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The majority owners of Russian
oil major YUKOS reached a preliminary deal on Thursday to buy the central
European assets of bankrupt telecoms group KPNQwest.
Antel Holding Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Menatep Group, which
also controls YUKOS, agreed to the purchase price subject to an audit of
the assets, the head of Antel, Alexander Kabanovsky, told Reuters. The
audit is to be conducted by Ernst & Young.
The price tag is more than the 15 million euros Britain's Interoute was
reported to have paid for KPNQwest's Ebone network based in Brussels.
Ebone was KPNQwest's high-capacity data network that carries a large chunk
of Europe's Internet traffic.
The $15 million Interoute spent had been the highest price paid for
remains of the once mighty KPNQwest that only two years ago had a market
capitalization value of 42 billion euros and owned Europe's largest data
fiber-optic network that cost billions of euros to build.
Menatep's Antel Holding will assume the operational debt of KPNQwest in
central Europe, which is dwarfed by KPNQwest's overall debt. The
operational debt was said by Antel's Kabanovsky to be in the "single-digit
millions" of euros.
YUKOS CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who controls nearly 60 percent of Menatep,
is one of several emerging captains of Russian industry increasingly on
the lookout for investments abroad.
Although the YUKOS foreign projects are modest by the standards of major
multinationals, they are seen as big steps for companies which just over a
decade ago were part of the Soviet industrial complex.
Before collapsing two months ago, KPNQwest hoped to sell the central
European network for life-saving cash, but was unable to complete the deal.
A group led by Lehman Brothers
was earlier seen as the most likely buyer.
SQUEEZING A STONE
Excluding the central European assets, KPNQwest's administrators had so
far only managed to squeeze about 30 million euros out of its remaining
assets.
KPNQwest bought the Ebone network and central European businesses from
Global TeleSystems, which itself drowned under heavy debt, late last year
for 645 million euros.
Several interested groups, including U.S. giant AT&T, once considered
paying as much as 200 million euros for the entire KPNQwest network but
were frightened away by legal questions, a trail of unpaid vendor bills
and the sheer complexity of the liquidation process.
Dutch KPN, which together with troubled U.S. phone operator Qwest founded
KPNQwest, bought its Dutch data network, paying only several million euros
to keep competitors from buying their way onto its territory.
Khodorkovsky had already shown a penchant for hunting bargains in
beleaguered European corporations.
Khodorkovsky recently was dubbed Russia's first billionaire when he became
the first head of a multi-billion-dollar Russian corporation to reveal his
stake.
Russian tycoons and industrial groups who made their money extracting
Russia's vast mineral wealth have gone on foreign expansion campaigns.
Menatep Group, 60 percent controlled, directly and indirectly, by
Khodorkovsky, has 60 percent of YUKOS.
Menatep made its first major foray into telecoms late last year when it
bought a packet of assets from antenna and coaxial cable maker Andrew Corp.,
including Russian voice and data networks, and Andrew Telecom, a
international carrier based in the United States.
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