Court rejects 11.4 bln rbl GAZ minorities suit against Deripaska

MOSCOW, Feb 12 (PRIME) -- The Arbitration Court of the Nizhny Novgorod Region has rejected an 11.4 billion ruble suit of three minority owners of carmaker GAZ Group against the carmaker’s beneficiary businessman Oleg Deripaska and CEO Vadim Sorokin, as seen by PRIME on Monday in the register of arbitration cases.

Other details of the case were not disclosed. The GAZ Group asked the court previously for a private hearing of the case.

The three companies – Prosperity Cub Fund, Prosperity Quest Fund, and Russian Prosperity Fund, all affiliated with Prosperity Capital Management – submitted a suit against Deripaska and Sorokin in August 2017 asking court to oblige them to redeem losses inflicted on GAZ by an ungrounded debt relief in 2015–2016.

But the claimants requested the court dismiss the suit without consideration and filed a similar suit to the Arbitration Court of the Nizhny Novgorod Region in September 2017.

A GAZ Group representative said then that the suit was ungrounded and illegitimate.

In September 2013, three Cyprus-based companies – Lancrenan Investments Limited, Medvezhonok Holdings Limited, and Protsvetaniye Holdings Limited – all parts of Prosperity Capital Management group, filed a suit against top managers of GAZ Group demanding redemption of 491 million rubles of losses of the company.

The three companies thought that GAZ board of directors members inflicted financing damage on the company by voting in 2010 for a sale of a stake in the company to Kazington Limited for 815 million rubles, as they thought the market price of the stake was more than 1.3 billion rubles. Courts of four instances, including the Supreme Court, rejected the suit.

The core owner of GAZ Group is engineering holding Russian Machines, part of Deripaska’s Basic Element, with a 61.05% stake in the company.

(58.1718 rubles – U.S. $1)

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