Megafon, Russia’s second largest mobile operator, has borrowed $4.5 billion with the intention of buying back investor Mikhail Fridman’s 25.1% stake, Reuters reported last week. If successful, the purchase will bring MegaFon closer to a $4 billion IPO on the London Stock Exchange.
Megafon borrowed $1.5 billion from Sberbank, the Russian national savings bank, $1 billion from Gazprombank, and a syndicated loan of $2 billion from Western banks.
Megafon has appointed Ivan Tavrin as CEO, a step which amounts to a move to give control of the company to Alisher Usmanov.
Usmanov is a shareholder of DST and Mail.ru Group, with a fortune estimated to be $18.1 billion.
MegaFon’s planned IPO would be the largest public offering on the London exchange since Glencore commodities trading went public in May of 2011. Such a move, along with the recent ownership changes, would enable the company to fund an ambitious plan to deploy LTE across Russia.
President-elect Vladimir Putin has already announced he plans to tap MegaFon’s outgoing CEO, Sergei Soldatenkov, to be his next telecom minister. Meanwhile, the company’s new CEO, Ivan Tavrin, was formerly employed by UTV, a media group in which Alisher Usmanov is a major investor.
According to banking analysts, a 20% stake could be floated in the IPO, which is tentatively planned for the second half of 2012, based on a valuation of up to $20 billion.
Usmanov currently has a 31.1 percent stake in Megafon, smaller than TeliaSonera, which holds a 43.8 percent stake. The coming transactions are intended to alter that scenario so that Usmanov will become the majority stakeholder, with TeliaSonera as a minority partner, Reuters wrote.
