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Former Bulgarian finance minister Milen Velchev, who is now the
representative of VTB Capital in Bulgaria, said the buyer had agreed to
add the restructured debt to the bid amount, meaning the real price is
actually € 730 million (US$ 776 million).
The other finalist bidder was the Greek Olympia Group of Greek businessman Panos Germanos.
According
to Bulgarian Capital daily, third bidder Mark Schneider did not meet
the tender requirements, though he offered € 850 million (US$ 902
million). Schneider owns the cable operator UPC.
The sale was
organized after InterV, the Luxembourg-based indirect holding company of
Vivacom, defaulted May 22 on VTB Capital’s bridge loan of € 150 million
(US$ 164 million). The loan was secured with shares of InterV. Five
months later, at the end of October, VTB announced the sale.
Tsvetan
Vassilev, the majority shareholder of the collapsed Corporate
Commercial Bank (CCB) had a 43 percent stake in Vivacom. Prior to its
collapse, CCB was the fourth largest bank in Bulgaria. VTB had 33.33
percent and the rest belonged to a group of telecom creditors led by Michael Tennenbaum, founder of the Tennenbaum Capital Partners LLC hedge fund.
The
auction was held despite a rival claim from Russian businessman Dmitry
Kosarev, who says he is the actual owner of Vivacom because his company,
Empreno Ventures Limited, owns 76 percent of the shares through a
subsidiary. He says he will challenge the deal through legal channels.
Vassilev,
who is in Belgrade, Serbia fighting extradition to Bulgaria on
embezzlement charges, confirms on his own website that Kosarev is indeed
the owner. According to Vassilev, the "political Mafia" in Bulgaria is
trying to seize the business.
Velchev, the former finance minister, insists the stakes are still owned by Vassilev.
The
transaction is said to be monitored closely by the Bulgarian Deposit
Insurance Fund, as it had to repay more than 3.6 billion Bulgarian levs
(€ 1.8 billion or US$ 3.8 billion) to depositors after the collapse of
CCB.
The sale has not yet been officially announced. According to
VTB Capital, it will name the winner once a share purchase agreement is
signed.
Vivacom is a prosperous company with a healthy balance
sheet. It has registered a four percent increase in revenue for the
first ninth months of 2015 and has more than 3.2 million customers.
According
to Bulgarian Capital daily, the auction had the sole purpose of
reselling the telecom at a profit by the end of next year.
Roussev
is believed to be one of the wealthiest Bulgarians and amassed his
fortune shortly after the fall of the Communist regime.
He started
his career as Deputy Director of the Agency for Foreign Aid, the state
body that at the dawn of democracy was in charge of receiving, storing,
distributing and controlling foreign governments’ humanitarian aid for
Bulgaria. It was closed in 2007.
Roussev was advisor to the first democratically elected President of Bulgaria, Zhelio Zhelev, in 1991 – 1992, and later to Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,
the country’s last king, exiled as a child by the Communist regime, who
returned to Bulgaria and served as Prime Minister in 2001 – 2005.
According
to media reports, Roussev, who has been living in London since 1991,
introduced Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to several Bulgarian finance professionals
from the City of London who later became members of the former king’s
government, including Velchev. The Bulgarian Telecommunications Company, now Vivacom, was privatized during their term in office.
Roussev, himself, had never been active in politics and never held a political office.
His
business interests have always been linked to telecommunications; he is
co-founder and chairman of one of the most successful Bulgarian and
Eastern European IT companies, TeleLink. In recent years Telelink has won a number of public bids worth millions of Bulgarian levs.
According
to the site for investigative journalism Bivol.bg, an OCCRP partner,
the company provides telecommunication equipment, software, spare parts
and consumables for IT infrastructure for the Sofia City Hall, the
Registry Agency, the Ministry of Health, the courts and others. Its most
impressive winning bid is the one for “integrated monitoring system of
the Bulgarian-Turkish border,” won by a consortium of Telelink and Indra
Sistemas JSC (Spain).
According to Bloomberg Business,
Roussev was the driving force behind numerous privatization and
acquisition deals, acting as advisor to foreign investors in Bulgaria
such as Motorola, MTG (Sweden), Electrowatt (Zurich), Intralot (Greece).
In 2012, he purchased the upscale Radisson Blu hotel in downtown Sofia, and in 2013, the Sofia Hilton hotel.
In London, the businessman is also known as a philanthropist.
Roussev
has also been surrounded by controversy. He referred to as the
“right-wing’s oligarch,” and the “gray cardinal” in the
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha government and is suspected of past connections with
several figures from Bulgarian organized crime such as Ivan “the Doctor”
Todorov, Vasil “the Skull” Bozhkov, and Petar “Amigos” Petrov.
After
a failed attempt on the life of Todorov in April 2003, when his car
exploded on a busy Sofia thoroughfare, a photograph was found among
other items in the bombed vehicle.
Its publication in the media sent shockwaves across Bulgaria.
It
was taken in Monaco, on Roussev’s yacht and shows Petrov, convicted of
laundering € 26 million (US$ 28 million); Velchev, then-finance minister
in the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha government; Miroslav Sevlievski, then energy
minister; Roussev’s close business associate Lyubomir Minchev and his
wife Maria Oprenova; Todorov, murdered in 2006 in Sofia; and
then-transport minister Plamen Petrov, former boss of Vivacom.
A
few days after the story broke, Roussev admitted he invited the people
in the photograph aboard his yacht, saying he was sorry for “causing
trouble for these guys, who had been attacked in a smear war.”
In 2010, in an interview for TV station bTV, Roussev also said he had arranged a meeting between Todorov and Boyko Borissov, now the Prime Minister, who was at the time chief secretary of the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior.
“This
was a mistake. But I was not that close with Ivan Todorov. I can say
that I know nearly everyone, but I would not consider the Doctor one of
my friends,” said Roussev.
He also told the bTV viewing audience, "I can get any politician in Bulgaria on the phone.”
By Maria Guineva Bulgarian businessman Spas Roussev has
By Maria Guineva Bulgarian businessman Spas Roussev has
purchased Vivacom, the country’s largest telecom, according to Bulgarian
media reports.