Tinkoff and Yandex. What is behind the breakdown of negotiations?
After the Tinkoff group unexpectedly announced on Friday that it had terminated negotiations with Yandex on the sale of its shares, different versions of what happened began to emerge.
Blogger Ilya Varlamov suggests that Oleg Tinkov specifically started negotiations in order to speculate on Yandex shares.
“It seems to me that someone took a great ride on this story and made good money on this sudden news. I wonder who took advantage of these insights. Were the negotiations real at all, or is this just another PR campaign from Tinkov? It is quite possible that Tinkov himself took a ride on this topic. Generally a profitable business.
You start negotiations with Yandex, reach some successful stage, leak to the media that the negotiations are at the final stage, we are uniting, and in general everything will be wonderful. Before this, of course, you purchased Yandex shares. They grew up, you sold them and made a lot of money. And then you say: bullshit, I changed my mind, we won’t merge,” Varlamov said in his video blog.
Political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky believes that Oleg Tinkov, who is in London, has changed his mind about selling his bank due to the fact that in November the court will most likely decide on his extradition to the United States on a tax evasion case.
“If in November 2020 the London court decides to extradite Mr. Tinkov to the United States, he will have to urgently move (harder: flee) to the Russian Federation. And in this case, big real money in the West becomes not as important for him as relationships with certain figures / influence groups in his homeland.
As well as big business itself in the Motherland, the invulnerability of which will be ensured by these figures/groups. In fact, this is a model of the future behavior of many Russian elites in the event of EU, UK and US sanctions being imposed against them as part of the newest/formed “Navalny list,” Belkovsky wrote in his Telegram channel.
He believes that the main beneficiary of the deal breakage is Sberbank, because it managed to avoid creating a super-powerful competitor.
In September, Yandex tentatively agreed to purchase 100% of TCS Group (manages Tinkoff Bank) for $5,48 billion. According to experts, this deal nullifies Sberbank’s plans to purchase Yandex. Amid talk of the deal, Yandex shares then rose by 8%.
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