The management of Bank Société Générale Vostok’s Yekaterinburg branch explained the nature of its difficulties with one of its customers, OAO Pnevmostroymachine.

The bank admits that if creditors take the business apart, a whole range of industries will go under, but the bank is not prepared at this point to stop claiming the debt.

We have obligations not only towards our borrowers, but towards our stockholders as well, which means we have to find a mutually acceptable solution. However, we cannot just make a present of the money we once lent. We are willing to negotiate. We do not prevent the company from operating, but its current performance is sadly not enough to restore its paying capacity,’ Director of Bank Société Générale Vostok’s Ural Federal District Directorate Alexei Panin says.

He explains OAO Pnevmostroymachine has not been paying off the interest.

‘Under the existing legislation, the company is now allowed not to pay: when you’re broke, you’re broke,’ Panin says.

However, BSGV management is still hoping for a peaceful conflict resolution.

‘I hope we can come to an agreement. There are some orthodox solutions, and there are some extreme ones. The orthodox one is either a business agreement with the creditors, when the latter agree to debt restructuring, or actually handing the business over to creditors. But this isn’t the desirable outcome for us,’ he explains. What’s more, no proposals have been made by the borrowing party yet.

OAO Pnevmostroymachine applied for bankruptcy in the fall of 2009, and the court sustained its insolvency claim. There were over sixty entities on the list of creditors then, including ZAO Raiffeisenbank Österreich (its Ural subsidiary), ZAO KAB Bank Société Générale Vostok, ZAO UniCreditBank, and others.