Page 112 - RusRPTApr24

received a record net profit of 432.2bn rubles ($4.7bn) under IFRS after a loss of 667.5bn rubles ($7.3bn) a year earlier.
Businessmen Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, German Khan and Alexey Kuzmichev sold their shares in A1, the investment division of Alfa Group, to its CEO Alexander Fain for 100,000 rubles. This follows from the testimony of the co-owner of the collapsed Vneshprombank (VPB) Georgy Bedzhamov in the High Court of England and Wales, where a multi-year process of collecting his assets during the bankruptcy case is underway. Vedomosti has read the court's decision. “A1” represents the interests of VPB’s bankruptcy trustee, the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA). The deal, according to Bedzhamov, took place in the spring of 2022, a week after the announcement of sanctions against businessmen. The fugitive banker insists that the amount was symbolic and the sale was a fiction. All four businessmen actually continue to control “A1,” Bedzhamov’s testimony says.
RBC wrote on March 19 that Armenian banks will stop accepting Russian Mir cards from March 30. The publication refers to a representative of the Armenian subsidiary of the sanctioned VTB Bank - VTB Armenia - and its source in the Russian payment market. Payments with Mir cards in stores and cash withdrawals from ATMs of Armenian banks will no longer be available. “VTB Armenia” promises that in its ATMs and branches “Mir” cards of any banks will be fully serviced. Their network in the country is quite large - 53 branches (though almost half are in Yerevan) and 190 ATMs. The Armenian subsidiary of the second Russian state bank launched its own POS terminals even before the war, but they are also not widespread. The Mir card operator, the NSPK system of the Bank of Russia, came under blocking US sanctions at the end of February, so cooperation with it began to be threatened with secondary sanctions. At that time, the NSPK system worked in 11 foreign countries (including Armenia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, which were popular among relocants and card tourists). Many banks in the last two countries limited or stopped operations with NSPK even earlier, and after the new sanctions, Bereke Bank, a former subsidiary of Sberbank, announced the restriction of servicing Mir cards.
Sovcombank published financial statements for 2023. Net profit at the end of the year amounted to RUB95bn ($1bn) (the bank previously disclosed this figure in February), which corresponds to a RoE of 39% (the bank uses the indicator without subordinated debt - 45%) after about 23-24% in 2020-2021 and a small loss in 2022 due to the effect of sanctions, Renaissance Capital reported on March 19.
According to the bank's estimates, 2/3 of the profit comes from core operations, 1/3 from irregular items (mainly currency revaluation and revaluation of securities). In 4Q23, Sovcombank's net profit amounted to RUB 18.6bn. (RoE – 26%) with a slight decrease in the net interest margin (to 4.8%, according to our estimate) against the backdrop of tightening monetary policy.
112 RUSSIA Country Report April 2024 www.intellinews.com