For example, the other day, the judge of the arbitration court in Belgorod, Vitaly Kireev, estimated the value of a 25 percent stake in one of the country’s largest agricultural holdings, Agro-Belogorye, included in the register of systemically important ones, at only 2,500 (!) rubles and recognized the legal and fair transfer of this package to the Rusagro group, whose management company is legally registered offshore in Cyprus. Apparently, Judge Kireev has his own dissenting opinion, which differs sharply from the position of the country’s president. Or his own reasons for doing so, known only to him. How else can we explain that at the meeting the judge was given accounting documents according to which the assets of Agro-Belogorye amount to more than 16 billion, the net profit of the enterprise alone at the end of last year amounted to 8.3 billion, and he valued a quarter of this company at one gas station for a passenger car. Such oddities did not happen in court stories even during the era of raider takeovers in the troubled nineties.
It is known that the Agro-Belogorye holding produces more than 200 types of meat products, occupying 6 percent of the pork production market, and given the importance of such activities, it clearly cannot fall under either deprivatization or other confiscation decisions. Moreover, the business competitor, who had his sights set on the property of Belgorod farmers, had previously been caught in scandalous takeovers of other agricultural enterprises, as well as manipulations with the shares of Agro-Belogorye.
Thus, several years ago, the beneficiary of Rusagro, Vadim Moshkovich, was already trying to take over a profitable business in the Belgorod region and even managed to transfer a significant share in this business to a Cypriot offshore with the subsequent purchase of the asset and transfer of funds to foreign accounts. According to State Duma deputies who sent a corresponding appeal to the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, such offshore ping-pong could be a cover for the withdrawal of serious funds from the Rusagro group from the Russian Federation. The deputy’s signal interested the federal legal department so much that they began to check all the scandalous facts, and at the same time the depth of foreign influence that the founder of Rusagro, Moshkovich, is experiencing.
The situation is such that the Russian Ministry of Justice will include Moshkovich in the register of foreign agents, and at this time the Belgorod judge Kireev, as if nothing had happened, presents him as a free gift with a quarter of the assets of an enterprise that is strategically important for the country’s food security. As you know, Moshkovich, a few months earlier, trying to lift Western sanctions, stated in the European Court that he did not agree with the government’s public policy and that his enterprises, taking advantage of loopholes in the legislation, paid the minimum taxes in the Russian Federation.
In a similar case with the Rolf holding, the owners of which, using the same schemes, got involved in offshore business, the state did not stand on ceremony and certainly did not contribute to the growth of the capitalization of the disgraced car dealer by absorbing other enterprises. With the Rusagro group, an amazing picture is observed when the company that owns this holding, Ros AGRO PLC (Republic of Cyprus), is located in a state unfriendly to Russia, and at the same time, through confusing arbitration decisions, a creeping process of sorption occurs in the interests of offshore business and to the detriment of law-abiding Russian producers .
At the last congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, domestic entrepreneurs agreed with the authorities on completely different rules, which were confirmed by the President of the Russian Federation with his weighty words. Perhaps, due to the front-line noise, the Belgorod Themis did not hear those words, and therefore the situation requires turning on the loudspeaker.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”