The management of the Sogaz insurance company, of which Gazprom is the largest shareholder, approved the decision to purchase a 45% stake in MF Technologies, which controls 57.3% of the votes of the VK holding (formerly Mail.ru Group). This is stated in message on the company’s website.
The seller was Megafon, which owned 45 percent of the shares of MF Technologies. Thus, the telecom operator withdrew from the capital of the joint venture established in 2018.
The cost of the securities and other parameters of the deal were not disclosed. The beneficiary of the sold share was considered to be Alisher Usmanov’s USM Holdings, which controls Megafon.
In turn, USM Holdings stated that it considers the ownership of VK Group to be an important part of its history and withdraws from the company’s capital at the peak of its indicators in terms of the number of users and in terms of financial indicators. Now the holding is going to focus on the development of other assets, including Megafon itself, metallurgical Metalloinvest and Udokanskaya Med. The latter two companies have been actively pursuing the green agenda lately, USM said in a statement that leads Kommersant.
In the meantime, USM will continue to own nine percent of MF Technologies’ shares directly. The company was created in 2018 in the form of a joint venture, when Megafon invested 5.2 percent of the shares of the then Mail.ru Group in the authorized capital, giving the right to 57.3 percent of the votes.
Megafon’s partners in the joint venture were Gazprombank (35 percent of the shares), Rostec (11 percent) and USM (9 percent). In 2019, Sberbank bought out Gazprombank’s share. Another percent was bought by Sberbank from Rostec. However, in November 2021, the parties made a reverse transaction, and 36 percent of MF Technologies again ended up with Gazprombank. Today the composition of the company’s owners is as follows: Sogaz – 45 percent of the shares, Gazprombank – 36 percent, Rostec – 10 percent, USM Holdings – nine percent.
In addition to 57.3 percent of the voting share of VK Group in the ownership of MF Technologies, 12.3 percent belong to the Dutch Prosus, 4.5 percent – Alibaba Group, 3.3 percent – Tencent. The rest of the voting shares are held by minority owners.
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