The festival has come to an end – Newspaper Kommersant No. 239 (7440) of 12/23/2022
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LLC KRI, the organizer of the largest exhibitions of popular youth culture Comic Con Russia and Igromir, are required to be declared bankrupt. KRI owes money to an exhibitor in 2021, which was canceled due to the pandemic. The market expects that other creditors will soon join the bankruptcy. According to Kommersant, at the beginning of 2022, MTS considered the purchase of KRI, but abandoned the deal after foreign brands left the Russian Federation.
“Kommersant” found in the filing cabinet of arbitration cases that on December 16, the Moscow Arbitration Court accepted for proceedings an application for declaring KRI LLC bankrupt, which owns the rights to the Comic Сon Russia and Igromir trademarks. The applicant was LLC DIS-3 (among the main activities is the sale of audio and video equipment, toys), the amount of the claims was not specified.
It follows from another DIS-3 claim against the KRI that in April 2021 the company paid the KRI a fee for participation in the Igromir exhibition, which was supposed to take place in the fall of 2021, but it was canceled by the organizer, and DIS-3 was unable to return the fee for participation in it. In September, the court satisfied the requirements of DIS-3 and decided to recover 3.5 million rubles from the KRI. Representatives of the KRI declined to comment, the general director of DIS-3 Vyacheslav Rybakov did not answer Kommersant’s questions.
Comic Сon Russia — the largest festival of popular culture, anime, science fiction, video games, etc. in the Russian Federation, has been held since 2014. In 2019, the exhibition was visited by 183 thousand people, 200 companies were represented at it, including major game publishers CD Projekt RED, Gigabyte, Kojima Productions, Microsoft. In 2020, due to the pandemic, the exhibition was postponed to 2021, then to 2022, but it did not take place.
According to SPARK-Interfax, OOO KRI established in 2004. The company is owned by Vladimir Yeltsov and Sergey Orlovsky (22.5% each), Vladimir Kudr (13.28%), Alexander Fedorov (10%), Dmitry Arkhipov (9.22%), as well as Olivin-IT LLC (22 .5%, the company is 99% owned by the publisher of computer games Buka). In 2021, KRI’s revenue amounted to 15 million rubles, net profit – 204 thousand rubles.
KRI shareholders want to completely curtail their activities in Russia, says a Kommersant source in the video game market: “The problem is not money – it is possible to find funds to pay off creditors. The question is rather how to hold Comic Con Russia and Igromir now. Not a single foreign company will come to the exhibitions.” Kommersant’s interlocutor, who is familiar with the situation, believes that other creditors may also join the KRI bankruptcy case.
At the beginning of 2022, the owners of KRI were negotiating the sale of MTS, two interlocutors of Kommersant in the video game market say: “MTS was interested in the rights to Comic Con Russia and Igromir.”
But, one of Kommersant’s sources clarifies, the operator refused the deal when it became clear that it would be impossible to hold the event due to sanctions and the withdrawal of foreign brands from the market.
MTS declined to comment.
Comic Con Russia was one of the most famous brands of events for a young audience, says Alexander Sablukov, CEO of 0+ Media, organizer of the Multimir exhibition: “During our exhibition, we involved their team to help organize and made sure that they were professionals with experience that allowed us to avoid a lot of mistakes. But two years of the pandemic has essentially destroyed the market for such events, he admits.
The partners of the project were mainly foreign content holders or their representatives in the Russian Federation, notes the general director of the Megalicense agency Zakhar Nazarenko: fearing the consequences for his image in the West”. Now it will not be possible to sell the asset, says Sergey Zuykov, managing partner of Zuykov and Partners: within the framework of bankruptcy proceedings, all transactions made over the past three years can be challenged. During the bankruptcy period, if it starts, the fate of the company’s assets will be decided by creditors and an arbitration manager.
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