Rostelecom Demands to Recognize Sputnik Bankrupt

Recently it became known that the company Rostelecom is demanding that Sputnik LLC be declared bankrupt. It is worth recalling that Sputnik is a subsidiary of Rostelecom, but in spite of this, the latter is demanding to collect 292 million rubles from its subsidiary. As it turned out, the telecommunications service operator filed for bankruptcy Sputnik back in February of this year, as reported by Cnews.

The reason for the claim is Sputnik's debt under the loan agreement, which was concluded in 2015. The court recognized the demand in the amount of approximately 10 million rubles as legal in 2017 - then Sputnik delayed the date of the refund. And in July of this year, the court began to observe the bankruptcy proceedings, appointing the temporary administrator, Egor Nazarenko, from the Delo, self-regulatory organization.

In July 2018, Sputnik's debt reached already 292 million rubles. Now Nazarenko in the framework of the case should provide the court with the protocol of the first meeting of creditors - the court will consider it in November. Claims "Rostelecom" in the amount of 292 million rubles, the court plans to consider in October.

Initially, Sputnik's principal amount was a relatively small amount of 3 million rubles, the amount of accrued interest was 7.6 million rubles. Total - 10.6 million rubles. This debt in 2017 tried to appeal against one of the minority shareholders of Sputnik, Vyacheslav Rudnik. His appeal stated that the judicial act regarding the collection of the debt "affected his rights because he is a participant in Sputnik LLC and believes that the loan agreement for which the debt was collected is a transaction concluded with interest and not received proper approval by disinterested participants society. " The court did not take into account these arguments, and at the end of January 2018, as indicated above, the consideration of the complaint was discontinued.

Already after the trial, a document appeared that is related to the statement of Rostelecom about “including in the Register of creditors' claims debts in the amount of 292.2 million rubles.” Unfortunately, there is no information about the origin of this amount - Rostelecom and Sputnik do not give comments.

As far as one can understand, Sputnik has no other lenders other than Rostelecom. The head of the dispute resolution practice group of the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner Russia law firm Natalia Belomestnova, in particular, said this: “After the court introduced observation and published the corresponding announcement in the Kommersant newspaper, Sputnik's creditors had 30 days to the court and the interim manager their claims on the debtor to consider whether to include them in the register of creditors' claims. As can be seen from the card of the case, during the specified period only Rostelecom presented a demand. This means that either Sputnik has no other creditors, or they exist, but did not have time to present their demands and will be included in the register later, as part of subsequent bankruptcy procedures. ”

The database "Contour. Focus" contains information that in 2017, the "Sputnik" was zero revenue. But the organization led some kind of activity, since its net loss amounted to 54.9 million rubles. At the end of 2017, Sputnik had a balance of 96 million rubles.

It should be noted that, apart from Rostelecom, the founders of Sputnik LLC are Vyacheslav Rudnikov (19.5%) and Vasily Vasin (5.5%). In addition, Sputnik’s share of 1% belongs to Rostelecom International Limited (1%).

Around the middle of July 2015, Kommersant announced the intention of Rostelecom to consolidate the full package of shares of Sputnik LLC. At that time, there was no agreement with minority shareholders, but already on May 30, Sputnik LLC lost control over its own domain - Rostelecom became its administrator. In May of the same year, the state operator became the copyright holder of the “Sputnik” trademark for a number of goods and services, including e-mail, Internet access and radio telephone communication. Until November 2015, the rights to the corresponding trademark for the services “maintenance of automated databases, search for information in computer files (for third parties)” were reserved for the LLC.

So far, the trial is still under way, but it seems that Sputnik LLC will not last long.