Experts expect a number of lawsuits on M&A deals from previous years. The newspaper Kommersant writes about this.
The Moscow Arbitration Court accepted the claim of the Moscow Prosecutor's Office in the interests of the Ministry of Industry and Trade against GS Investments JSC, which acquired the assets of the packaging manufacturer Amcor at the end of 2022, follows from the file file. The plaintiff demands to recover 414.53 million rubles from the company. The Ministry of Finance and the Accounting Chamber are listed as third parties in the court's ruling, and a preliminary hearing is scheduled for September 29. Yuri Levitsky, Investment Director of BGP Capital, referred to by Kommersant, believes that the lawsuit against GS Investments is highly likely to be a retrospective recalculation of the "voluntary contribution" to the budget. Anna Barabash, CEO of Enterprise Legal Solutions, believes that the audit could reveal signs of underestimation of Amcor's assets or incorrect accounting of the transaction structure at its closing, which could lead to an underestimation of the budget contribution.
Earlier in early August, the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region registered a lawsuit by the Prosecutor's Office of the city in the interests of the Russian Federation, represented by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, against Ilim Global Timber Rus, Zakhar Smushkin and Boris Zingarevich, to recover 1.81 billion rubles in connection with a violation of the procedure for conducting a transaction with a foreign person associated with a state "committing unfriendly acts against the Russian Federation." actions". The Ministry of Finance and the Accounting Chamber are also involved in this dispute by third parties. In 2023, Ilim Global Timber Rus agreed to purchase 50% of the Ilim timber group from American International Paper for $484 million.
As noted by Yu.Levitsky, two lawsuits with an identical configuration with an interval of several weeks indicate consistent work on a portfolio of closed transactions rather than isolated episodes. "Judging by the dates, the plaintiff counts down the deadline not from the closing of the transaction or from the payment, but, apparently, from the moment when the relevant agency found out about the discrepancy. If the court supports this approach, it means that the risk for buyers of 2022-2024 transactions is not limited to three years and we can expect similar requirements for other transactions of that period," he says. A.Barabash also admits the appearance of a wave of revision transactions.
Read our Telegram channel "Mergers and Acquisitions. AK&M».
Our channel at MAX is "Mergers and Acquisitions. AK&M».
