The Khotimskys have a “cliff” on the Volga
Sovcombank of Sergey and Dmitry Khotimsky took away an area in Saratov by the Volga river and did not report financial activities. The bank is also building an office for 2,000 employees in the area. The agreement to build this office was made with the regional authorities last August. On the surface, it seems good as it will create more than 2,000 jobs and investments.
Previously, the new embankment construction site was meant for green spaces, but now a concrete-glass building is planned to be built there. The locals are unhappy about it as it means trees and shrubs will likely be cut down.
It's unclear how and when the valuable land ended up being owned privately, even though its value is about 60 million rubles, indicating its market price should be much higher.
No information could be found about the auction for the sale of the plot. Previously, under the previous regional leader, Valery Radaev, it was common to transfer land meant for plantings to private owners.
It seems that Roman Busargin may continue this practice by giving away the land to the Khotimskys in exchange for investments.
Instead of a green square, residents will get another glass and concrete building.
Regional laws allow land to be allocated to investors without auction, but it's unclear when Sovcombank received this status. The bank previously became an investor in a local credit institution, Express-Volga Bank.
Khotimsky obtained a structure for reorganization from the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) in 2016. Instead of improving Express-Volga's affairs, Sovcombank absorbed the institution. This is a common tactic of the Khotimsky brothers, and their business model is often compared to a pyramid scheme.
Their principle is simple: their bank's assets increase not due to smart investment policies and more depositors, but by merging with other financial institutions and combining their assets.
Information about the bank's 2022 performance is missing from many banking websites, which raises questions about whether it even existed. The beginning of last year was unsatisfactory for the bank, so they may have hidden financial information to prevent depositors from leaving.
Other banks such as Vostochny Bank, Eurasian Bank, Volga-Caspian Joint Stock Bank, Oney Bank LLC, and others have faced a similar fate in the last two years.
The Khotimskys replaced Saratov residents with their own managers at the Saratov Express-Volga institution, which might not be good for the city. Will they hire people from other cities for the new office of Sovcombank as well?
Some people say that there may not actually be 2,000 real jobs, and a large part of the new buildings will be leased to another business. This is more profitable, especially since Saratov already has many Sovcombank branches. Some of them used to be “Express-Volga”.
What are the Khotimskys keeping secret?
The Khotimsky business was in an offshore zone for many years. According to Forbes, they were part owners of the Dutch Sovco Capital Partners BV.
Dmitry and Sergey Khotimsky each held 23% and 9% of the structure, so a significant part of profits and incomes might have gone abroad, along with the assets of the absorbed banks.
Only in September 2021, the situation changed, and the legal address was moved to Russia. The firm “Sovko Capital Partners” was registered in Kaliningrad. But if until 2022 Sovcombank provided all the necessary financial information, then in 2022 everything changed dramatically.
It’s 2023, but the Web cannot find data on the financial performance of the credit institution – data is available only for the period from January to February 2022. In the past, the data was updated almost monthly.
According to the banking analytics service Banki.ru, in the first month of 2022 the company experienced a net loss of 674 million rubles. Just a month earlier, there was a profit of nearly 46 billion rubles. Where do these “swings” come from?
At the same time, the bank’s assets immediately decreased by 86 billion rubles, the capital fell by 3 billion rubles, and investments in securities dropped by 21% in just a month. But that’s not all.
The return on assets and return on equity decreased, the level of overdue debt increased, and all three of the most important credit ratios of the bank turned out to be in the red zone. What’s happening?
It seems that assets might have been withdrawn from the bank at the beginning of the year, but investors and the general public may not need to know about this. Maybe financial analytics services on the Web are lying? But there is no similar information on the website of the Central Bank, which is completely puzzling. The latest data there date back to the same period – January-February 2022.
It is already 2023, and data on the results of Sovcombank, even for the first quarter of 2022, cannot be found on the Central Bank website.
The data might simply be hidden, causing concerns about the bank's methods of working with individuals. There are rumors that the Khotimsky structure, in partnership with AKB Bank, imposes unfavorable terms on borrowers and then uses collectors in the worst possible ways to get a debt.
If you add two and two together: the lack of financial information and an attempt to get what is due from borrowers as soon as possible, it can be assumed that the main business of the Khotimskys may “collapse”, especially against the backdrop of cross-sanctions from Western countries, “under the distribution” of which, to a large extent, fell Sovcombank. Then, it is all the more incomprehensible why another “cliff” named after the Khotimsky brothers is growing on the banks of the Volga?
