By Andrei Skvarsky.

Moscow-based investment adviser CFC Management has confirmed that its clients who together own a stake of about 3.6 per cent in copper producer Kaz Minerals intend to vote against the acquisition price offered for the London-listed copper miner by investment consortium Nova Resources.

In following CFC advice, the owners of the 3.6 per cent stake argue that the per-share price of 640 British pence ($8.45) offered by Nova fails to reflect the fair value and growth potential of Kaz Minerals, which is headquartered in London and has offices in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Moscow, CFC said in a statement.

Nova, which is domiciled in Singapore, is indirectly controlled by Kaz Minerals’ chairman Oleg Novachuk and president and non-executive director Vladimir Kim, CFC said.  

“Nova has put into action a plan that takes advantage of the fact that Kaz Minerals’ share price has been under significant pressure in 2020 due to a number of factors, including the covid-19 pandemic and uncertainty around the US elections,” said CFC chief executive Ekaterina Chernova.

“The offer will prevent the current minority shareholders of Kaz Minerals from realising the full value of their investment and will not allow them to benefit from growing copper prices, launch of Aktogay-2 and development of Baimskaya,” she said.

Aktogay-2 is a copper mine in Kazakhstan and Baimskaya a copper project in Chukotka, Russia. Both are operated by Kaz Minerals.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Australian multi-asset financial brokerage Ingot Brokers has drastically speeded up its client identity verification procedure and made it more accurate via an automated solution acquired from London-headquartered identity verifier Sumsub.

The solution, obtained by Ingot from Sumsub under a partnership agreement, cuts customer onboarding time “from 3 days to 3 minutes”, the two companies said in a joint statement.

The solution precludes mistakes possible in manual verifications and supports more than 6,500 document types from over 220 countries and territories. It easily detects fake documents and is an effective anti-money laundering device, according to the statement.

Ingot trades in financial instruments in eight asset classes, including stocks, indices, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrencies.

Sumsub offers a range of verification services. It has offices in Berlin, St Petersburg, Nicosia and Hong Kong besides its London headquarters.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

M4Markets, a foreign exchange (FX) and contract-for-difference (CFD) brokerage, has announced that clients of the company will receive $2 for every lot they trade as a Christmas-New Year rebate promotion launched on December 1 and expiring on January 31.

Only direct clients, both current and new ones, and only those holding a standard account with M4Markets are eligible for the promo. The latter does not apply to clients introduced by brokers.

There are no minimum lot requirements. Nor is there any cap on rebates earned, M4Markets, which is based in the Seychelles, said in a statement.

New clients can open an account directly through the M4Markets website. They would need a minimum deposit of $50.

The promo automatically applies to existing clients meeting its criteria.

A CFD is a speculative financial derivatives contract stipulating that the difference between the value of an asset as of the moment of settlement and its value as of the moment of signature of the contract will be paid by the buyer to the seller or vice versa depending on which value is higher.

The payment must be made in cash and not in physical goods or securities.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Leverate, a Limassol-headquartered technology provider for foreign exchange brokerages, has clinched a deal with London-based identity verifier Sumsub that supplements packages offered to clients by the Cyprus-based company with anti-fraud technologies.

The terms of the deal save customers of Leverate, whose technology is used by about 65,000 traders, the trouble of going elsewhere to find facilities for know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks.

It is estimated that regulatory non-compliance may land a trading company with fines worth tens of billions of dollars.

“Our clients now don’t have to waste time on regulatory headaches … while Sumsub covers all of the necessary KYC/AML compliance demands for any region,” a statement from Sumsub quoted Tal Laitner, vice-president for innovation at Leverate, as saying.

Among other things, Sumsub has provided Leverate with technology to detect fraudulent chargeback claims.

There have been serious increases in fraudulent activities in financial sectors since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the statement.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Sovcombank, one of Russia’s largest banks, has entered into a deal in which it would lend a maximum of $300m to co-finance Russia’s current construction of a nuclear power plant at Akkuyu, Turkey, the first Turkish nuclear generating facility.

The borrower is construction project operator Akkuyu Nuclear JSC, a subsidiary of Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, Sovcombank said in a statement.

Sovcombank is one of Russia’s 10 largest banks by assets. Its assets reach 1.5 trillion roubles ($20.3bn) by international reporting standards. It has a workforce of 17,000 in 2,000 branches throughout Russia.

Sovcombank is the first Russian bank to have joined a United Nations initiative for environmentally and socially responsible banking (UNEP FI). It is one of the 202 banks that have signed the UN FI’s Principles for Responsible Banking.

Akkuyu, due to be put in operation in 2023, is expected to have generating capacity to satisfy up to 10 per cent of the electricity needs of Turkey and about 90 per cent of those of a city the size of Istanbul.

The construction of the plant in the Mediterranean province of Mersin is one of Rosatom’s current projects in 12 foreign countries.

Rosatom brings together about 400 firms employing more than 250,000 people.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Sovcombank, one of Russia’s largest banks by assets, has announced it has signed an agreement to receive its first loan to be based on environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles.

Financing Sovcombank’s buy-now-pay-later Halva card programme is the purpose of the ESG tranche of a two-tranche syndicated loan of $350m arranged for the firm by a group of about a dozen banks, among them HSBC, Credit Suisse and ING.

HSBC is also the coordinator of the ESG tranche.

The other tranche would be used to fund foreign trade operations and “general corporate” expenditures, according to a Sovcombank statement.

The bank initially set the sum to be borrowed at $200m but raised it to $350 after oversubscription.

The loan arrangers also include Germany’s Commerzbank, Italy’s Banca Intesa, the Russian units of UniCredit and Societe Generale, the Russian Regional Development Bank, Russia’s Bank Zenit, the Eurasian Development Bank, which is headquartered in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the Moscow-based International Bank for Economic Co-operation.

One of the tranches has 12 and the other 18 months’ maturity.

“This is the second syndicated loan that we have obtained from a group of international and Russian investors but is our first ESG loan,” said Sovcombank chief executive Dmitry Gusev.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Two state-owned investment promotion funds, one of them Russian and the other Russian-Japanese, have pledged to make a joint investment in SBI Bank, a Russian lender owned by Japanese group SBI Holdings.

The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and the Russia-Japan Investment Fund, which has been instituted by RDIF and a subsidiary of the state-owned Japan Bank for International Cooperation, are going to put 1bn roubles ($13m) into SBI Bank under a January 25 agreement with SBI Holdings, according to a statement from the Russian bank.

RDIF specialises in co-investment, primarily in Russia, with foreign entities. Partnerships between RDIF and foreign institutional investors have pulled off billions of dollars’ worth of projects since the fund was set up in 2011, RDIF says.

SBI Holdings is a financial group largely specialising in online services and bringing together dozens of companies. It is the sole owner of Moscow-based SBI Bank.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, has signed a deal to buy out goods.ru (Marketplace), a Russian e-commerce company selling a wide range of consumer goods, among them electronics, car accessories, furniture, toys and medicines.

Sberbank is going to acquire an 85 per cent stake in goods.ru by buying part of Russian electronics retailer M.Video-Eldorado’s stake in the company under the terms of the legally binding deal, which is due to be closed in the second quarter of 2021, Sberbank said in a statement.

M.Video-Eldorado’s interest would shrink to 10 per cent. The other 5 per cent would be owned by Alexander Tynkovan, founder of M.Video and goods.ru.

Sberbank has also pledged to invest in the development of goods.ru.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Oney Bank LLC, the Russian unit of global banking group Oney, is changing hands as Sovcombank, one of Russia’s largest private lenders, has signed a deal to sell it to Russian online retailer Ozon.

Ozon is buying 100 per cent of Oney, according to a statement from the retailer, which held an initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq stock exchange in November 2020.

According to Reuters, Sovcombank is Russia’s third-biggest private bank. There are a total of 369 banks in the country.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Uzbek shoe manufacturer Grand Leather Shoes has bought out a dysfunctional electrical heating equipment producer as part of Uzbekistan’s current sweeping privatisation programme, with Central Asia-focused Bluestone Investment Bank leading the shoe company through the $1.9m acquisition.

Grand Leather Shoes, whose name in Uzbek is Grand Charm Poyafzallari, acquired a stake of 61.9 per cent in UzElectroterm through an auction held at the Tashkent Republican Stock Exchange, according to a statement from the shoe firm and Bluestone.

The shoe company paid 20.08bn Uzbek som ($1.9m) for the stake after the price had rocketed up 35.3 per cent during the auction from the starting level of 14.8bn som ($1.4m).

Grand Leather Shoes, which, as UzElectroterm, is based in the city of Namangan, makes shoes for men, women and children. Besides sales within Uzbekistan, it exports some of its products to countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

It expects its buyout of UzElectroterm, which it plans to convert into a shoe-making facility, to enable it to expand its export geography outside the CIS.

Bluestone, which is an investment bank and a brokerage, raises capital for Central Asian companies, helps international corporations to enter the Central Asian market through acquisitions and offers comprehensive sales and trading services to global and local investors.

Bluestone is based in New York and Tashkent.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

The Russian rouble’s unusual volatility in the second quarter of 2021 was chiefly caused by uncertainties over the then inability of the OPEC cartel and other key oil producing nations to agree output volumes because of a dispute that was only settled by July 18, according to Russian investment firm Matrix Capital.

The reported July 18 agreement by OPEC and other principal oil producers, often referred to as OPEC+, followed a lengthy row between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both OPEC members, that made a deal impossible.

The Russian currency was swinging by up to 6 roubles or by nearly 10 per cent versus the dollar in the second quarter.

The rouble was further weakened in that period by larger purchases of U.S. dollars by the Russian Finance Ministry and by tensions fuelled by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, Matrix general partner Pavel Teplukhin said during an online news briefing.

On the other hand, the rouble gained some strength from lower demand for foreign currency as vast numbers of Russians were unable to go ahead with usual annual holidays abroad because of restrictions caused by the Covid pandemic, Teplukhin said.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

London-based brokerage Sova Capital and U.S. boutique investment bank EarlyBirdCapital have acted as joint book runners for a successful initial public offering (IPO) aimed at funding an energy transition project for emerging and frontier markets.

Oxus Acquisition Corp., a Kazakh special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), raised $150m through its IPO on the Nasdaq Capital Market on September 3, according to the Law360 legal intelligence website.

Sova said in a statement that Oxus plans to use the money to buy out a company specialising in energy transition technologies.

A SPAC or blank-cheque company is a firm that conducts no commercial operations itself and has been set up solely for acquiring another company.

Oxus, which is headquartered in Almaty but incorporated in Cayman Islands, is not formally restricted to any specific industry or geographical region in its search for a company to acquire.

But it plans to spend its IPO-raised money on a company that specialises in energy transition technologies, doing business in fields such as battery materials, energy storage, electric vehicle infrastructure or advanced recycling and operating in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Asia, the Middle East or North Africa.

Sova is not a U.S.-registered entity and therefore operates in the United States, as it has done in the Oxus IPO, under a chaperoning arrangement with New York-headquartered global brokerage Auerbach Grayson.

Sova said Oxus is the first SPAC to focus on energy transition technologies for emerging and frontier markets and the first non-Russian-based CIS SPAC to have gone public.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

United Arab Emirates state investment company Mubadala and two other firms have put $33m into Switzerland-headquartered base metals trading company Open Mineral to help it further sophisticate the digitisation of its business.

Dusseldorf-headquartered venture capital firm Statkraft Ventures and Beijing- and Hong Kong-based private equity fund Lingfeng Capital were the investors that joined Mubadala in what was the Series C round of financing for Open Mineral, the metals trader said in a statement.

In earlier funding, Open Mineral had investments from Moscow’s venture capital fund Xploration Capital and Zurich’s investment firm Emerald Technology Ventures.

More than 900 metals and mining companies across the world have been through Open Mineral’s trading platform, according to the statement from the trader, which has its headquarters in Baar, Zug canton.

Mubadala, which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, manages assets worth $243bn. It has investments in more than 50 countries.

The day the Open Mineral’s Series C funding was announced, Mubadala signed a five-year agreement with the British government under which the UAE is to invest 10bn British pounds ($13.65bn) into technology, technology, infrastructure and energy transition projects in Britain.

The deal is part of a UAE-British investment programme under which Mubadala and the British government made pledges in March 2021 to invest 800m pounds ($1.11bn) and 200m pounds ($278.00m) respectively in life sciences projects in Britain, according to a statement from the UAE company.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Euronext Dublin (the Irish Stock Exchange) has registered a five-year framework $5bn Eurobond programme to be launched by Sovcombank, one of Russia’s top ten lenders.

Multinational investment banks J.P. Morgan and Renaissance Capital are acting as co-arrangers of the programme while Bank of New York Mellon is the trustee and principal paying agent. Multinational law firms Latham & Watkins and Baker McKenzie have prepared documentation for the issue, Sovcombank said in a statement.

Sovcombank has already carried out four Eurobond issues worth a total of $1.2bn with 62 per cent of the securities having been sold to investors based in the United States and European Union countries and including pension funds and insurance companies, the lender said.

Sovcombank owns assets totalling 1.9 trillion roubles ($25bn) according to international financial reporting standards. It has 23,000 employees working at 2,600 offices in 1,050 Russian towns and cities, the statement said.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Deutsche Boerse (DB1) has made an investment in AirCarbon Exchange (ACX) in what is expected to result in synergic collaboration between Singapore-based ACX and DB1 subsidiary European Energy Exchange (EEX) in selling carbon credits, greenhouse gas emission quotas.

ACX, a carbon allowances trading specialist, did not disclose the exact sum received from DB1. It just said in a statement the amount was “substantial”.

Carbon allowances trading is one of the business areas of EEX, which is based in Leipzig, Germany, in addition to its core field of trade in electricity and related commodities.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

European Principal Finance (EPF), a business franchised by New York-headquartered global asset manager Apollo, has bought an 842m-euro ($923m) portfolio of 68 commercial and residential real estate properties from an Italian pension fund.

The properties include hotel, retail, logistics and parking assets and are mostly located in Rome and Milan, Apollo said in a statement distributed by global press release distribution network GlobeNewswire.

The properties’ former owner is Rome-based pension fund Enpam (Ente Nazionale di Previdenza ed Assistenza dei Medici e degli Odontoiatri).

Assets managed by Apollo, which is a global alternative asset manager, amounted to about $498bn as of December 31, 2021.

EPF is a fund platform that had $8.6bn in assets under management as of the end of 2021.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Qureos, a Dubai-based education technology startup organising advanced training for graduates to help them find successful employment, has raised $3m in a pre-seed funding round.

The round was led by venture capital firms COTU Ventures and Colle Capital, the former headquartered in Dubai and the latter in New York, according to a statement from Qureos, which has clients in about 130 countries.

The other investors were Dubai Angel Investors, Beirut-headquartered Globivest, U.S.-based Plutus21 Capital and Bahrain’s AlZayani Venture Capital.

Qureos says there are 254m Generation Z graduates worldwide who remain unemployed because of being unable to bridge what the firm calls a skill gap between campus and workplace. Generation Z are people born between the middle to late 1990s and the early 2010s.

Skill gaps are an especially serious problem in emerging market countries, according to Qureos, which puts youth unemployment there at more than 36 per cent.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

A toolkit developed by identity verification firm Sumsub has enabled its client NiceHash, a cryptocurrency mining platform and exchange, to boost its rate of avoidance of fraud attempts and security incidents by 80 per cent, according to Sumsub.

The kit is an all-in-one solution that enables NiceHash to meet differing requirements set by the crypto regulations of the approximately 190 countries where the company operates, Sumsub said in a statement.

NiceHash, which, according to Sumsub, has 2.5m customers worldwide, has checked about half a million users since it acquired the kit more than two years ago.

NiceHash, which is headquartered in the British Virgin Islands and has offices in Maribor, Slovenia, has some “big product launches” in the pipeline and plans to bring its crypto exchange service NiceX to the U.S. market, Sumsub said.

Sumsub’s kit is applicable to about 6,500 document types in more than 220 countries and territories. The firm is headquartered in London and has offices in Berlin, Limassol in Cyprus and Miami.

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By Andrei Skvarsky.

Stockholm-headquartered EQT Private Equity and Abu Dhabi sovereign investment company Mubadala have clinched a deal to acquire Envirotainer, a provider of temperature-controlled containers for the air transport of biopharmaceuticals.

The price that EQT Private Equity, a division of global investment group EQT, and Mubadala have agreed to pay the sellers, British private equity firm Cinven and Danish co-investor Novo Holdings, has been set at about 2.8bn euros, according to statements from the buyers and sellers.

EQT and Mubadala describe the buyout deal as “part of their broader strategic partnership”.

Envirotainer designs, manufactures and leases temperature-controlled containers primarily for air transport. It says it has a fleet of about 6,700 containers globally,about 375 employees in some 20 countries, and more than 600 customers worldwide.

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Emirati state-owned investment company Mubadala said on Twitter that its asset management arm, Mubadala Capital, had recently led a $100m Series B financing round for Swedish neobank Juni.

Juni, which is headquartered in Gothenburg, is a business-to-business firm providing services for e-commerce companies.

Mubadala, whose full name is Mubadala Investment Company, is based in Dubai.

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