Mintos ‘defending investors’ interests’ in battle against Russian originator
Mintos has said it is “defending the interests of our investors” in court cases against Russian loan originator Kviku, as its consultants work to recover funds.
The European lending marketplace has been recovering war-affected loans in its portolio since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This has been challenging due to sanctions and payment limitations imposed by Russia and the EU.
It recovered €10m as of 3 March this year, and said agreements have been reached with all Russian lending companies apart from Kviku.
The conflict centres around Kviku’s decision to convert its euro-denominated debt to Mintos investors into a ruble-denominated bond that matures in 2026.
Mintos said it never agreed to this approach as it is not in the interests of investors and believes that the conversion violates local requirements.
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“Just days before Kviku issued the bonds for the purpose of converting the debt, the management and owners of Kviku reassured us that they were applying for special permission from the Central Bank of Russia to make transfers larger than the RUB 10m monthly limit,” Mintos said.
“It goes without saying that they had already been working on the bond issuance for a few months before the actual issue. We have no factual evidence of any actions being taken by Kviku to obtain the special permission from the Central Bank of Russia for money transfers.
“Since then, Kviku has tried to remove the pledges on its portfolio for the funded loans on Mintos by approaching the notary, and after that was not met with success, by filing court cases in Russia in late December 2022.
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“After Mintos filed objections to Kviku’s court applications, one of the applications was dismissed by the court and the other one was withdrawn by Kviku before the court ruled on the matter.
“Kviku claimed that no agreements exist and no money was transferred for the part of the portfolio arising from forward flow investments. These claims by Kviku are obviously not true. Forward flow investments represent a smaller part of the portfolio.”
Mintos said it is being represented in these court cases and defending the interests of its investors, while its consultants “are also actively working on recovering investors’ money”.
“Please understand that we can only share information on legal cases with a delay, as being too transparent might give away vital information to the opposing party,” Mintos added. “We’ll share more updates as soon as we can.”