Page 30 - bne_Magazine_September_2017

30 I Cover story
bne September 2017
Ruben Aganbegyan
Aganbegyan is an ethnic Armenian, the son of the famous Soviet economist Abel Aganbegyan and loves to ride his giant Harley Davidson motorcycle around central Moscow during the summer.
Aganbegyan is the odd man out in this story as he is an actual banker and is the only shareholder that has had a hands on role in running Otkritie.
After graduating from Moscow State University he held
a string of jobs in the early 1990s with international firms including PwC, Clifford Chance and Credit Suisse First Boston before joining Troika Dialog, then headed by fellow Armenian Ruben Vardanyan. In 2009 he was hired by Stephen Jennings of Renaissance Capital to basically sack most of the senior staff, before he was sacked himself.
He was quickly hired to run Russia’s leading bourse in 2010 and oversaw the revolutionary merger between the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (MICEX) and its sister exchange, the RTS, that has transformed Russia’s capital market.
He has great visions for the exchange and Russia’s capital market, telling bne at a dinner with board members of the Blackrock fund: “The problem with Russia is it needs to be transformed from a permission-based system to
a permissive system. Now if you want to do something you need permission and if there is no rule you can’t do it. Better if you can do anything you want unless there is
a rule against it.” But for reasons that are not entirely clear he was sacked again in 2012 after the merger
was complete.
Looking for a new job, he bought part of Mints’ stake
in Otkritie and took over as the chairman of Otkritie’s managing board. He has also been chief executive officer of Otkritie Holding JSC since December 29, 2012, also serving as its general director.
Vagit Alekperov
The founder Russia’s largest privately owned oil company Lukoil, Baku-born Vagit Alekperov has never owned a bank, but has been involved in several. He was secretly
a shareholder in Nikoil, a leading investment bank in the 1990s that later through a series of mergers and acquisition transformed into today’s Uralsib. Alekperov’s participation was eventually revealed in a Eurobond prospectus that Nikoil founder Nikolai Tsvetkov, who began his career running Lukoil’s financial operations, was incensed to discovered could be shared with journalists.
Alekperov’s move from Nikoil/Uralsib to Otkritie — alongside his partner Leonid Fedun, who is co-owner
of the IFH Capital — is partly because Uralsib got into trouble, but also because Tsvetkov was more than a little crazy. Multiple market sources told bne IntelliNews that Tsvetkov, who had worked his way up through the LUKoil ranks, was obsessed with a Russian new age self-help guru named “Sun Light” who taught aliens were challenging information to earth into a “golden triangle” and forced senior members of the bank to report financials that were in tune with the triangle amongst other bizarre behaviour.
Andrei Kostin
The most intriguing of Otkritie’s shareholders is VTB, which gained a 10% stake after a loan went bad. There has been constant speculation that VTB would buy Otkritie — and reports that Belyaev wanted to sell — but VTB has always said it is not interested.
To an extent Otkritie appears to act as an errand boy for VTB doing deals that that the state-owned behemoth doesn't want to do itself. The most notorious was when Otkritie facilitated a repo deal set up by VTB on behalf of Rosneft in 2014. Both Rosneft and VTB had been sanctioned at this point but the oil company needed tens of billions
in hard currency to pay off loans. In a ruble/dollar bond swap Otkritie provided the money and doubled in size as
a result. Some observers say the deal caused the collapse of the ruble that winter and tellingly the CBR must have been aware of what was going on.
VTB doesn't have the same sort of relationship with any other bank, nor does maintaining the stake make much sense from a business perspective.
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