2014 approved a resolution on the abolition of the banking license of the bank and its liquidation.
