Page 16 - bneNewspaper_130417

Eastern Europe
April 13, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 16
Uralsib veteran John Lewin surprisingly retains his role as chief executive of the London opera- tion after the buyout. His team has been pared back to the bone by a Moscow parent anxious to cut costs. “We see robust synergies between ITI Group and Uralsib’s core products,” Lewin said in a statement.
The Moscow parent Uralsib, which has ties to President Vladimir Putin, stopped its English-lan- guage research daily last year and discontinued some of its Russian-language products, sources close to the bank told bne IntelliNews in Octo- ber. Most analysts and production staff, who were based in Moscow, were laid off.
Uralsib, once Russia’s fifth-largest bank by as- sets, has been roiled by mismanagement, the collapse in commodity prices and the fallout
from sanctions against the Kremlin’s actions
in Ukraine. Founder Tsvetkov surrendered control in November 2015 as part of a bailout, after a year of the bank being on the edge of bankruptcy and under threat of having its licence revoked.
“The writing has been on the wall for the UK busi- ness since the bank changed hands,” a source close to Uralsib told bne IntelliNews. “The bank has a bunch of guys doing virtually nothing for the past two years but sit around in prime London of- fice space.”
The bank had previously employed 25 people in its London office and was the Russian partner to prestigious New York brokerage Auerbach Gray- son. The lease of its offices on the 33rd floor of the prestigious Tower 42 (formerly the NatWest Tower) is understood to cost around £4mn a year to maintain and is expected to be far too extrava- gant for the new owners, insiders said.
Tsvetkov, a former Soviet Air Force officer who is a fan of mysticism, paid the sky-high rent because “the building looks like a rocket ship to the stars”, a former staffer told bne IntelliNews. The office, which takes up the south-facing side of the build- ing with a panoramic view over the River Thames
towards the Houses of Parliament, was even decorated with space motifs. “It is the ideal feng shui location,” said the former exec.
As part of Uralsib’s rescue – or “sanitation” as
it’s known in Russian – the state extended an RUB81bn ($1.3bn) lifeline to the bank and allowed entrepreneur Vladimir Kogan, a close ally of Putin, to take a 82% stake.
Meanwhile, Tsvetkov was left with a minority hold- ing and is believed to have withdrawn from the business to focus on his spirituality and personal research. In a profile last year, bne IntelliNews re- vealed how revelations and mysticism were stock- in-trade of his management style.
CHANGES ARE GOOD
YOUR BUSINESS PARTNER. www.rbinternational.com