The Board of Directors of the Bank of Russia approved the sale of one of the country's largest banks, FC Otkritie, to the state bank VTB. The amount of the transaction will be 340 billion rubles, this is stated in the message of the regulator.
As a result of the transaction, VTB will receive 100% of FC Otkritie. Part of the amount will be transferred in cash (233,126,864,828 rubles 15 kopecks), the other part – in federal loan bonds (OFZ), the value of which is calculated at market prices and amounts to 106,873,135,171 rubles 85 kopecks. The ownership of the financial group will pass to VTB by December 31, 2022. Thus, the regulator lost about 203 billion rubles < without inflation – The Insider>. Since 2017, the Central Bank has spent 555 billion rubles to save Otkritie, taking into account dividends (12 billion rubles) and the amount from the sale of the bank (340 billion), the Bank of Russia has been in the red.
The current head of the "Discovery" Mikhail Zadornov has already announced that he is leaving his post. In various interviews, he repeatedly criticized the possible decision to sell the bank in favor of some major state player, in particular, the VTB Group, as this creates risks for the banking market, which has become much less competitive in recent years. Mikhail Zadornov as the head of Otkritie will be replaced by the ex-head of the Russian division of UniCredit Bank Mikhail Alekseev.
The reorganization of the Otkritie financial group has become one of the key events in the banking sector during Elvira Nabiullina's tenure as head of the Bank of Russia. For several years, it has been clearing the Russian banking sector of banks with a dubious reputation; during this period, several large financial organizations fell under various restrictions from the regulator: Otkritie, Binbank, Promsvyazbank, Trust Bank, Yugra Bank, etc. On the basis of Trust Bank, which was part of the Otkritie group, the regulator later created a "bank of bad debts", in which he collected all the bad assets of problem banks.
As part of the reorganization, Otkritie was merged with Binbank, which led to the creation of one of the largest banks in the Russian market. The former head of VTB24, Mikhail Zadornov, was appointed to bring the new group out of the crisis, under his leadership the bank was being prepared for listing on the stock exchange, so the Central Bank planned to recoup the losses incurred due to the financial group's reorganization.
In the presentation of "Discovery" from 2021, it was said about the intention to enter the IPO. The bank wanted to sell 20% of the shares and thus raise about 400 billion rubles. Based on these calculations, the entire bank was estimated at about 2 trillion rubles. However, it was not possible to bring Otkritie to an IPO – the covid crisis and the war prevented, in which none of the players was ready to pay for the once problematic asset.
