‘The information on services Neva offers looks rather dubious to professionals. As far as their Private Banking service is concerned, for instance, the company only speaks about ‘unlimited capital management opportunities, highest financial service standards, individual approach, strict confidentiality, special terms’ and so on,’ Management Company’s Investment Director Alexander Metzger said to UrBC.

‘As for their Trust Management offer, Neva provides more detailed data here, yet their information still leaves the field pretty open. Firstly, what they offer is not trust management but actually some brokerage or agential activity. The thing is, according to their ‘investment strategies’, Neva suggests that their customers buy certain issuers’ promissory notes. One can naturally call the acquisition of Sokolskiy cement plant’s promissory notes a strategy (as it is advertised by Neva under the name of Industrial Portfolio); nevertheless, it would still be an exaggeration, even though these notes are to be intermingled with 30% of Bank Saint Petersburg’s promissory notes,’ he added.

‘If one looks at Real Estate and Building strategy, the company offers for sale the promissory notes of VolSpetsSMU with a 10% portion of Sberbank’s notes. This 10% bit of Sberbank’s promissory notes is meant to create the diversified approach to strategic investments. Finally, the last strategy is rather hard to comment upon, as here one can buy the liabilities of a Russian limited liability company that is a daughter enterprise of Investment Building Bank of London. It’s questionable whether IBBL can and should be responsible for the debts of its daughter enterprise,’ Alexander Metzger observed.

‘To sum up, I feel Neva should come up with a more specific language for its potential customers, like brokerage operations, agency contract, and so on, given especially the fact that this is the type of agreements the company appears to have with the above-mentioned issuers of promissory notes.’