‘Vodyanoy hasn’t been faced with any specific claims so far. We did act as a guarantor of STKS at the time, so all the problems might have stemmed from this company’s possible debts,’ Director of Vodyanoy chain store Alexander Mokhov said to an UrBC reporter.


Meanwhile, Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court is now looking into the claim laid by UniCreditBank against STKS-Nedvizhimost and Vodyanoy, insisting that the defendants should pay them 163,205,903.41 RUR and on having the defendants’ mortgaged property arrested. The preliminary hearing has been scheduled for June 8, 2009.


‘I’m not sure why the bank has decided to sue us. It looks like they grew alarmed way too early. We had an agreement with the bank that they wouldn’t do anything of this sort until October or November 2009. We are by no means going to deny our obligations; quite on the contrary, we do intend to meet them in due time, that is, to pay the sum in question. Simply ruining the business would be the silliest thing to do at the moment. Something has obviously gone wrong, but we need to sort it out somehow. Vodyanoy is a respectable company, and it’s not our plan to vanish into thin air,’ the director observed.


‘As for the demand to have our assets arrested, I believe the bank means our chain stores, since we did inform the bank of how many stores we actually run when we applied for a loan,’ Mokhov explained.