KOMMERSANT. At Investbank the regulator found a shortage of funds as Rub 30.2 bln is unavailable to make settlement with the creditors. The contents of the Bank of Russia’s application to declare Investbank bankrupt (the bank was stripped of its license on December 13, 2013), which was filed with the Moscow Arbitration Tribunal are not disclosed, and sources familiar with the matter told Kommersant about the bank’s negative capital. Rub 30.2 bln is a record amount of the cash shortage of a bank in the past three years. A similar amount of insufficient funds was reported only by Mezhprombank in 2010, the paper noted. In the first financial statement after the revocation of the bank’s license, which was compiled by the regulator’s temporary administration team (as of November 1, 2010) the gap was estimated at Rub 30.9 bln.
Investbank’s last official report (as of December 1), which was compiled and signed by the management and subsequently recognized by the Bank of Russia as materially unreliable, showed the bank’s capital equaled Rub 8.56 bln. While comparing this number with CBR’s estimates it turns out that the bank not only lost its capital, but also lost assets for nearly Rub 40 bln, Kommersant writes. And the point is not that the assets physically vanished, simply their quality is such that the regulator found them to be bad. Based on the paper’s data, after the bank’s license was revoked the Bank of Russia assessed Investbank’s assets and found out that their real value is Rub 32.4 bln against roughly Rub 70 bln as showed in the financial statement. At present, the bank’s obligations to the clients equal Rub 62.6 bln.
The bank’s financial statement also indirectly shows that income derived from the credit portfolio did not cover the bank’s deposit payments. The bank’s report also showed that claims to receive credit interest (where underpaid interest is reflected) account for Rub 9.6 bln. This is nearly a quarter of both the deposit (Rub 39.9 bln) and corporate credit portfolio (Rub 42 bln), and these numbers are as of December 1, 2013. Both figures are not far from Investbank’s assets which CBR recognized as devaluated (roughly Rub 40 bln), Kommersant pointed out.
What Investbank owners contributed to this collapse has yet to be assessed in the course of bankruptcy proceedings after the bank is declared bankrupt. As the paper’s interviewees said, the bank held bad assets for a long time. “As some assets could deteriorate shortly before the license was revoked as a result of legal proceedings relating to inter-bank relations between bankrupt Lithuanian bank Snoras and a dispute with Moscow authorities over the assets collateralized by Mir fantazii against credits," the paper’s source familiar with the situation at the bank said. Therefore it is more difficult to find the guilty as during the period under study since 2009 the bank has changed hand three times.
Initially it was controlled by Convers Group head Vladimir Antonov. His old partner and Stolichny Trade Bank co-owner Sergei Mendeleev became the bank’s controlling owner in 2011 and Sergei Mastyugin took control of the bank in 2012. In addition, formally the bank’s beneficial owners are several individuals with stakes under 20%. As practice has showed, it is quite hard to prove that a bank’s real beneficial owners are responsible for the bank’s collapse, Kommersant writes.
