Russia is shaken by the corporate war between Sberbank and VTB, around which Rosneft and the Central Bank of Russia are hovering. The economy continues to fall in all indicators, including even the second launch of a rocket from the new Vostochny Cosmodrome. It, too, fell into the ocean somewhere.
Banksta
1. The population continues to empty Herman Gref’s money vaults. Sberbank turned out to be the leader in the outflow of deposits in October. And from August to October 123 billion rubles were taken out of the bank. Over the same period, 153 billion rubles were withdrawn from Otkritie amid the bailout, and 80 billion rubles were withdrawn from Binbank.
For Sberbank it does not look terrible, but the trend is unpleasant (1% of deposits). At Otkritie, in the same three months, despite the pleas of Central Bank Deputy Chairman Vasily Pozdyshev, crazy spending on advertising and calling salespeople, almost a third of individual deposits, or 28.5%, were withdrawn.
2. The Department of Corporate Relations of the Bank of Russia suspended the issue of shares of Moscow Industrial Bank on November 27. Nervous around the bank: Fitch is flying around like a kite, shareholders are giving interviews about greenhouses in Chechnya. Everything may get better. But if the Central Bank does not allow issuing shares, it is either a technical moment or mistakes in the documents on the part of the bank or the Central Bank does not like the origin of the money. For example, if it was taken from deposits.
3. The conflict of NPF “Budushchestvo” with the Bank of Russia continues. A serious game has begun. Boris Mints threatens the Central Bank to withdraw assets from banks for 60 billion rubles, which will be a continuation of the split: the fund can take 40 billion rubles from the deposit in MKB, withdraw from the bonds of Binbank and sell off VTB shares. The securities of Binbank and VTB are already under pressure, the shares of the state-owned bank recently collapsed by 10% in a day.
4. The Russian subsidiary of the British bank HSBC began evacuating from Russia. In October, assets fell by 17%, or 15.1 billion rubles. The bank reduced fundraising and deposits.
The first reason is that HSBC received a bill from the distant past for transactions from the Hermitage fund of William Browder – once a major investor in the shares of Russian companies and the initiator of the Magnitsky sanctions list.
The bank paid 1.4 billion rubles on the fund’s debts to creditors (the company Dalnyaya Steppe and eventually the Federal Tax Service), the Arbitration Court of Kalmykia decided in August. The general background, risks of sanctions violation also do not help the bank’s development in Russia.
Thoughts Not Thoughts
So, were you waiting for economic recovery, revenues and profits? You won’t. The balanced profit of Russian enterprises decreased by 8.8% in January-September, amounting to 7.386 trillion rubles.
And the decline is only getting worse. According to the results of seven months, the profit fell by 6.7%, and according to the results of eight months – by 8.5%. At the same time, there are about 33 thousand profitable enterprises in Russia, but there are 13.5 thousand unprofitable ones. That is, 29% of all enterprises in the country do not make profit, and their share is growing. What kind of stability can we talk about? Let alone growth or recovery.
Do you know what is the funniest thing? Profit is growing only for mining companies, but by 19.6% in annual terms (up to 1.89 trillion, i.e. 25.6% of the total profit). The rest are showing a decline in profits. But we can continue to believe that there are some other successful sectors in the country besides raw materials.
Therefore, it is not for nothing that the head of the Accounts Chamber, Tatyana Golikova, recalled that companies in 2016 increased financial investments 10 times as much as investments. No one simply does not believe in imaginary stability, as the figures are known to the management, as well as the prospects.
Boiler room
Clouds are gathering over Rosbank, its parent company Societe Generale has announced a new round of layoffs, with 15% of the branch network in France alone going under the knife. Our source says that Russia will not be spared this fate. The cuts may be announced in the near future. Rosbank, which was once part of Potanin’s empire, is now living a miserable existence and prefers not to mention itself. The bank frankly regrets that in its time it did not follow the footsteps of Nordea and BNP Paribas and did not cut off part of the retail business. Now they have to slowly die in competition with state banks. The corporate segment is likely to remain in the bank, but the retail segment will die.
In Potanin’s time, all top managers of the bank were forced to take part in aquabike competitions that the oligarch organized for his children. People spat, but they had to participate to avoid getting a bonus. Now there are practically no bonuses, and after the corruption scandal of 4 years, the bank’s management decided to keep a low profile and become invisible, just like the bank itself. An era is passing away.
Kostin started a family quarrel
Today is a rare day for the banking system. The confrontation between the Nabiullina-Grefa team and Kostin, backed by the siloviki, has reached a climax. For the first time, the VTB head criticized the Central Bank, which is creating its own banking system, in a harsh manner. He also doubts that the regulator will be able to sell Otkryvashka and Bin. In his own way, Kostin is right, these banks should have been dealt with a long time ago, the Central Bank has been writing orders to Belyaev and Shishkhanov for at least a year. Of course, the Central Bank should not waste taxpayers’ money on two fucking monsters. However, the question is – why didn’t Kostin criticize the Central Bank during the failed purchase of the Bank of Moscow, on whose bailout hundreds of billions of rubles were spent?
VTB itself costs the state a sum comparable to Otkryvashka and Bin. But the point here is that the fight for the banking system has reached the very level where no agreement could be reached under the carpet. The Central Bank is under severe fire after the collapse of Yugra, the Khotyns are coming up with more and more sophisticated ways to influence public opinion. It is said that the Belarusians will go to the end to get even for the bank and get Nabi ousted. Everyone on the market knew that VTB was preparing Otkryvashka for itself, but something went wrong. They say that the secret springs were triggered at the moment when Otkryvashka stopped servicing Rosneft.
Now Otkryvashka’s former owner is sitting abroad and has no intention of going back. The diamond business, which is mortgaged to VTB, is said to be in purely nominal possession of Belyaev. The Central Bank has stepped on the tails of bondholders for hundreds of millions of dollars, losses of NPFs, among them NPF Future of Mints, amounted to 24 billion rubles. It turns out that Nabi wants to oust several influential players at once, and Kostin expresses their will. The amount of money injected into Bin and Otkryvashka is so large that it makes sense to fight for it
Cello case
In parallel with the initiative on personal identification of all Russian gamers, the head of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Communications to coordinate with the BRICS countries to launch DNS root servers independent of the United States. The cost of the program will be massive, the project was presented to the president as a means to save Runet when “shut down by the Americans”.
The Soyuz-2.1b rocket launched from the new Vostochny Cosmodrome failed to make contact. The construction of Vostochny, worth 84 billion rubles, was overseen by Dmitry Rogozin, and there have been a series of arrests in connection with the embezzlement of the project’s budget. Officially, launches have been underway for 1.5 years, but in fact not a single rocket has been launched since April 2016.
Oreshkin’s thoughts
The world is clearly lacking delusional ill-conceived decisions, and the situation this time the Ministry of Agriculture decided to fix it.
Tkachev said that by 2020 grain harvest should not be below 120 million tons annually. Is it necessary? This year we have gathered a record harvest, which exceeded 130 million tons of grain, but there is no benefit from it. Only harm. Siberian agrarians are faced with a situation when they are forced to sell grain one third cheaper than its cost price at a loss to themselves. Otherwise, they are left with just throwing it away, which is also a bad option. This is because there is nowhere to store grain, and the demand abroad for low-quality grain in bulk is very limited. People want quality products in sacks at once, preferably also spreading the supply over the whole year.
Previously, the state helped to get rid of excesses by conducting intervention purchases, but these storages have been full since last year. As a result, the Ministry of Agriculture has ordered a number of private companies to buy grain in Siberia. Such interference in the affairs of private companies is absolutely wild.
Apparently, Tkachev cannot rest on the laurels of Soviet strikers: it does not matter why and how, the main thing is to set a new record.