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December 7, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
At VTB, he was deputy chairman of the board of the Bank of Moscow, the retail lender acquired by the state bank in 2011 for $3.7bn. Since 2016, when the Bank of Moscow was finally merged with VTB, Verkhoshinsky had headed the retail business.
“Verkhoshinsky is a very talented, young employee and grew into a fairly mature independent worker,” added Kostin. “Here he was not on the first, on the second role, and suddenly he was offered this growth. I always support a person who has an elevator, let him ride in it.”
For his part, Verkhoshinsky boasted that he would set himself the ambitious task of “doubling Alfa’s market share and become an undisputed technological leader.”
“This is an exciting challenge,” he added. “There is a huge potential and strong team at the bank. I am certain of our success.”
Analysts have become very dubious about Kostin’s public pronouncements – not least since he rejected a recent Reuters story that VTB secretly financed a recent deal by Qatar to buy
a stake in oil giant Rosneft. The nine sources who told Reuters that in fact VTB did provide
a loan to Qatar included a source close to VTB management, a Russian central bank official and a Russian government source familiar with foreign investments in Russia.
“We have learnt to take Andrey Leonidovich with a little more than pinch of a salt and a shot of vodka,” quipped a banking analyst, who covers VTB.
Alfa is Russia’s fifth largest bank after Sberbank, VTB, Gazprom and recently nationalised Otkritie Founded in 1990, the bank has about 25,000 employees operating in 774 offices in Russia and overseas.
The lender, which has 15.8mn retail clients and 500,000 corporate customers, is on the Central
Bank’s “systemically important list” with assets of about 2.5 trillion rubles as of March 31 this year.
As well as lagging Sberbank, Tinkoff and others in adopting technology and finessing its online banking offering, Alfa’s branches look tired and in dire need of an upgrade.
bne IntelliNews recently visited three different branches in Moscow’s Kurskaya, Semyonovskaya and Arbat regions and the format seems jaded and scuffed in comparison to the modern and bright offices of Otkritie, Citigroup or even Sberbank. Several of Moscow’s notorious bomzhi [homeless tramps] had taken up residence in the Semyonovs- kaya branch next to the ATM machines after hours as the temperature plunged to minus 15.
Fridman, a Ukrainian born hustler who started out selling theatre tickets and washing windows, may finally be losing his prized teflon coating if he is being forced to sell.
The billionaire, along with one of his key lieuten- ants Alexey Kuzmichev, became a British tax resi- dent in 2015 even after Putin had requested that investors pay Russian taxes on profits they receive on holding companies registered abroad.
The key to Fridman keeping on side of the Kremlin has always been his suave partner Petr Aven,
who joined Alfa in 1991 after serving as Russia's foreign minister.
Aven regularly meets with Putin at the President Novo-Ogarevo residence and was even conferred with a state award for corporate citizenship personally by Putin in May last year. Boris Berezovsky, who was once known as the Godfather of the Kremlin, admit- ted that it was Aven who introduced him to Putin.
Though Fridman is not in Putin’s inner circle, he has managed to avoid the fate of some other 1990s’-era oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Gusinksy, who have had assets seized and have been exiled after failing out
of favour.