Tax authorities re-initiate bankruptcy of the Petrosakh oil company
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According to Kommersant, the tax authorities are re-initiating bankruptcy of the small oil company Petrosakh, which produces in Sakhalin. The corresponding application was filed with the court at the end of December 2023. In the 2000s, Petrosakh’s parent company, Urals Energy, owned large assets in Eastern Siberia, including the Dulisminskoye field, but lost them after the 2008 crisis. The main shareholder of Petrosakh is the offshore Adler Impex, which was associated with the interests of ex-banker Sergei Kononov. A minority shareholder of the company was also the former son-in-law of the first President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Dyachenko.
The Federal Tax Service Inspectorate No. 31 for Moscow filed an application with the Moscow Arbitration Court to declare Petrosakh JSC bankrupt due to non-payment of debt. The application was registered on December 29, but has not yet been accepted for processing. The Federal Tax Service has already filed for bankruptcy of Petrosakh in 2020 due to a debt of 1.2 billion rubles. (including penalties of 159 million rubles), but two years later the company managed to reach a settlement agreement.
Petrosakh is 98.56% owned by the Cypriot Urals Energy Public Company Limited, the rest is owned by the Sakhalin Oil Company, which is owned by the Ministry of Property of the Sakhalin Region. Petrosakh owns a number of licenses in Sakhalin and is also developing the Okruzhnoe field. At the end of 2021, the oil company produced 35 thousand tons of oil. The company also owns 24.9% in the sea trade port of Kholmsk. Urals Energy also includes Arktikneft (production – 32 thousand tons in 2021), which is developing the Peschanoozerskoye field on Kolguev Island in the Barents Sea. The revenue of Petrosakh at the end of 2022 amounted to about 1.4 billion rubles. The company suffered a net loss of 550 million rubles.
The main shareholder of Urals Energy is Adler Impex (British Virgin Islands; share – 44.6%), which was associated with the interests of the family of the former head of the board of directors of the Transnational Bank Sergei Kononov (in 2015 the Central Bank revoked the bank’s license). Sergei Kononov was also the president of Petrosakh until August 2022. At the end of 2013, Adler Impex increased its share from 5.7% to 25.8%, and already in 2014 it increased it to 44.6%. Other shareholders are not disclosed. In 2018, a corporate conflict broke out in the company: members of the board of directors of Urals Energy accused Mr. Kononov of improperly spending funds in the form of loans and transactions without the consent of the board of directors. As a result, at the beginning of 2019, Andrew Schrager, the former son-in-law of the first President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Dyachenko (who were minority shareholders of Urals Energy) and Stefan Bucher, left the company’s board of directors.
In the 2000s, Urals Energy had ambitious development plans. The company owned large assets – the Dulisminskoye field in the Irkutsk region and 35% in the Srednebotuobinskoye field in Yakutia, but after the 2008 crisis it had to give them to its creditor Sberbank. Dulisma subsequently went to the structures of Alexey Khotin, and the Yakut asset to Rosneft. Urals Energy hoped for prospects for the development of the Pogranichny area, part of Sakhalin-6, but in 2011 it refused to renew the license.
The Federal Tax Service quite often initiates bankruptcy procedures for debtors, although it has begun to do this less frequently than before, says Ilya Rodionov, managing partner of the A1 law office. This trend is connected, on the one hand, with the fact that tax authorities have begun to take a more thorough approach to analyzing the prospects for debt collection, the lawyer explains: if a company and its controlling persons (taking into account the possibility of bringing them to subsidiary liability) clearly do not have enough assets to repay the debt, inspectorates refrain from filing bankruptcy applications. Mr. Rodionov suggests that, given the date of filing the claim, Petrosakh did not make the next tax payment on December 25. He notes that if the company pays off the debt, it will avoid bankruptcy proceedings.
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