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Investment
April 2020 www.intellinews.com I Page 11
referred to as “BTC”) of Bulgaria by United Group B.V. of the Netherlands,” the EC said in a statement.
It added that the deal would not raise competition concerns given the very limited increase in the merged entity's market position and the presence of several other players in the market.
Vivacom is the brand name under which the Bulgarian telecoms operator BTC operates.
The post-privatisation history of BTC, Bulgaria’s communist-era fixed-line monopoly, has been mired in controversy, as its ownership has changed several times since its sell-off in 2004, and tracking its end-owner has been challenging.
Vivacom’s head – the London-based Bulgarian businessman Spas Roussev – holds 46% of
Vivacom, while VTB Capital, the UK arm of sanctions-hit Russian VTB Bank, holds around 20%. Delta Capital International, which is the investment vehicle of Bulgaria’s former finance minister Milen Veltchev and his brother George, holds a 20% stake.
The sale procedure for BTC was launched by VTB Capital in 2015, after InterV, which owns 100%
of BTC through two subsidiaries, failed to repay
a €150mn bridge loan. The financing was secured via a share pledge over 100% of the shares of InterV.
Russian company Empreno Ventures, owned by businessman Dmitry Kosarev, reportedly linked with Russian billionaire Konstantin Malofeev, has made several unsuccessful attempts to declare the deal null and void in courts in Bulgaria and Luxembourg.
After Belarus and Ukraine, Russian gaming giant Playrix acquires studio in Armenia
Playrix, a global Russian-founded gaming giant, announced on March 5 its acquisition of Armenian game studio Plexonic. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, reports East-West Digital News (EWDN).
The Yerevan-based team, still led by Plexonic’s founder and CEO Gevorg Sargsyan, has already started developing a new casual mobile game, according to a corporate statement.
“Together with the talented Plexonic team, we will broaden our recruitment efforts, attract the best talent on the market, and create mobile games of the highest quality that we’re very excited about. Playrix Armenia is already on its way to becoming the largest gaming company in the region,” said Dmitri Bukhman, co-founder of Playrix.
A leading game development studio in Armenia, Plexonic has developed more than 60 casual titles
since its foundation in 2008. The team is behind such games as Panda Jam, Pet Savers and Stretch.
Focusing on free-to-play mobile games, Playrix is a major global gaming player founded in Vologda, Russia, 16 years ago. Headquartered in Dublin, the company also has offices in Moscow, Almaty, Yerevan, Kyiv, Vologda and a dozen other Russian and Ukrainian cities.
Since April 2019, company founders Igor and Dmitry Bukhman have been featured in Bloomberg’s list of US dollar billionaires.
In August 2019 Playrix made an investment in Vizor, a major Belarusian publisher of multiplayer games for browser, social networks and mobile platforms.
A few months later, the company announced the acquisition of Ukrainian game studio Zagrava Games.