Alfa Bank Seeks $1 Billion From Deripaska, Wins in Jersey Court

March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Alfa Bank, Russia’s biggest private lender, is seeking to recover about $1 billion of debt from companies controlled by Oleg Deripaska after rejecting a payment moratorium that other banks agreed to. The Island of Jersey’s Royal Court last month froze 13.7 million pounds ($19 million) of assets belonging to EN+, the Jersey-based company through which Deripaska controls aluminum producer United Co. Rusal, according to EN+ and Alfa Bank. Alfa Bank is controlled by billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven. The ruling is only “the first step,” said Vladimir Tatarchuk, deputy chairman of Moscow-based Alfa Bank, in a telephone interview yesterday. Alfa Bank hasn’t agreed to the repayment freeze and is seeking to recover about $1 billion of loans from Deripaska’s companies, he said. “We are ready to restructure,” Tatarchuk said. “The options to repay the debt are far from being exhausted.” The lawsuit in Jersey was filed by an Alfa Bank unit, Amsterdam Trade Bank NV. Sergei Rybak, a spokesman for Deripaska’s holding company, Basic Element, said the group’s debt to Alfa Bank was “less” than $1 billion, without being more specific. “Our companies are conducting restructuring talks and have reached significant progress in certain cases,” Rybak said in a phone interview yesterday. “Alfa’s actions often undermine normal work of our companies and fulfillment of agreements with other lenders.” EN+ spokesman Petr Lidov said by phone from Moscow that the company is in talks with the Alfa Bank unit that filed the suit in Jersey. Richest-List Ranking Rusal on March 6 reached a so-called standstill agreement to stop repayments for two months on $7.4 billion of loans from more than 70 banks, including ABN Amro NV, Citigroup Inc., BNP Paribas SA and Merrill Lynch & Co. Deripaska, 41, tumbled from Russia’s richest to eighth- richest billionaire after $35 billion in losses reduced his fortune to $4.9 billion, Finans magazine said last month. He was the first of Russia’s billionaires to cede assets to banks last year as credit markets seized up and the country was pushed to the brink of recession after a decade of uninterrupted growth. Deripaska in October was forced to cede stakes in Canadian auto-parts maker Magna International Inc. and German builder Hochtief AG to western banks after they lost more than half of their market value. Rusal held on to its Norilsk Nickel stake after a $4.5 billion bailout loan from Russian state development bank VEB. To contact the reporters on this story: Denis Maternovsky in Moscow at dmaternovsky@bloomberg.net; Maria Kolesnikova in Moscow at mkolesnikova@bloomberg.net