PRESS: Sberbank wants to sell 20% stake in Basel Aero

MOSCOW, Sep 12 (PRIME) -- Russia’s top bank Sberbank is searching for a buyer of a 20% minus one share stake in Basel Aero, a joint venture with multi-industry holding Basic Element (BasEl) and Singapore’s Changi Airports International, Vedomosti business daily reported on Tuesday citing sources.

Basel Aero owns airports in cities of Sochi, Krasnodar, Gelendzhik, Anapa, and Krasnoyarsk and 33% in the airport of Vladivostok. Sberbank bought its 20% minus one share stake in Cyprus-based Transport AMD-2, the parent company of Basel Aero, for U.S. $120 million in 2012, and Changi bought its 30% for $200 million back then.

Sberbank expected its investments in Basel Aero to be temporary. Its stake in the company consists of preferred shares, and the financial report of Transport AMD-2 classifies Sberbank’s investment as a debt to an affiliated party with an interest rate of 12% annually. So, Sberbank may have received $72 million as interest on the debt since 2012, Vedomosti reported.

BasEl and Changi see these payments as a burden, and they obtained an option to buy Sberbank’s stake in July 2017. But a source told the business daily that BasEl is unlikely to buy the stake as Sberbank usually sets high prices for assets and the multi-industry holding has no spare money.

BasEl is also actively searching for a buyer of the stake, and there is one foreign contender for the asset, sources told Vedomosti without disclosing the sum of the deal and the name of the contender.

Representatives of BasEl and Sberbank declined to comment.

The passenger traffic of airports of Basel Aero increased to 9.9 million people in 2016 from 5.5 million people in 2012.

Konstantin Yuminov, an analyst at managing company Raiffesen Capital, calculated the cost of Basel Aero at 25–35 billion rubles on the basis of the EV/EBITDA (enterprise value divided by earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) ratio of the company. Thus, the stake of Sberbank may cost 5–7 billion rubles, Vedomosti reported.

(57.1694 rubles – U.S. $1)

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