The lawsuit concerns the company SIBEKO, which Melnichenko’s structures bought in 2018. They are demanding that it be recovered as state revenue, considering the transaction to be corrupt. This is the fourth lawsuit regarding the seizure of private assets in favor of the state in the summer of 2023.
On August 17, the Prosecutor General's Office filed a lawsuit against businessman Andrei Melnichenko; a preliminary hearing on it is scheduled for September 7, it follows from documents of the Sverdlovsk District Court of Krasnoyarsk. Melnichenko's fortune is $25.2 billion; he and his family are in first place among all Russian businessmen, according to Forbes.
The plaintiff in these materials is the Deputy Prosecutor General, without specifying his last name. The defendants are Andrey Melnichenko himself, the Khakass Service and Repair Company and the Kuzbass Joint Stock Company of Energy and Electrification (“Kuzbassenergo”). The Prosecutor General's Office demands that JSC Siberian Energy Company (SGC) be involved in the process as a third party.
A source familiar with the content of the claims against Melnichenko told RBC that the Prosecutor General’s Office’s claim concerns energy assets, which, according to the prosecutor’s office, were purchased from the structures of the former Minister of Open Government Affairs, Mikhail Abyzov. A representative of the businessman confirmed to Vedomosti that he had received the claim.
According to the telegram channel “SovetBezRynka”, the plaintiff is demanding that the shares of the Siberian Energy Company (SIBEKO) be recovered from the state. The Prosecutor General’s Office justifies the requirement by the fact that while supervising the investigation of the case of “Mikhail Abyzov’s accomplices” it received information “about the violation by citizen Melnichenko and the legal entities controlled by him of anti-corruption legislation when making transactions to acquire shares of SIBECO, as indicated in the materials of the claim, which were published by the Council Without Market "
According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, “in order to implement his plans and conceal his participation in the sale of SIBECO shares, Abyzov, maintaining informal friendly relations with Melnichenko, offered him to purchase the said property asset.” On February 7, 2018, an agreement for the purchase and sale of securities was concluded between Melnichenko and Abyzov in Cyprus, the lawsuit says.
The Prosecutor General's Office concludes that the transaction contains signs of “taking advantage of dishonest behavior” and therefore there are grounds for collecting as state income “all received by the parties under antisocial transactions.”
This is the fourth lawsuit filed by the prosecutor's office regarding the seizure of private assets in favor of the state in the summer of 2023. Previously, the Prosecutor General's Office filed a lawsuit in connection with the "illegal privatization" in the 1990s of one of the largest producers of methanol and formaldehyde in Russia, Metafrax Chemicals, and demanded that the company's shares be seized from the current owners. In July, the Tefida fishing holding and the Perm port were requested.
In judicial acts, the reclaiming of property is explained by the interests of the state and the transfer of companies to the control of foreign persons or citizens living abroad. At the beginning of August, a lawsuit was filed against the companies SibMir and IsNov (part of the RATM holding). It concerned the seizure of the Rostov Optical-Mechanical Plant (ROMZ), which produces optical-mechanical and optical-electronic day and night vision devices for fire control systems of armored military vehicles, including Armata tanks.
“In essence, business must understand the vector that the state is focusing on. We see that quite a lot of actions related to nationalization are now being carried out. But we see practically no measures to support the investment climate,” Alexander Abramov, head of the analysis laboratory at the Institute of Financial Markets, Institute of Financial Markets, RANEPA, told RBC.
SIBEKO (Siberian Energy Company) is the main supplier of electricity in Siberia, it generates thermal and electrical energy. The FAS allowed SGK to acquire SIBECO at the beginning of 2018, subject to a number of conditions, including the refusal to “significantly increase prices on the wholesale electricity market” for three years. Novosibirsk Governor Andrei Travnikov considered then that the deal “will have a beneficial effect on the reliability of heat supply to the city and region, and on the rate of indexation of heat tariffs for the population.” SIBECO General Director Ruslan Vlasov said that negotiations on attracting investors had been going on for several years, and that for consumers, the sale or purchase of company shares “is at least an invisible process.”
Experts interviewed by Kommersant in 2018 estimated the cost of the transaction at 18–24 billion rubles. SIBECO's revenue in 2016 amounted to 28.2 billion rubles, net profit - 1 billion rubles. In 2022, according to the SPARK system, the company’s revenue was already 38.3 billion rubles, net profit - 4.8 billion rubles.
In October 2020, the court converted 32.54 billion rubles that belonged to Abyzov into state income - before joining the government, he was one of the richest businessmen.
The charges under the last two articles against Abyzov are related to SIBEKO, which, according to the Investigative Committee, was transferred to trust management only nominally. In 2018, while Abyzov was a civil servant, the company was sold, and this decision, contrary to the law, was made by him personally, the Investigative Committee believes.
Deputy Prosecutor General Victor Green demanded the withdrawal of funds in 2020. The department’s position was that Abyzov had been hiding the ownership of five Cypriot offshore companies since 2012, through which he, as a minister, illegally managed SIBECO. As a result, Abyzov sold it, violating the ban on business activities for officials, the Prosecutor General’s Office believed.
“The decision represents a pretentious view of the investigation on some arbitrarily selected circumstances of the case without verification and testing of these views by an independent and impartial court,” the former minister’s lawyer, Yuli Tai, said in the appeal. He doubted that the judge had written the decision herself, suggesting that "it was made by a third party with a greater breadth of knowledge."
As of the end of 2021, Andrey Melnichenko, together with his family, indirectly owned 92.2% of the shares of the Siberian Coal Energy Company (SUEK). However, he ceased to be a beneficiary of SUEK and EuroChem on March 8, 2022 - the day before the European Union imposed sanctions against him, a source close to EuroChem told RBC. Melnichenko was the beneficiary of the trust that controls both companies, explained RBC's interlocutor. According to him, even before the introduction of sanctions, on March 8, the businessman abandoned this role, and his wife automatically became the beneficiary.
