Energo Battles City Over 30,000 Assets
By Alla Startseva
Staff Writer
Mosenergo has 30,000 assets worth "enormous sums" that have never been legally registered and a showdown with City Hall to secure them is looming, Pavel Teplukhin, a member of the utility's board, said Thursday. Teplukhin said no one knows for sure how much the assets -- including office buildings, land plots, food stores and vacation resorts -- are worth, but City Hall wants to charge Mosenergo a fortune to register them. "Moscow authorities have thrown a wrench into the works by asking $300 million, which is about a third of the company's assets," Teplukhin, who is also a president of Troika Dialog Asset Management, told a group of independent directors of Unified Energy Systems' subsidiaries, shareholders and journalists.
"We are talking about an enormous amount of money and will fight for it; $300 million is the first sum on the table and we will be bargaining with [City Hall]," Teplukhin said.
When asked if he expected a protracted legal battle, Teplukhin said: "Certainly." Anatoly Chabak, who represents NIKoil on Mosenergo's board, said no one bothered to do a thorough inventory of assets before Dmitry Vasilyev joined the company. The former Federal Securities Commission chief left the stock market watchdog in September to head Mosenergo's corporate policy division. "No one knows how to value this property; no one even knows how many square meters of real estate Mosenergo owns nor how to value it all, especially the land," Teplukhin said.
City Hall's registration committee said Thursday that fees for registering a unit of property are set by federal law and cannot exceed 5,000 rubles ($156), suggesting that Mosenergo should not have to pay more than $5 million to register its 30,000 assets. But Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov is a sworn political enemy of UES chief Anatoly Chubais and has been highly critical of Mosenergo since Chubais engineered the removal of former Mosenergo CEO Alexander Remezov, whom the mayor backed, last summer.
Luzhkov is also trying to break the monopoly enjoyed by Mosenergo with a newly created rival called Mosgorenergo.
Vasilyev said late last year that one of the most important tasks he faced is putting the company's assets in order ahead of a May or June shareholder vote on restructuring the utility. The revamp is dependent upon the passage of a package of bills, currently stuck in the State Duma, that would be the blueprint for industry-wide restructuring.
Mosenergo, like all UES subsidiaries, is required to inventory all its assets before restructuring can begin.
Under the revamp plan for Mosenergo, within two years the company will be split into a dozen parts, each functioning independently in the capital and the Moscow region.
Vasilyev said that while Mosenergo had found common ground with regional authorities, its relationship with City Hall is not constructive. UES owns 50.87 percent of Mosenergo, minority shareholders own 46 percent and City Hall owns the rest. |
