Re: New TVR 'On Sale In 2012' Says Smolenski
Discussion
Porscheplayer said:
King Fisher said:
grahamw48 said:
Porscheplayer said:
I hope it does happen
TVR Brand, as far as I can see it wasn't worth much anyway.
I'd be happy the cars drove better and didn't drop to bits
Go away and play with your two a penny volkswagen porsche then...IF you actually own one of course. TVR Brand, as far as I can see it wasn't worth much anyway.
I'd be happy the cars drove better and didn't drop to bits
If he prefers his pig ugly, overpriced VW clone with its tacky interior and pathetic exhaust note to a TVR (ANY TVR!), he's obviously never driven one.
I would buy another tvr if the russian can sort out the build quailty and the'niggles' as tvr fans call them .
Hope it comes off
The correct spelling is IDIOT (in amongst all your other illiterate tosh)
...Idiot !Exactly what were your 'other' cars ?...don't see any listed or pictured on your profile.
Now go and disappear into one of your daydreams.
If I were relaunching TVR there are a couple of things that I definitely wouldn't do:
1. Criticise the heritage of the brand (Wheeler Era).
2. Alienate potential consumers in what has historically been my largest sales market (UK).
3. Focus on a region that has never bought into the concept (Europe).
All in all, looks (sadly) destined to fail.
1. Criticise the heritage of the brand (Wheeler Era).
2. Alienate potential consumers in what has historically been my largest sales market (UK).
3. Focus on a region that has never bought into the concept (Europe).
All in all, looks (sadly) destined to fail.
Far Eastender said:
If I were relaunching TVR there are a couple of things that I definitely wouldn't do:
1. Criticise the heritage of the brand (Wheeler Era).
2. Alienate potential consumers in what has historically been my largest sales market (UK).
3. Focus on a region that has never bought into the concept (Europe).
All in all, looks (sadly) destined to fail.
I agree on points 1 and 2 but I'm not sure TVR sold as many in Europe as they could have done. I'm sure the Germans would have gone for TVR in as big a way as us if they'd had the dealer network; as the success the Wiesmann would demonstrate. 1. Criticise the heritage of the brand (Wheeler Era).
2. Alienate potential consumers in what has historically been my largest sales market (UK).
3. Focus on a region that has never bought into the concept (Europe).
All in all, looks (sadly) destined to fail.
grahamw48 said:
Porscheplayer said:
King Fisher said:
grahamw48 said:
Porscheplayer said:
I hope it does happen
TVR Brand, as far as I can see it wasn't worth much anyway.
I'd be happy the cars drove better and didn't drop to bits
Go away and play with your two a penny volkswagen porsche then...IF you actually own one of course. TVR Brand, as far as I can see it wasn't worth much anyway.
I'd be happy the cars drove better and didn't drop to bits
If he prefers his pig ugly, overpriced VW clone with its tacky interior and pathetic exhaust note to a TVR (ANY TVR!), he's obviously never driven one.
I would buy another tvr if the russian can sort out the build quailty and the'niggles' as tvr fans call them .
Hope it comes off
The correct spelling is IDIOT (in amongst all your other illiterate tosh)
...Idiot !Exactly what were your 'other' cars ?...don't see any listed or pictured on your profile.
Now go and disappear into one of your daydreams.
From a literacy point may I suggest you look at some of the ads in the classifieds? You'd be amazed at how many rather tasty modes of rapid transport are advertissed wid spellin mistakkes and bad gramma.
An education in how to spell and construct the perfect line of prose does not equal ones ability to be successful in making dosh. Hell, I met a copper the other day who couldn't even spell, nor perform basic mental addition. Coppers, aye? He shall never progress through the ranks due to his lack of education, surely?
The points raised by Porscheplayer are fair, as you well know. Especially if taken in the correct context. It would also help if you took off your blinkers...
The poor reliability did kill off the brand, in the end. The brand name is not actually worth a massive amount, is it? What would you value it at exactly?
I love TVR's and the Tusc greatly and I also love my VW's/Porsches. To those that roll out the old VW clone/Beetle attempted insults though? Please, don't you think it's time you thought of something original?
As for exhaust notes? LOL. Some of you may like to hear an RSR at full chat...or any of the pre 996 era with the equivalent type/style of exhaust fitted. In saying that, even some of the water cooled 911 brigade sound rather sweeeet when fitted with a Hayward & Scott...
Now with regards to the actual article it is a shame this wee lad is turning off some of the British fan base with his comments. He should be thanking the prior owners for making the cars they did, otherwise he'd not be in the position of ownership that he's currently enjoying(?!).
The yank V8 is a mighty fine route to take (and has been done by a few TVR owners already). IF it all happens I wish the future of the TVR brand all the success in the world, regardless of where the cars are made.
ETA an ampersand
Edited by Caractacus on Sunday 17th October 11:52
NS is clearly a man scarred from his run in with true Northerners. You have to suspect that he has a little bit of a contempt towards those who built the cars and those who bought them. It is fair to say that it is a two way street. 
The real issue that NS has can be seen in the number of different partners he has been speaking with for the last 5 years, he has no focus and comes from a background of poor education and 'different' style of doing business. Anyone who has attempted to work with the Russians in London can appreciate that these are very unsophisticated people with a penchant for dealing with crooks. Or maybe more politely the inability to comprehend that someone is a crook as their business practices are similar to their own.
Sadly, my understanding of Oxley is that he is a classic middle manager type and if correct isn't the right type of character to head something like TVR. But he was loyal to NS (kiss ass, some may prefer) and Russians love people who are 'loyal'.
So what you are left with is a brand which is spearheaded by two people who arevery unlikely to be able to pin down the right model to make this work combined with a historic market of the UK which does not have any appetite for hand built British cars at the price they would need to be sold at to be profitable.
TVR's have always been 'affordable' and in modern Britain it is very difficult to make such a car.
As such it does make sense to focus on other markets but you would do so utilising the British heritage rather than damning it.
Now, just focussing on the car for one minute, I think it is an interesting question to pose whether a TVR chassis can genuinely handle 600bhp? I personally don't think so. If we are going to be completely honest we all know that there are other cars out there in the target demographic that handle better, this arena is moving away from the traditional type of chassis that TVRs have used for decades.
The best thing would be to produce a modern shell and tub but this would lead to a car over £150k which is well outside the target market for UK buyers. But you can no longer build a TVR in the UK and be profitable for the type of money which the target market would be willing to pay.
NS's plan of simply rejigging the old formulae is weak and I suspect that this is due to a lack of funding. But in 2010 I doubt many people will attract the funding required to do what needs to be done and create a state of the art tub using modern materials using British firms.
However, I do hear on the grapevine that some people who attempted to purchase the brand a couple of years ago are in revised contact so I have been a little surprised to learn that he is touting his dreams to the Swiss.
The real issue that NS has can be seen in the number of different partners he has been speaking with for the last 5 years, he has no focus and comes from a background of poor education and 'different' style of doing business. Anyone who has attempted to work with the Russians in London can appreciate that these are very unsophisticated people with a penchant for dealing with crooks. Or maybe more politely the inability to comprehend that someone is a crook as their business practices are similar to their own.
Sadly, my understanding of Oxley is that he is a classic middle manager type and if correct isn't the right type of character to head something like TVR. But he was loyal to NS (kiss ass, some may prefer) and Russians love people who are 'loyal'.
So what you are left with is a brand which is spearheaded by two people who arevery unlikely to be able to pin down the right model to make this work combined with a historic market of the UK which does not have any appetite for hand built British cars at the price they would need to be sold at to be profitable.
TVR's have always been 'affordable' and in modern Britain it is very difficult to make such a car.
As such it does make sense to focus on other markets but you would do so utilising the British heritage rather than damning it.
Now, just focussing on the car for one minute, I think it is an interesting question to pose whether a TVR chassis can genuinely handle 600bhp? I personally don't think so. If we are going to be completely honest we all know that there are other cars out there in the target demographic that handle better, this arena is moving away from the traditional type of chassis that TVRs have used for decades.
The best thing would be to produce a modern shell and tub but this would lead to a car over £150k which is well outside the target market for UK buyers. But you can no longer build a TVR in the UK and be profitable for the type of money which the target market would be willing to pay.
NS's plan of simply rejigging the old formulae is weak and I suspect that this is due to a lack of funding. But in 2010 I doubt many people will attract the funding required to do what needs to be done and create a state of the art tub using modern materials using British firms.
However, I do hear on the grapevine that some people who attempted to purchase the brand a couple of years ago are in revised contact so I have been a little surprised to learn that he is touting his dreams to the Swiss.
Think the Russian guy has lost money on TVR to be fair, he paid to much for it, and making cars in low volumes, especially at lower price points (I'E under 80k+) is hard work, loads of companies have failed as the lower down you go, the more your competion changes from other low volume makers with lower overheards, to large makers with much stronger economies of scale
While porsche are not what i would call a mass producer, i would say there economies of scale and larger purchaser power puts there build costs a lot lower than say AM, with the V8 Vantage
It's nice to see production getting restarted, and i think the move to US V8 power is a sensible one, and perhaps if done earlier instead of the speed 6, may have resulted in the company still trading, I think the Speed 6 was a admirable goal, but doing your own engine is very risky without spending huge amounts on testing to get it all working, The V8 in the Esprit also had it's issue's probably due to having a very tight budget of a few million, to an even smaller company like TVR thes costs are just to high, even Lotus i suspect with hind sight would not have done there own V8 given the choice a second time round
While porsche are not what i would call a mass producer, i would say there economies of scale and larger purchaser power puts there build costs a lot lower than say AM, with the V8 Vantage
It's nice to see production getting restarted, and i think the move to US V8 power is a sensible one, and perhaps if done earlier instead of the speed 6, may have resulted in the company still trading, I think the Speed 6 was a admirable goal, but doing your own engine is very risky without spending huge amounts on testing to get it all working, The V8 in the Esprit also had it's issue's probably due to having a very tight budget of a few million, to an even smaller company like TVR thes costs are just to high, even Lotus i suspect with hind sight would not have done there own V8 given the choice a second time round
Edited by peter450 on Sunday 17th October 12:00
fatboy18 said:
Its all been done before, Remember AC cars! The that's not a real AC its a copy, then you got AC Auto Craft, etc.... Triumph motorcycles, they no longer exist either. Yes there is a motorcycle company called Triumph but it has nothing to do with the old brand even the logo is different;) They may be producing retro looking bikes but the similarity ends there! So some bloke wants to put a corvette engine in a car, fine by me but its not a TVR, that chapters closed.
I agree with you about AC. However Triumph is a resounding success and shows what can be done in the UK. Triumph in the NVT days was moribund and deserved to fizzle away due to the UK's desire to undrespend in R&D, poor quality, militant workforce and useless management. Triumph today is well run producing quality bikes that are a credit to the haydays of the original Triumph.Never going to happen. Although I find myself a little 'partisan' as the best and worst time I ever had was working for him. Knock anyone as much as you like...Oxley in particular, I certainly have, but just remember that he knows too much now,finances,Cyprus etc etc...he can never escape Nikolai. I bet sometimes, just sometimes, he wishes he left TVR when Nikolai took over.
Luckily I, and others, know some things that are probably best not aired here but not enough to get us into real trouble.....sometimes ignorance is bliss!
I wasn't really going to bother posting on this topic but in for a penny, in for a pound! Nikolai will never, ever have agreement from Lotus or any othere manufacturer to supply him with anything, anytime...thats what comes of screwing over everyone, at every oportunity...see article below.
Notwithstanding everyones different opinions, the way he runs his 'business' as always been a style he learned from his Dad. TVR could have worked but there was a lot more going on regarding the purchase than most people know about....
I'ts a very odd thing, the Russian way of doing things,just when it looks like things can be made to work, lets bugger the whole thing up by getting a little greedy.
I give you a nice little article about family history.....(if it is too long mods, I can edit and post the link)..
MOSCOW -- As storm clouds gathered over Moscow markets in the summer of 1998, Russia's largest private retail bank, SBS-Agro, made a desperate telephone call to Goldman Sachs International in London. It wanted to unload its entire book of dollar-denominated Russian government bonds, with a face value of $1.2 billion.
Two senior Goldman bond traders rushed to Moscow for secret talks in Alexander House, a grand riverside mansion lavishly restored for Alexander Smolensky, a typesetter-turned-Russian banking tycoon. By four in the morning on Aug. 6, they had a deal to buy the bonds for about $500 million. "It was probably the most unusual transaction I've ever seen," says the trader who sealed the deal for the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. unit.
What made it particularly unusual was that SBS-Agro hadn't mentioned an important detail: It didn't have clear title to the bonds. They had been pledged to foreign lenders scattered across the globe in so-called repo-deals. The discovery didn't ruin Goldman's arrangement -- the firm simply settled with foreign counterparties instead -- but it did reveal the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't world of Russian banking.
Little involving Mr. Smolensky is ever quite what it seems. Within weeks of the Goldman deal, which helped nudge already-jittery markets into a nose dive, Mr. Smolensky seemed a ruined man. The ruble had collapsed, the government had defaulted on domestic treasury bills, and an insolvent SBS-Agro, with more than a million depositors and nearly 1,500 branches, staggered toward oblivion. Besieged by jilted customers and foreign creditors, Mr. Smolensky retreated behind the high brick walls of his dacha outside Moscow.
In reality, though, SBS-Agro didn't perish. It merely mutated. "I simply rearranged everything, that's all," says the 46-year-old tycoon, languidly puffing on a Camel cigarette in an ornate Moscow office stuffed with sculpted elephants.
'Dead Donkey Ears'
Thanks to asset shuffles, political muscle and lax supervision, he has quietly reassembled a big chunk of his former domain into a new empire. He today says he is "the brains" behind a cluster of "new" banks stretching from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, nine time zones away, and linked together by a state-of-the-art Moscow computer complex funded in part by the World Bank. As for SBS-Agro's foreign creditors, who lost more than $1 billion, he declares they deserve only "dead donkey ears."
Mr. Smolensky's resurrection points to a big problem. Behind shiny statistics showing a robust postcrash economic recovery in Russia stands a banking system bereft of trust, focused on short-term fiddles and largely incapable of mobilizing capital for real investment.
Despite Russia's rocketing oil revenue, nearly 5% annual economic growth and a nearly balanced budget, its sickly banks are once again "an accident waiting to happen," says a confidential International Monetary Fund and World Bank report dated July 28. They jeopardize long-term recovery and "remain extremely vulnerable to another crisis." Most Russians keep their money at home. As Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov put it recently: "There have not been banks in the classical sense of the word."
Free Ice Cream
Mr. Smolensky used to sell himself as a man who would create them. And, until the August 1998 debacle, many foreigners believed him. They scrambled to lend money to SBS-Agro, formed in 1996 when Stolichny Bank of Savings took over state-owned Agroprombank. At the end of 1997 -- after a $55 million syndicated loan led by West Merchant Bank Ltd., a $113 million deal arranged by Chase Manhattan Corp. and a $250 million Eurobond lead-managed by J.P. Morgan & Co. -- SBS-Agro published its first, and last, glossy annual report. It boasted of its "benevolent aims" -- free ice cream for children and lavish donations to the Orthodox church -- and of the "great trust placed in SBS-Agro by international investors."
Today, Mr. Smolensky derides these same partners as "suffocated by greed." The state-run Agency for Restructuring Credit Organizations, or Arco, which is winding down SBS-Agro's affairs, recently told foreign creditors to expect one cent on the dollar.
Highlights of an Unorthodox Banking Career
1989: Alexander Smolensky establishes Bank Stolichny, one of Soviet Union's first private banks. Berlin Wall falls.
1993: Bank Stolichny becomes Stolichny Bank of Savings (SBS). President Yeltsin puts down armed rebellion by free-market foes.
1996: SBS plays important role in privatizations. Acquires stake in state's Agroprombank and becomes SBS-Agro. Mr. Smolensky helps mobilize money for Mr.Yeltsin's campaign.
1997: SBS-Agro issues $250 million Eurobond and signs big contracts with foreign computer firms. Stock market soars.
1998:
--May: Asian crisis blows into Russia.
--August 6: SBS-Agro sells its dollar- denominated government bonds to Goldman Sachs.
--August 17: Russian government defaults on $40 billion in debt and devalues ruble.
--August 28: Central Bank places SBS-Agro under temporary administration. Central Bank governor is fired soon afterwards.
Sept. 10: Central Bank cancels temporary administration.
1999:
--January: SBS-Agro affiliate Samara-agrobank changes name to Pervy OVK and starts gobbling up parent's branches.
--November: Central Bank orders state agency, Arco, to seize SBS-Agro.
2000:
--March: Vladimir Putin elected president.
--July: Arco proposes to give SBS-Agro's foreign creditors one cent on the dollar. Mr. Smolensky becomes chairman of STB-Card, formerly owned by SBS-Agro.
Foreign banks never expected all their money, but 10 months of negotiations with SBS-Agro on pain-sharing produced only acrimony -- and a heap of unpaid bills to financial advisers, lawyers and accountants. Brunswick UBS Warburg, hired by SBS-Agro to devise a restructuring plan, quit. The firm, a Moscow affiliate of Swiss-based UBS AG, is still waiting to get paid in full.
Russians who entrusted SBS-Agro with their savings fared only a little better. Those with deposits less than $750 have, after two years of begging and legal action, gotten much of their money. Tens of thousands with more in their accounts are still waiting. Mr. Smolensky says his "hair stood on end" when he saw some had deposited more than $1 million. "They must be idiots," he says.
But life for Mr. Smolensky is sweet. He cruises around Moscow in a BMW 750 and has a big apartment on Patriarch's Pond in central Moscow as well as his dacha. He travels between Russia and Europe, flying off to see his wife, who lives in Austria, and his teenage son, who studied at a private school in Britain and recently moved into a big house near the London graveyard where Karl Marx is buried. "Are they supposed to live in the railway station?" asks Mr. Smolensky.
The prosecutor general and an investigator who last year sought Mr. Smolensky's arrest in connection with an early 1990s fraud scandal have both lost their jobs. The sacked prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, says the Kremlin told him to drop the case as a gesture of gratitude to Mr. Smolensky for his help in bankrolling Boris Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign. Kremlin officials have denied that the firing stemmed from improper influence by Mr. Smolensky or anyone else. Mr. Smolensky says he received an apology from authorities over the fraud probe.
This summer, a former SBS-Agro executive, Alexei Rasskazov, agreed to testify on behalf of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. At an arbitration hearing in London, he backed the EBRD in a $34 million claim against Zoloto-Platina Bank, a key link in Mr. Smolensky's new chain.
An Alleged Beating
A few days after his return to Moscow, Mr. Rasskazov got called to a meeting in a hotel near the Kremlin. Five beefy men rushed in claiming to be law-enforcement officers. They beat him, stuffed a gun down his trousers, threatened jail for illegal firearm possession and forced him to swallow a white powder planted in his socks, he said in an affidavit provided to Moscow prosecutors. One of the assailants accused him of being "very dishonest to Mr. Smolensky," according to the affidavit, and said Mr. Rasskazov "had forgotten that Mr. Smolensky is very powerful."
In an interview, Mr. Smolensky himself raises the plight of his former employee -- which hasn't been made public. He denies any involvement and says police are hunting for Mr. Rasskazov over an illegal gun. Mr. Smolensky says his onetime colleague "betrayed himself" and is "running around like an ant." He asks: "Where is Rasskazov and where am I?"
Mr. Rasskazov is now in hiding outside the country with his wife and teenage daughter. He fled Moscow immediately after the attack, shaving off his beard to try to disguise his identity. The EBRD, which arranged his flight, has raised the case with Russia's prime minister. Mr. Rasskazov's Russian lawyer says Russian law-enforcement officials have told him they have no quarrel with his client.
An Elder Comrade
Mr. Smolensky, meanwhile, helps guide a financial archipelago extending the length of Russia -- although exactly who owns the operation is virtually impossible to establish. He says he doesn't have an ownership stake, and won't reveal who does. But he makes it clear that he holds considerable sway over the mostly young former SBS-Agro bankers who now hold the executive titles at the new banks. "Naturally, they will listen to me … as a consultant, as an elder comrade," he says, "because I made them myself with my own hands. This is normal influence."
The most visible vehicle of Mr. Smolensky's resurrection is the First Mutual & Credit Society, or Pervy OVK. It calls itself "Bank for the New Millennium" -- a bold boast for an outfit that until last year specialized in lending to often-bankrupt farms in southern Russia. It was then called Samaraagrobank, a tiny subsidiary of SBS-Agro. After the 1998 crash, it changed its name, ditched SBS-Agro as a shareholder, got permission from the Central Bank to move to Moscow and began devouring its former parent. It says its balance sheet mushroomed 15 times since last year.
About the only thing it hasn't gobbled up are SBS-Agro's debts.
Pervy OVK now has about 40 branches in Moscow, nearly all located in the former premises of SBS-Agro, and is run by Mr. Smolensky's nephew, Alexei Grigoriev, SBS-Agro's former management board chairman. It uses SBS-Agro's Moscow network of ATM machines, has taken over many of SBS-Agro's big Moscow clients and even wooed some of its foreign partners. DeltaCredit, part of the U.S. government-funded U.S. Russia Investment Fund, moved a small portfolio of mortgage loans it had with SBS-Agro to Pervy OVK.
No Need for Toilet Paper
SBS-Agro depositors are also welcome -- if they agree to forfeit much of their money. Boris Kolosov, head of a committee of disgruntled depositors, says he recently got a phone call from Pervy OVK offering a deal: The bank will give him 15% of his money now on deposit with SBS-Agro if he accepts Pervy OVK promissory notes for the rest. "I don't need extra toilet paper," he says. His committee holds regular protests, shouting "thieves" outside Pervy OVK's head office -- formerly SBS-Agro's headquarters.
Across Russia the pattern is the same, as previously small regional banks take over SBS-Agro branches and swell into local banking powerhouses. These include Siberian OVK east of the Ural Mountains, Northwest OVK in St. Petersburg, Povolzhskoe OVK in Saratov, Konekagroprombank in the Far East and Zoloto-Platina Bank in Yekaterinburg. Mr. Grigoriev, Mr. Smolensky's nephew, sits on their boards. Other former SBS-Agro executives dominate their management.
Registration filings and other documents show more links. Pervy OVK and at least five other banks in the new network masterminded by Mr. Smolensky took on the same four Moscow-registered companies as shareholders: ZAO Bleisi, ZAO Enfleid, ZAO Riel 2000 and ZAO Skald 99. Each of these registered in June last year, named the same two obscure Muscovites as directors, reported a single computer as its founding "capital" and then issued shares that were promptly sold to four shell companies registered in Cyprus. One of the directors couldn't be located, and another, who lives in a run-down Moscow apartment guarded by a big dog, wasn't home.
Modest Quarters
Despite holding large chunks of a sprawling banking empire, the Moscow companies have uncommonly modest quarters. Three list their address as the same grubby back-street office of a company that makes stamps. The fourth is located in an empty brick shack that used to sell vegetables.
Mr. Smolensky denies knowledge of the Moscow or Cyprus shell companies, but then says he "recommended" the use of such vehicles -- to whom he didn't say -- because banks "shouldn't have a face. Everything should be quiet, calm. Money is silent."
In this silence, say creditors, much of SBS-Agro's value has been spirited away. Assets valued by the World Bank at between 17.59 billion and 20.16 billion rubles, or between $1.1 billion and $1.26 billion, just after the August 1998 devaluation have since shrunk to around six billion rubles, or $222 million, according to Arco, the restructuring agency.
Instead of husbanding its cash, SBS-Agro poured money into various affiliates that have since spun away from the mother bank. "Administrative expenses" -- largely payments to subsidiaries for property, communications, security and other services -- more than quadrupled between 1997 and 1998. So, too, did loans to subsidiaries and other related parties, according to a report by Arthur Andersen presented to creditors last year.
When Arco finally took control of SBS-Agro late last year, the bank was still paying millions to former affiliates that, after the crash, had mutated into separate organizations. Lyudmila Davydova, Arco's deputy director, says SBS-Agro had an agreement with one of these requiring quarterly payments of $750,000 for computer data. "There have been many surprises, very many surprises," she says.
J.P. Morgan Lends a Hand
Everything looked a lot more straightforward back in 1997, when J.P. Morgan helped SBS-Agro float its Eurobond and prepared a lengthy prospectus presenting a sleek, forward-looking bank with offices in Amsterdam, Vienna, Madrid, Dubai and Macedonia, as well as branches across Russia, and even its own $5 million collection of fine art. A diagram showed SBS-Agro as a firm center anchoring a plethora of satellites. Solid arrows designated majority or, in most cases, total ownership.
These arrows have all since snapped. "The bank doesn't directly own many of its subsidiaries," explained Arthur Andersen in last year's report. "These subsidiaries are owned by third parties connected with the principal shareholders." As is often the case in Russian business, it is very difficult to establish who owns what. Foreign creditors hired private detectives and made little headway, having been unable to draw any direct line to Mr. Smolensky.
SBS-Agro Managing Co., set up by the bank in 1996 with the stated aim of imposing unity on a diverse group, renamed itself Soyuz after the 1998 blowout and began hacking away at links between SBS-Agro and its offspring. This was easily done: Creditors discovered to their dismay that SBS-Agro Managing, registered in Kalmykia, a Russian region notorious for lax supervision, had an option agreement to control all voting shares of each affiliate at a nominal price.
Scraping the Bones
What had been a compact mass exploded into a mist of independent units. SBS Property Agency, a subsidiary to which most of the bank's buildings had been transferred, bolted and last December renamed itself Property, Capital and Integration Agency. Even the art collection slipped away: "They sold it to themselves," says Arco official Alexander Voznesensky. Mr. Smolensky says SBS-Agro didn't truly own any of the property now on the books of subsidiaries that have since spun off.
"First they took all the meat. Then they scraped off the bones," says Yuri Parfilov, a retired military scientist who says he has more than $20,000 stuck in frozen ruble and dollar accounts at SBS-Agro. "We get what's left."
Mr. Smolensky's most important asset has been his political clout. In his office, he displays a framed certificate signed by Mr. Yeltsin thanking him for his support during the 1996 election campaign. He also won gratitude from fellow "oligarchs" during Russia's sell-off of state assets. SBS-Agro acted as financial midwife during the birth of AO Sibneft, a big private oil company whose big shareholders have included Boris Berezovsky, Russia's best-known tycoon, and Roman Abramovich, a potent player under both Mr. Yeltsin and Russia's current president, Vladimir Putin.
When authorities tried to install a temporary administrator to take charge of SBS-Agro in late August 1998, Mr. Smolensky and Mr. Berezovsky both said they would lobby to get the order reversed. Sergei Dubinin, then chairman of the Central Bank, says Mr. Berezovsky bluntly told him to back off. Mr. Dubinin, a man with many influential critics, was fired shortly afterward. The temporary administrator, who'd spent his first day of duty shivering in the rain outside SBS-Agro's locked doors, was removed. Mr. Berezovsky didn't respond to a telephone call and facsimile seeking comment.
When the central bank then issued an order freezing all SBS-Agro's operations, Mr. Smolensky again prevailed: The head of the Moscow arm of the Central Bank revoked the instruction.
Free of outside supervision, SBS-Agro executives set about preparing for the future. In September 1998, for example, SBS-Agro shifted a valuable chunk of its loan portfolio to its then-tiny Yekaterinburg affiliate, Zoloto-Platina bank, Central Bank records show. Zoloto-Platina's books, previously dominated by modest credits to local industry, suddenly swelled with the arrival of what had been SBS-Agro loans to AO Sibneft and seven of its petroleum-related affiliates. It is unclear what SBS-Agro got in return for these assets, which, including penalties and interest, were at the time worth more than $100 million. Mr. Smolensky says no loans were moved to Yekaterinburg and that Central Bank data are incorrect.
Missing Documents
Creditors complain that the Central Bank could have halted the hemorrhage by swiftly taking control of SBS-Agro from Mr. Smolensky. Instead, it poured in money, providing him with emergency "stabilization loans" and other facilities worth more than $450 million. Mr. Smolensky says the money was used to pay depositors. But while on life-support from the state, say Arco officials, SBS-Agro continued to play shell games.
On Dec. 31, 1998, loan documents show, SBS-Agro gave its moribund agricultural-lending arm, Agroprombank, a $750 million "credit." In reality, says Arco, no money changed hands: The credit was a bookkeeping ruse to cover SBS-Agro's own gaping financial hole and thus deter authorities from taking action. SBS-Agro then initiated bankruptcy proceedings against Agroprombank -- after shifting most of the unit's buildings to a separate real-estate firm. The liquidator, Vladimir Limonov, says he can't work out what happened: Too many documents are missing.
By the time the Central Bank finally put Arco in charge of SBS-Agro late last year, Mr. Smolensky had shifted his energies to new ventures. Nonetheless, Arco still had trouble getting a grip: Many of Mr. Smolensky's executives stayed behind. It didn't get its own people in place until early this year and only recently got access to SBS-Agro's files.
And even now, more than two years after the 1998 debacle, Mr. Smolensky still holds the key that Arco officials say could unlock details of how Russia's biggest private retail bank wasted away: He controls all the computer records of SBS-Agro's past transactions.
"We've got an agreement that this information will be provided," says Valery Miroshnikov, the Arco official now in charge of SBS-Agro as it staggers toward liquidation. "But, of course, it is not 100% certain that this information will be, first of all, complete and, secondly, reliable. No certainty at all."
Inside 'the Bunker'
At the heart of Mr. Smolensky's new empire stands a walled, tightly guarded complex with a satellite dish on the roof in northern Moscow. Dubbed "the bunker," it houses the computers, software and brains that knit Mr. Smolensky's new nationwide network together.
"Technologically, we have a five-year head start," says Mr. Smolensky. It's not an idle boast: Pervy OVK and other new banks now provide 24-hour banking and possess state-of-the art equipment. But much of this infrastructure used to belong to SBS-Agro. And many of the companies that provided it haven't been paid.
International Business Machines Corp. sold SBS-Agro seven AS/400 computers and nearly 900 ATM machines. Midas-Kapiti International, a British banking-software company, provided it with a sophisticated system to process transactions across the country. Nortel Networks Corp. of Canada signed a $25 million contract for communications gear. The Canadian government's Export Development Corp. granted a $10 million credit. The World Bank gave its own loans worth more than $7 million to help SBS-Agro develop its technical infrastructure.
This high-tech rapture has since become an agony of low blows. After the 1998 crash, SBS-Agro reneged on payment guarantees. SBS-Leasing, a subsidiary that signed many of the contracts, morphed into a separate organization. A sign outside the computer complex marking a branch of SBS-Agro vanished, replaced by big red letters reading Pervy OVK. Inside, names also changed. What had been SBS-Agro's processing system mutated into the United Settlement System, or USS.
Zhana Alexandrova, USS's deputy director, says "there are certain parallels" with SBS-Agro, but "this is a new company" that has only had a license for a year. In many ways, though, USS is merely the new guise for what SBS-Agro left behind. Rental agreements show that USS rents the massive computer complex from SBS-Agro's former property agency. USS is controlled by STB-Card, SBS-Agro's former credit-card processing company. STB-Card, in turn, now has four of Mr. Smolensky's "new" banks as its main shareholders, says Valery Pershin, who runs the card company. Presiding over this structure as STB-Card's chairman is none other than Mr. Smolensky.
IBM and Nortel, who helped equip the computer complex, are still struggling to get many of their bills paid. Software provider Midas-Kapiti hasn't received its annual license fee for three years. Canada's EDC has joined the queue of more than two dozen jilted creditors hoping for some payment, including Chase Manhattan Bank, Deutsche Bank, Banque Societe Generale, Bank of America Corp., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the EBRD. Mr. Smolensky says that the debts aren't his responsibility, and that creditors owed money by SBS-Agro should take their complaints to the Russian government, which he says created the 1998 financial crisis.
Western banks grumble bitterly in private but, exhausted and embarrassed by the SBS-Agro fiasco, shun public complaints. Says one banker: "It's like being a Nazi hunter: You have to dedicate your whole life to it. Life's too short."
A raw, self-made man who, in the twilight of the Soviet Union, moved from printing to construction and then into banking, Mr. Smolensky has repeatedly outfoxed his foes. Any creditor who tries to press its claim against Pervy OVK or other parts of his new domain will "get bashed around the ears automatically," he says: "We'll take care of them … I don't mean physically, though this tends to be easier, but we'll deal with them in court."
The government, meanwhile, acknowledges that Russia's banks are a mess and pledges action. An economic-policy blueprint drafted by a think tank closely linked to the government and endorsed by President Putin sets banking reform as an urgent priority and calls for legislation to "enhance the personal responsibility" of managers and owners for the "financial status of their banks."
The think tank's choice of office space, however, has raised skeptical eyebrows. It does its thinking in Alexander House, the SBS-Agro building where Goldman Sachs negotiated the August 1998 bond deal.
Like most of the bank's properties, it now has murky new owners. Arco says the building, tossed between various subsidiaries in convoluted deals, has been owned at various times by SBS-Agro in Moscow, its property agency and its subsidiary in Macedonia, which was recently itself sold to unnamed "minority shareholders" registered in Cyprus and elsewhere.
Arco officials say they've lost track of who owns Alexander House now.
Before the think tank moved in, Alexander House boasted an even more distinguished tenant: Mr. Putin's campaign staff. On election night in March, Mr. Putin appeared there to celebrate his victory. There is no evidence that Mr. Smolensky enjoys close relations to Mr. Putin's Kremlin, and campaign staffers have said they paid a market rent on the building. Still, Mr. Smolensky crows about the episode. "I supported Putin. He went to the Kremlin from my building," he says. "I don't owe anybody anything. I can now do what I want to do. Finally, I'm free."
Luckily I, and others, know some things that are probably best not aired here but not enough to get us into real trouble.....sometimes ignorance is bliss!
I wasn't really going to bother posting on this topic but in for a penny, in for a pound! Nikolai will never, ever have agreement from Lotus or any othere manufacturer to supply him with anything, anytime...thats what comes of screwing over everyone, at every oportunity...see article below.
Notwithstanding everyones different opinions, the way he runs his 'business' as always been a style he learned from his Dad. TVR could have worked but there was a lot more going on regarding the purchase than most people know about....
I'ts a very odd thing, the Russian way of doing things,just when it looks like things can be made to work, lets bugger the whole thing up by getting a little greedy.
I give you a nice little article about family history.....(if it is too long mods, I can edit and post the link)..
MOSCOW -- As storm clouds gathered over Moscow markets in the summer of 1998, Russia's largest private retail bank, SBS-Agro, made a desperate telephone call to Goldman Sachs International in London. It wanted to unload its entire book of dollar-denominated Russian government bonds, with a face value of $1.2 billion.
Two senior Goldman bond traders rushed to Moscow for secret talks in Alexander House, a grand riverside mansion lavishly restored for Alexander Smolensky, a typesetter-turned-Russian banking tycoon. By four in the morning on Aug. 6, they had a deal to buy the bonds for about $500 million. "It was probably the most unusual transaction I've ever seen," says the trader who sealed the deal for the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. unit.
What made it particularly unusual was that SBS-Agro hadn't mentioned an important detail: It didn't have clear title to the bonds. They had been pledged to foreign lenders scattered across the globe in so-called repo-deals. The discovery didn't ruin Goldman's arrangement -- the firm simply settled with foreign counterparties instead -- but it did reveal the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't world of Russian banking.
Little involving Mr. Smolensky is ever quite what it seems. Within weeks of the Goldman deal, which helped nudge already-jittery markets into a nose dive, Mr. Smolensky seemed a ruined man. The ruble had collapsed, the government had defaulted on domestic treasury bills, and an insolvent SBS-Agro, with more than a million depositors and nearly 1,500 branches, staggered toward oblivion. Besieged by jilted customers and foreign creditors, Mr. Smolensky retreated behind the high brick walls of his dacha outside Moscow.
In reality, though, SBS-Agro didn't perish. It merely mutated. "I simply rearranged everything, that's all," says the 46-year-old tycoon, languidly puffing on a Camel cigarette in an ornate Moscow office stuffed with sculpted elephants.
'Dead Donkey Ears'
Thanks to asset shuffles, political muscle and lax supervision, he has quietly reassembled a big chunk of his former domain into a new empire. He today says he is "the brains" behind a cluster of "new" banks stretching from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, nine time zones away, and linked together by a state-of-the-art Moscow computer complex funded in part by the World Bank. As for SBS-Agro's foreign creditors, who lost more than $1 billion, he declares they deserve only "dead donkey ears."
Mr. Smolensky's resurrection points to a big problem. Behind shiny statistics showing a robust postcrash economic recovery in Russia stands a banking system bereft of trust, focused on short-term fiddles and largely incapable of mobilizing capital for real investment.
Despite Russia's rocketing oil revenue, nearly 5% annual economic growth and a nearly balanced budget, its sickly banks are once again "an accident waiting to happen," says a confidential International Monetary Fund and World Bank report dated July 28. They jeopardize long-term recovery and "remain extremely vulnerable to another crisis." Most Russians keep their money at home. As Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov put it recently: "There have not been banks in the classical sense of the word."
Free Ice Cream
Mr. Smolensky used to sell himself as a man who would create them. And, until the August 1998 debacle, many foreigners believed him. They scrambled to lend money to SBS-Agro, formed in 1996 when Stolichny Bank of Savings took over state-owned Agroprombank. At the end of 1997 -- after a $55 million syndicated loan led by West Merchant Bank Ltd., a $113 million deal arranged by Chase Manhattan Corp. and a $250 million Eurobond lead-managed by J.P. Morgan & Co. -- SBS-Agro published its first, and last, glossy annual report. It boasted of its "benevolent aims" -- free ice cream for children and lavish donations to the Orthodox church -- and of the "great trust placed in SBS-Agro by international investors."
Today, Mr. Smolensky derides these same partners as "suffocated by greed." The state-run Agency for Restructuring Credit Organizations, or Arco, which is winding down SBS-Agro's affairs, recently told foreign creditors to expect one cent on the dollar.
Highlights of an Unorthodox Banking Career
1989: Alexander Smolensky establishes Bank Stolichny, one of Soviet Union's first private banks. Berlin Wall falls.
1993: Bank Stolichny becomes Stolichny Bank of Savings (SBS). President Yeltsin puts down armed rebellion by free-market foes.
1996: SBS plays important role in privatizations. Acquires stake in state's Agroprombank and becomes SBS-Agro. Mr. Smolensky helps mobilize money for Mr.Yeltsin's campaign.
1997: SBS-Agro issues $250 million Eurobond and signs big contracts with foreign computer firms. Stock market soars.
1998:
--May: Asian crisis blows into Russia.
--August 6: SBS-Agro sells its dollar- denominated government bonds to Goldman Sachs.
--August 17: Russian government defaults on $40 billion in debt and devalues ruble.
--August 28: Central Bank places SBS-Agro under temporary administration. Central Bank governor is fired soon afterwards.
Sept. 10: Central Bank cancels temporary administration.
1999:
--January: SBS-Agro affiliate Samara-agrobank changes name to Pervy OVK and starts gobbling up parent's branches.
--November: Central Bank orders state agency, Arco, to seize SBS-Agro.
2000:
--March: Vladimir Putin elected president.
--July: Arco proposes to give SBS-Agro's foreign creditors one cent on the dollar. Mr. Smolensky becomes chairman of STB-Card, formerly owned by SBS-Agro.
Foreign banks never expected all their money, but 10 months of negotiations with SBS-Agro on pain-sharing produced only acrimony -- and a heap of unpaid bills to financial advisers, lawyers and accountants. Brunswick UBS Warburg, hired by SBS-Agro to devise a restructuring plan, quit. The firm, a Moscow affiliate of Swiss-based UBS AG, is still waiting to get paid in full.
Russians who entrusted SBS-Agro with their savings fared only a little better. Those with deposits less than $750 have, after two years of begging and legal action, gotten much of their money. Tens of thousands with more in their accounts are still waiting. Mr. Smolensky says his "hair stood on end" when he saw some had deposited more than $1 million. "They must be idiots," he says.
But life for Mr. Smolensky is sweet. He cruises around Moscow in a BMW 750 and has a big apartment on Patriarch's Pond in central Moscow as well as his dacha. He travels between Russia and Europe, flying off to see his wife, who lives in Austria, and his teenage son, who studied at a private school in Britain and recently moved into a big house near the London graveyard where Karl Marx is buried. "Are they supposed to live in the railway station?" asks Mr. Smolensky.
The prosecutor general and an investigator who last year sought Mr. Smolensky's arrest in connection with an early 1990s fraud scandal have both lost their jobs. The sacked prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, says the Kremlin told him to drop the case as a gesture of gratitude to Mr. Smolensky for his help in bankrolling Boris Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign. Kremlin officials have denied that the firing stemmed from improper influence by Mr. Smolensky or anyone else. Mr. Smolensky says he received an apology from authorities over the fraud probe.
This summer, a former SBS-Agro executive, Alexei Rasskazov, agreed to testify on behalf of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. At an arbitration hearing in London, he backed the EBRD in a $34 million claim against Zoloto-Platina Bank, a key link in Mr. Smolensky's new chain.
An Alleged Beating
A few days after his return to Moscow, Mr. Rasskazov got called to a meeting in a hotel near the Kremlin. Five beefy men rushed in claiming to be law-enforcement officers. They beat him, stuffed a gun down his trousers, threatened jail for illegal firearm possession and forced him to swallow a white powder planted in his socks, he said in an affidavit provided to Moscow prosecutors. One of the assailants accused him of being "very dishonest to Mr. Smolensky," according to the affidavit, and said Mr. Rasskazov "had forgotten that Mr. Smolensky is very powerful."
In an interview, Mr. Smolensky himself raises the plight of his former employee -- which hasn't been made public. He denies any involvement and says police are hunting for Mr. Rasskazov over an illegal gun. Mr. Smolensky says his onetime colleague "betrayed himself" and is "running around like an ant." He asks: "Where is Rasskazov and where am I?"
Mr. Rasskazov is now in hiding outside the country with his wife and teenage daughter. He fled Moscow immediately after the attack, shaving off his beard to try to disguise his identity. The EBRD, which arranged his flight, has raised the case with Russia's prime minister. Mr. Rasskazov's Russian lawyer says Russian law-enforcement officials have told him they have no quarrel with his client.
An Elder Comrade
Mr. Smolensky, meanwhile, helps guide a financial archipelago extending the length of Russia -- although exactly who owns the operation is virtually impossible to establish. He says he doesn't have an ownership stake, and won't reveal who does. But he makes it clear that he holds considerable sway over the mostly young former SBS-Agro bankers who now hold the executive titles at the new banks. "Naturally, they will listen to me … as a consultant, as an elder comrade," he says, "because I made them myself with my own hands. This is normal influence."
The most visible vehicle of Mr. Smolensky's resurrection is the First Mutual & Credit Society, or Pervy OVK. It calls itself "Bank for the New Millennium" -- a bold boast for an outfit that until last year specialized in lending to often-bankrupt farms in southern Russia. It was then called Samaraagrobank, a tiny subsidiary of SBS-Agro. After the 1998 crash, it changed its name, ditched SBS-Agro as a shareholder, got permission from the Central Bank to move to Moscow and began devouring its former parent. It says its balance sheet mushroomed 15 times since last year.
About the only thing it hasn't gobbled up are SBS-Agro's debts.
Pervy OVK now has about 40 branches in Moscow, nearly all located in the former premises of SBS-Agro, and is run by Mr. Smolensky's nephew, Alexei Grigoriev, SBS-Agro's former management board chairman. It uses SBS-Agro's Moscow network of ATM machines, has taken over many of SBS-Agro's big Moscow clients and even wooed some of its foreign partners. DeltaCredit, part of the U.S. government-funded U.S. Russia Investment Fund, moved a small portfolio of mortgage loans it had with SBS-Agro to Pervy OVK.
No Need for Toilet Paper
SBS-Agro depositors are also welcome -- if they agree to forfeit much of their money. Boris Kolosov, head of a committee of disgruntled depositors, says he recently got a phone call from Pervy OVK offering a deal: The bank will give him 15% of his money now on deposit with SBS-Agro if he accepts Pervy OVK promissory notes for the rest. "I don't need extra toilet paper," he says. His committee holds regular protests, shouting "thieves" outside Pervy OVK's head office -- formerly SBS-Agro's headquarters.
Across Russia the pattern is the same, as previously small regional banks take over SBS-Agro branches and swell into local banking powerhouses. These include Siberian OVK east of the Ural Mountains, Northwest OVK in St. Petersburg, Povolzhskoe OVK in Saratov, Konekagroprombank in the Far East and Zoloto-Platina Bank in Yekaterinburg. Mr. Grigoriev, Mr. Smolensky's nephew, sits on their boards. Other former SBS-Agro executives dominate their management.
Registration filings and other documents show more links. Pervy OVK and at least five other banks in the new network masterminded by Mr. Smolensky took on the same four Moscow-registered companies as shareholders: ZAO Bleisi, ZAO Enfleid, ZAO Riel 2000 and ZAO Skald 99. Each of these registered in June last year, named the same two obscure Muscovites as directors, reported a single computer as its founding "capital" and then issued shares that were promptly sold to four shell companies registered in Cyprus. One of the directors couldn't be located, and another, who lives in a run-down Moscow apartment guarded by a big dog, wasn't home.
Modest Quarters
Despite holding large chunks of a sprawling banking empire, the Moscow companies have uncommonly modest quarters. Three list their address as the same grubby back-street office of a company that makes stamps. The fourth is located in an empty brick shack that used to sell vegetables.
Mr. Smolensky denies knowledge of the Moscow or Cyprus shell companies, but then says he "recommended" the use of such vehicles -- to whom he didn't say -- because banks "shouldn't have a face. Everything should be quiet, calm. Money is silent."
In this silence, say creditors, much of SBS-Agro's value has been spirited away. Assets valued by the World Bank at between 17.59 billion and 20.16 billion rubles, or between $1.1 billion and $1.26 billion, just after the August 1998 devaluation have since shrunk to around six billion rubles, or $222 million, according to Arco, the restructuring agency.
Instead of husbanding its cash, SBS-Agro poured money into various affiliates that have since spun away from the mother bank. "Administrative expenses" -- largely payments to subsidiaries for property, communications, security and other services -- more than quadrupled between 1997 and 1998. So, too, did loans to subsidiaries and other related parties, according to a report by Arthur Andersen presented to creditors last year.
When Arco finally took control of SBS-Agro late last year, the bank was still paying millions to former affiliates that, after the crash, had mutated into separate organizations. Lyudmila Davydova, Arco's deputy director, says SBS-Agro had an agreement with one of these requiring quarterly payments of $750,000 for computer data. "There have been many surprises, very many surprises," she says.
J.P. Morgan Lends a Hand
Everything looked a lot more straightforward back in 1997, when J.P. Morgan helped SBS-Agro float its Eurobond and prepared a lengthy prospectus presenting a sleek, forward-looking bank with offices in Amsterdam, Vienna, Madrid, Dubai and Macedonia, as well as branches across Russia, and even its own $5 million collection of fine art. A diagram showed SBS-Agro as a firm center anchoring a plethora of satellites. Solid arrows designated majority or, in most cases, total ownership.
These arrows have all since snapped. "The bank doesn't directly own many of its subsidiaries," explained Arthur Andersen in last year's report. "These subsidiaries are owned by third parties connected with the principal shareholders." As is often the case in Russian business, it is very difficult to establish who owns what. Foreign creditors hired private detectives and made little headway, having been unable to draw any direct line to Mr. Smolensky.
SBS-Agro Managing Co., set up by the bank in 1996 with the stated aim of imposing unity on a diverse group, renamed itself Soyuz after the 1998 blowout and began hacking away at links between SBS-Agro and its offspring. This was easily done: Creditors discovered to their dismay that SBS-Agro Managing, registered in Kalmykia, a Russian region notorious for lax supervision, had an option agreement to control all voting shares of each affiliate at a nominal price.
Scraping the Bones
What had been a compact mass exploded into a mist of independent units. SBS Property Agency, a subsidiary to which most of the bank's buildings had been transferred, bolted and last December renamed itself Property, Capital and Integration Agency. Even the art collection slipped away: "They sold it to themselves," says Arco official Alexander Voznesensky. Mr. Smolensky says SBS-Agro didn't truly own any of the property now on the books of subsidiaries that have since spun off.
"First they took all the meat. Then they scraped off the bones," says Yuri Parfilov, a retired military scientist who says he has more than $20,000 stuck in frozen ruble and dollar accounts at SBS-Agro. "We get what's left."
Mr. Smolensky's most important asset has been his political clout. In his office, he displays a framed certificate signed by Mr. Yeltsin thanking him for his support during the 1996 election campaign. He also won gratitude from fellow "oligarchs" during Russia's sell-off of state assets. SBS-Agro acted as financial midwife during the birth of AO Sibneft, a big private oil company whose big shareholders have included Boris Berezovsky, Russia's best-known tycoon, and Roman Abramovich, a potent player under both Mr. Yeltsin and Russia's current president, Vladimir Putin.
When authorities tried to install a temporary administrator to take charge of SBS-Agro in late August 1998, Mr. Smolensky and Mr. Berezovsky both said they would lobby to get the order reversed. Sergei Dubinin, then chairman of the Central Bank, says Mr. Berezovsky bluntly told him to back off. Mr. Dubinin, a man with many influential critics, was fired shortly afterward. The temporary administrator, who'd spent his first day of duty shivering in the rain outside SBS-Agro's locked doors, was removed. Mr. Berezovsky didn't respond to a telephone call and facsimile seeking comment.
When the central bank then issued an order freezing all SBS-Agro's operations, Mr. Smolensky again prevailed: The head of the Moscow arm of the Central Bank revoked the instruction.
Free of outside supervision, SBS-Agro executives set about preparing for the future. In September 1998, for example, SBS-Agro shifted a valuable chunk of its loan portfolio to its then-tiny Yekaterinburg affiliate, Zoloto-Platina bank, Central Bank records show. Zoloto-Platina's books, previously dominated by modest credits to local industry, suddenly swelled with the arrival of what had been SBS-Agro loans to AO Sibneft and seven of its petroleum-related affiliates. It is unclear what SBS-Agro got in return for these assets, which, including penalties and interest, were at the time worth more than $100 million. Mr. Smolensky says no loans were moved to Yekaterinburg and that Central Bank data are incorrect.
Missing Documents
Creditors complain that the Central Bank could have halted the hemorrhage by swiftly taking control of SBS-Agro from Mr. Smolensky. Instead, it poured in money, providing him with emergency "stabilization loans" and other facilities worth more than $450 million. Mr. Smolensky says the money was used to pay depositors. But while on life-support from the state, say Arco officials, SBS-Agro continued to play shell games.
On Dec. 31, 1998, loan documents show, SBS-Agro gave its moribund agricultural-lending arm, Agroprombank, a $750 million "credit." In reality, says Arco, no money changed hands: The credit was a bookkeeping ruse to cover SBS-Agro's own gaping financial hole and thus deter authorities from taking action. SBS-Agro then initiated bankruptcy proceedings against Agroprombank -- after shifting most of the unit's buildings to a separate real-estate firm. The liquidator, Vladimir Limonov, says he can't work out what happened: Too many documents are missing.
By the time the Central Bank finally put Arco in charge of SBS-Agro late last year, Mr. Smolensky had shifted his energies to new ventures. Nonetheless, Arco still had trouble getting a grip: Many of Mr. Smolensky's executives stayed behind. It didn't get its own people in place until early this year and only recently got access to SBS-Agro's files.
And even now, more than two years after the 1998 debacle, Mr. Smolensky still holds the key that Arco officials say could unlock details of how Russia's biggest private retail bank wasted away: He controls all the computer records of SBS-Agro's past transactions.
"We've got an agreement that this information will be provided," says Valery Miroshnikov, the Arco official now in charge of SBS-Agro as it staggers toward liquidation. "But, of course, it is not 100% certain that this information will be, first of all, complete and, secondly, reliable. No certainty at all."
Inside 'the Bunker'
At the heart of Mr. Smolensky's new empire stands a walled, tightly guarded complex with a satellite dish on the roof in northern Moscow. Dubbed "the bunker," it houses the computers, software and brains that knit Mr. Smolensky's new nationwide network together.
"Technologically, we have a five-year head start," says Mr. Smolensky. It's not an idle boast: Pervy OVK and other new banks now provide 24-hour banking and possess state-of-the art equipment. But much of this infrastructure used to belong to SBS-Agro. And many of the companies that provided it haven't been paid.
International Business Machines Corp. sold SBS-Agro seven AS/400 computers and nearly 900 ATM machines. Midas-Kapiti International, a British banking-software company, provided it with a sophisticated system to process transactions across the country. Nortel Networks Corp. of Canada signed a $25 million contract for communications gear. The Canadian government's Export Development Corp. granted a $10 million credit. The World Bank gave its own loans worth more than $7 million to help SBS-Agro develop its technical infrastructure.
This high-tech rapture has since become an agony of low blows. After the 1998 crash, SBS-Agro reneged on payment guarantees. SBS-Leasing, a subsidiary that signed many of the contracts, morphed into a separate organization. A sign outside the computer complex marking a branch of SBS-Agro vanished, replaced by big red letters reading Pervy OVK. Inside, names also changed. What had been SBS-Agro's processing system mutated into the United Settlement System, or USS.
Zhana Alexandrova, USS's deputy director, says "there are certain parallels" with SBS-Agro, but "this is a new company" that has only had a license for a year. In many ways, though, USS is merely the new guise for what SBS-Agro left behind. Rental agreements show that USS rents the massive computer complex from SBS-Agro's former property agency. USS is controlled by STB-Card, SBS-Agro's former credit-card processing company. STB-Card, in turn, now has four of Mr. Smolensky's "new" banks as its main shareholders, says Valery Pershin, who runs the card company. Presiding over this structure as STB-Card's chairman is none other than Mr. Smolensky.
IBM and Nortel, who helped equip the computer complex, are still struggling to get many of their bills paid. Software provider Midas-Kapiti hasn't received its annual license fee for three years. Canada's EDC has joined the queue of more than two dozen jilted creditors hoping for some payment, including Chase Manhattan Bank, Deutsche Bank, Banque Societe Generale, Bank of America Corp., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the EBRD. Mr. Smolensky says that the debts aren't his responsibility, and that creditors owed money by SBS-Agro should take their complaints to the Russian government, which he says created the 1998 financial crisis.
Western banks grumble bitterly in private but, exhausted and embarrassed by the SBS-Agro fiasco, shun public complaints. Says one banker: "It's like being a Nazi hunter: You have to dedicate your whole life to it. Life's too short."
A raw, self-made man who, in the twilight of the Soviet Union, moved from printing to construction and then into banking, Mr. Smolensky has repeatedly outfoxed his foes. Any creditor who tries to press its claim against Pervy OVK or other parts of his new domain will "get bashed around the ears automatically," he says: "We'll take care of them … I don't mean physically, though this tends to be easier, but we'll deal with them in court."
The government, meanwhile, acknowledges that Russia's banks are a mess and pledges action. An economic-policy blueprint drafted by a think tank closely linked to the government and endorsed by President Putin sets banking reform as an urgent priority and calls for legislation to "enhance the personal responsibility" of managers and owners for the "financial status of their banks."
The think tank's choice of office space, however, has raised skeptical eyebrows. It does its thinking in Alexander House, the SBS-Agro building where Goldman Sachs negotiated the August 1998 bond deal.
Like most of the bank's properties, it now has murky new owners. Arco says the building, tossed between various subsidiaries in convoluted deals, has been owned at various times by SBS-Agro in Moscow, its property agency and its subsidiary in Macedonia, which was recently itself sold to unnamed "minority shareholders" registered in Cyprus and elsewhere.
Arco officials say they've lost track of who owns Alexander House now.
Before the think tank moved in, Alexander House boasted an even more distinguished tenant: Mr. Putin's campaign staff. On election night in March, Mr. Putin appeared there to celebrate his victory. There is no evidence that Mr. Smolensky enjoys close relations to Mr. Putin's Kremlin, and campaign staffers have said they paid a market rent on the building. Still, Mr. Smolensky crows about the episode. "I supported Putin. He went to the Kremlin from my building," he says. "I don't owe anybody anything. I can now do what I want to do. Finally, I'm free."
Frimley111R said:
tallmat said:
The guy sounds a right ar$e. What set TVR apart in it's latter years was that it was
using it's own engines and the cars weren't just another hand crafted body around a mass produced engine.
You opinion but from 'outside' TVR I wouldn't say so. What made them stand out was there fantastic styling. They are still v.much 'wow' cars today.using it's own engines and the cars weren't just another hand crafted body around a mass produced engine.
The extraordinary designs and the incredible sound is what TVR is all about.
TVRs are the TRUE British sportscars. No compromises, no electronics, no nonsense!
And I want the Sagaris back!
I am not sure if any whatever his name is truely understands it.
The world does not need another Wiesmann car!
Caractacus
Totally agree with you on all points. Having a go at someone on here for bad spelling/grammar is a joke the 1st post I looked at that Graham had responded to from his profile he says "Looking at that colour, howabout the ones 'chedder' has fitted ?" Howabout is 2 words so a bit silly pulling others on spelling eh!
I had a new 99 Cerbera speed 6 a Tuscan S and a TVR T350 all 3 had one or more engine rebuilds spending weeks at the factory. I live locally and Heath in service always looked after me with a Griff to use or whatever. Now the factory has gone there is no way I would buy another spreed 6 engined TVR unless it was one of Dom's new engines with a warranty. I am TVR through and through but building the speed 6 engine was one of Wheelers biggest downfalls. The engine builders at the factory will tell you that yes it initially had design problems but TVR were buying in the cheapest parts to make the engines and the warranty work with engines stacked up at the factory was mind blowing. When Peter was selling the company it was common knowledge suppliers had not been paid there were no parts to build the cars available it was in a shocking state. Yes NS was a prat but mainly for buying a company that had a disenchanted workforce was losing money hand over fist and a range of cars all using the speed 6 engine which was so fragile.
One of the 1st things NS did was offer a 2 year warranty to install some confidence in the cars yet the amount of extra warranty work that would have entailed was something the company could ill afford. TVR had bought in some Corvette engines and boxes at this time to look at installing them and I was told the price they could buy them for which would amaze you how cheaply they could get them from GM! Seriously the figure I was told in confidence was a joke hopefully someone on here from the factory might be willing to divulge. Put it this way they were a lot cheaper to buy in than it cost to build a speed 6 engine
A Sagaris/Tuscan with that power plant and its other states of tune would have been the turning point for TVR IMO. It would be such a shame if the car is not made in the UK but I for one would still be very interested in an updated Tuscan with a tuned Corvette engine no matter where it was made at the end of the day they are still great looking cars and with a decent reliable engine so would lots of other people.
Totally agree with you on all points. Having a go at someone on here for bad spelling/grammar is a joke the 1st post I looked at that Graham had responded to from his profile he says "Looking at that colour, howabout the ones 'chedder' has fitted ?" Howabout is 2 words so a bit silly pulling others on spelling eh!
I had a new 99 Cerbera speed 6 a Tuscan S and a TVR T350 all 3 had one or more engine rebuilds spending weeks at the factory. I live locally and Heath in service always looked after me with a Griff to use or whatever. Now the factory has gone there is no way I would buy another spreed 6 engined TVR unless it was one of Dom's new engines with a warranty. I am TVR through and through but building the speed 6 engine was one of Wheelers biggest downfalls. The engine builders at the factory will tell you that yes it initially had design problems but TVR were buying in the cheapest parts to make the engines and the warranty work with engines stacked up at the factory was mind blowing. When Peter was selling the company it was common knowledge suppliers had not been paid there were no parts to build the cars available it was in a shocking state. Yes NS was a prat but mainly for buying a company that had a disenchanted workforce was losing money hand over fist and a range of cars all using the speed 6 engine which was so fragile.
One of the 1st things NS did was offer a 2 year warranty to install some confidence in the cars yet the amount of extra warranty work that would have entailed was something the company could ill afford. TVR had bought in some Corvette engines and boxes at this time to look at installing them and I was told the price they could buy them for which would amaze you how cheaply they could get them from GM! Seriously the figure I was told in confidence was a joke hopefully someone on here from the factory might be willing to divulge. Put it this way they were a lot cheaper to buy in than it cost to build a speed 6 engine
A Sagaris/Tuscan with that power plant and its other states of tune would have been the turning point for TVR IMO. It would be such a shame if the car is not made in the UK but I for one would still be very interested in an updated Tuscan with a tuned Corvette engine no matter where it was made at the end of the day they are still great looking cars and with a decent reliable engine so would lots of other people.
barefoot said:
I had a new 99 Cerbera speed 6 a Tuscan S and a TVR T350 all 3 had one or more engine rebuilds spending weeks at the factory.
just to balance the above out, I had a speed six Cerbera 44k no engine rebuild and I now have a Sagaris at 46k also with no engine rebuild.Thou I agree the early speed six engines weren't the best.
barefoot said:
Caractacus
Totally agree with you on all points. Having a go at someone on here for bad spelling/grammar is a joke the 1st post I looked at that Graham had responded to from his profile he says "Looking at that colour, howabout the ones 'chedder' has fitted ?" Howabout is 2 words so a bit silly pulling others on spelling eh!
I had a new 99 Cerbera speed 6 a Tuscan S and a TVR T350 all 3 had one or more engine rebuilds spending weeks at the factory. I live locally and Heath in service always looked after me with a Griff to use or whatever. Now the factory has gone there is no way I would buy another spreed 6 engined TVR unless it was one of Dom's new engines with a warranty. I am TVR through and through but building the speed 6 engine was one of Wheelers biggest downfalls. The engine builders at the factory will tell you that yes it initially had design problems but TVR were buying in the cheapest parts to make the engines and the warranty work with engines stacked up at the factory was mind blowing. When Peter was selling the company it was common knowledge suppliers had not been paid there were no parts to build the cars available it was in a shocking state. Yes NS was a prat but mainly for buying a company that had a disenchanted workforce was losing money hand over fist and a range of cars all using the speed 6 engine which was so fragile.
One of the 1st things NS did was offer a 2 year warranty to install some confidence in the cars yet the amount of extra warranty work that would have entailed was something the company could ill afford. TVR had bought in some Corvette engines and boxes at this time to look at installing them and I was told the price they could buy them for which would amaze you how cheaply they could get them from GM! Seriously the figure I was told in confidence was a joke hopefully someone on here from the factory might be willing to divulge. Put it this way they were a lot cheaper to buy in than it cost to build a speed 6 engine
A Sagaris/Tuscan with that power plant and its other states of tune would have been the turning point for TVR IMO. It would be such a shame if the car is not made in the UK but I for one would still be very interested in an updated Tuscan with a tuned Corvette engine no matter where it was made at the end of the day they are still great looking cars and with a decent reliable engine so would lots of other people.
Well bully for you you pathetic nit-picking twirp. 'Howabout' used in chatty forum style....bit different from a whole paragraph of sTotally agree with you on all points. Having a go at someone on here for bad spelling/grammar is a joke the 1st post I looked at that Graham had responded to from his profile he says "Looking at that colour, howabout the ones 'chedder' has fitted ?" Howabout is 2 words so a bit silly pulling others on spelling eh!
I had a new 99 Cerbera speed 6 a Tuscan S and a TVR T350 all 3 had one or more engine rebuilds spending weeks at the factory. I live locally and Heath in service always looked after me with a Griff to use or whatever. Now the factory has gone there is no way I would buy another spreed 6 engined TVR unless it was one of Dom's new engines with a warranty. I am TVR through and through but building the speed 6 engine was one of Wheelers biggest downfalls. The engine builders at the factory will tell you that yes it initially had design problems but TVR were buying in the cheapest parts to make the engines and the warranty work with engines stacked up at the factory was mind blowing. When Peter was selling the company it was common knowledge suppliers had not been paid there were no parts to build the cars available it was in a shocking state. Yes NS was a prat but mainly for buying a company that had a disenchanted workforce was losing money hand over fist and a range of cars all using the speed 6 engine which was so fragile.
One of the 1st things NS did was offer a 2 year warranty to install some confidence in the cars yet the amount of extra warranty work that would have entailed was something the company could ill afford. TVR had bought in some Corvette engines and boxes at this time to look at installing them and I was told the price they could buy them for which would amaze you how cheaply they could get them from GM! Seriously the figure I was told in confidence was a joke hopefully someone on here from the factory might be willing to divulge. Put it this way they were a lot cheaper to buy in than it cost to build a speed 6 engine
A Sagaris/Tuscan with that power plant and its other states of tune would have been the turning point for TVR IMO. It would be such a shame if the car is not made in the UK but I for one would still be very interested in an updated Tuscan with a tuned Corvette engine no matter where it was made at the end of the day they are still great looking cars and with a decent reliable engine so would lots of other people.
te.Now go and look up some more posts, run back here and post a few if it makes you feel better, then go and get a f
king life. I have mixed feelings about this.
As much as I would love to see the TVR brand back on the road, I don't feel that NS is the person to do it after his past antics, false starts and broken promises. With regards being built in Germany, that in itself does not bother me - Aston Martins are being built in Austria, Lotus are using Japanese engines, and Mini, Rolls Royce & Bentley are German owned afterall, but the combination of a Russian owner and German build means this can no way be seen as a "British" sports car, even if the business is tenuously registered at Companies House.
Also, given the change in EU legislation over the last few years, will it still be true to the TVR ethos when it is loaded down with airbags, ABS, stability control, crumple zones etc...?
On the flip side, it's a new TVR, that looks like a Tuscan 2 Roadster with over 600 reliable and proven horses! That alone has got to be worth the money!
I just fear that this will be the automotive version of Gran Turismo 5 - on the cards for years, lots of rumours and false starts, and anticipation that the end result has been worth the wait and speculation.
As much as I would love to see the TVR brand back on the road, I don't feel that NS is the person to do it after his past antics, false starts and broken promises. With regards being built in Germany, that in itself does not bother me - Aston Martins are being built in Austria, Lotus are using Japanese engines, and Mini, Rolls Royce & Bentley are German owned afterall, but the combination of a Russian owner and German build means this can no way be seen as a "British" sports car, even if the business is tenuously registered at Companies House.
Also, given the change in EU legislation over the last few years, will it still be true to the TVR ethos when it is loaded down with airbags, ABS, stability control, crumple zones etc...?
On the flip side, it's a new TVR, that looks like a Tuscan 2 Roadster with over 600 reliable and proven horses! That alone has got to be worth the money!
I just fear that this will be the automotive version of Gran Turismo 5 - on the cards for years, lots of rumours and false starts, and anticipation that the end result has been worth the wait and speculation.
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