What the numbers hide: Chichvarkin, who pledged real estate, is on tour with lectures on how to successfully conduct business

“You have a pleasant and useful opportunity to learn from my business mistakes, and not from your own, because the conversation will go for money,” Eugene Chichvarkin preceded his speech in Odessa in a publication on social networks.

With a lecture at a business forum, he acted as the headliner on 27 August.

The cost of tickets varied from 4 thousand to 18.7 thousand rubles (in terms of hryvnia).

And the residents of the organizer of the forum, the KMB business club, were able to take part in a closed breakfast with Chichvarkin.

One of his followers on Instagram asked: “Eugene, what is the tour schedule?

Would you please visit Siberia? "

"Yeah, scows full of gruel ..." - answered the businessman.

• Instagram

This is not Chichvarkin's first tour.

In April 2015, he acted as a business coach in Kiev at the Forum One Ukraine “forum for leaders who change the world”.

Then the main speaker was the founder of the Virgin Group, Richard Branson, and tickets cost from $ 150 to $ 5 thousand.

In June 2019, Chichvarkin took part in the Business Concentrate 4.0 conference, also held in the Ukrainian capital.

And in March 2020, he was supposed to perform in Kiev again, however, probably due to the coronavirus pandemic, the event did not take place.

Most often, as Chichvarkin admitted, in lectures he was asked how to make money in difficult business conditions.

But how much did he actually make himself?

According to available data, the businessman divided the £ 189.9 million ($ 350 million) from the sale of Euroset in 2008 with the co-founder of the company Timur Artemiev (£ 95 million each).

And after moving to London, a number of real estate transactions and the subsequent divorce from his wife, Chichvarkin could have left about £ 39 million, most of which, according to RT calculations, he later loaned to his company Hedonism Drinks.

Instagram Storm

After the divorce from his wife Antonina in 2016, Chichvarkin left her not only half of the funds available at that time, but also a mansion in Surrey.

The businessman himself, along with a new family, settled in a prestigious area of ​​London.

As RT wrote, we are talking about a luxury apartment on 25 The Little Boltons Street, which is now estimated at about £ 8 million. Chichvarkin, who did not react in any way to RT's investigation of the financial difficulties of his business, responded quite vividly to this publication.

“Margarita Simonyan set fire to our hut as a cop.

And Rasha Today is worn with her like a written sack, shows everyone, ”he wrote in his Instagram.

Alexei Navalny, who previously also did not react to RT investigations about himself and the Anti-Corruption Foundation *, or about his London sponsor Yevgeny Chichvarkin, also joined in.

“Wow.

The most powerful investigation from Margarita Simonyan.

Her "journalists" "found" Chichvarkin's apartment, which he geotagged in every second of his million posts on Instagram, "he wrote on Twitter.

• Twitter

The point is not even that Chichvarkin put his geotag in his posts not on an apartment, but on the Brompton cemetery, located a few minutes' walk from his house.

Such a reaction may be due to the fact that, as RT found out, Chichvarkin had mortgaged his apartment long ago.

Hostage of hedonism

The documents received by RT confirm that the businessman acquired the apartment at The Little Boltons, 25 in November 2014 for £ 6.5 million. Chichvarkin invested in renovating the apartment - he updated the roof, changed the doors and windows.

• © rbkc.gov.uk

However, three years ago, the apartment was mortgaged to Bank Metro.

It is possible that this was done under the security of a loan.

• © eservices.landregistry.gov.uk

It can be assumed that the loan was taken to open the Hide restaurant, the cost of which, according to The Evening Standard, amounted to £ 20 million. This is indirectly confirmed by the chronology of Chichvarkin's business development and subsequent events.

So, in the statements of the last financial year, information was indicated on the availability of a loan for opening a restaurant.

The institution was opened in the spring of 2018, and the apartment was mortgaged (and possibly took out a loan) in August 2017.

A year and a half after the opening of Hide, Metro bank, as RT already wrote, was laid down for the building of the restaurant itself.

Perhaps this collateral also ensures loan payments.

• © beta.companieshouse.gov.uk

By itself, the practice of pledging personal property is quite common, notes bankruptcy trustee Andrei Galkin.

“It all depends on the willingness of the business owner to risk personal property to save the business,” the expert says.

"The situation is common, especially in small businesses."

Moreover, the pledge is not an indicator of the plight, says another bankruptcy trustee Konstantin Sunygin.

“Such actions may indicate attempts to negotiate with creditors and the intention to pay off the debt, and the difficulties that the company faced should be understood as temporary,” the source said.

"The collateral may be the result of pressure from individual lenders who understand the inevitability of bankruptcy and require securing their loans."

Debt-tinged profit

However, loans and mortgages against real estate are not the only problem.

The group of companies Hedonism Drinks Limited, owned by Chichvarkin, is still not getting out of debt.

Usually the bankruptcy of a group of companies and guarantors occurs simultaneously, explains Sunygin.

"In this case, after the bankruptcy of Hedonism Group of Companies, the bankruptcy of Chichvarkin himself will follow," the expert said.

Lawyer Anatoly Verbitsky agrees with this opinion.

“These are difficult times for Chichvarkin, so we have to solve problems in this way,” says the lawyer.

- In case of problems with the payment of loans, he will have to answer for the obligations of the pledged personal property.

That is, the apartment can be taken away to pay off the debt. "

As RT previously wrote, in the period from August 2017 to August 2018, auditors recorded a negative difference between the assets and debts of Hedonism Group of £ 1.5 million.

In the report published in the register of information on UK legal entities in August this year for the period from July 2018 to July 2019, the group of companies showed a profit of £ 1.7 million.

The £ 2,500 loss in the previous year was attributed to the launch of the Hide restaurant.

• © beta.companieshouse.gov.uk

At the same time, it follows from the same financial documents that the company still has more debts with different maturities than assets.

As RT wrote, the amount of debts accumulated by Chichvarkin's company in the last year's report was £ 60.8 million.In the latest report, this amount decreased, but slightly - to £ 57.27 million.

Debt terms

Most of these debts came from the loan of its founder, Evgeny Chichvarkin.

As RT already wrote, the businessman gave the firm an interest-free loan of £ 31.2 million from personal funds without a fixed maturity.

In 2019, according to the report, Hedonism Group seems to have managed to give its owner a little more than £ 3 million. The remaining £ 28 million “spilled over” into the next year.

• © beta.companieshouse.gov.uk

However, the fact that the company is formally profitable, it owes the financial injections of its owner, the auditors note in the report.

“Despite the fact that the company is profitable and has positive net assets, it is dependent on the constant financial support of its majority shareholder, Mr. Chichvarkin,” the auditors write.

It was Chichvarkin who "confirmed the current financial support and promised that he would not demand repayment of the debt for at least 12 months from the date of signing the balance sheet."

Therefore, “the financial statements were prepared on the basis of the principle of going concern of the company,” the auditors emphasize.

But to this should be added the fact that "due to the unpredictability of the duration and scale of the pandemic (coronavirus -

), the uncertainty about the company's continuity status is increasing."

The company's urgent (due within a year) and long-term debts of £ 39.27 million are £ 663,000 less than its assets (£ 39.93 million).

That is, if creditors immediately demand their money back, then the company will be able to pay them off.

• © beta.companieshouse.gov.uk

However, the company still has obligations in the form of payments for long-term finance lease (leasing).

In total, under equipment leasing agreements, Chichvarkin's company must pay £ 18 million, of which about £ 5.5 million - over the next five years.

Thus, together with the main debt of Hedonism Group of £ 39.27 million, the debt is £ 57.27 million.

• © beta.companieshouse.gov.uk

And if you subtract the amount of assets (£ 39.93 million) from this amount of debt, then the difference between them will be £ 17.34 million.

The burden of an emigrant

Arbitration manager Konstantin Sunygin believes that the excess of debts over assets does not necessarily indicate the bankruptcy of the company.

"In the case of the Hedonism group of companies, we have to speculate about what lies behind these numbers and what caused the imbalance - the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated sanitary restrictions or still short-sighted, fatal decisions of the company management," he said.

According to the expert, such an analysis will make it possible to establish whether the company is in the stage of objective bankruptcy or whether the financial and logistical difficulties are temporary.

Bankruptcy lawyer Anatoly Verbitsky says that at times expats doing business in Britain find themselves in a less advantageous position compared to the indigenous people of Albion.

“Sometimes wealthy citizens, immigrants from Russia or Ukraine, who settled in Britain, are faced with less favorable conditions for business in comparison with local residents,” the lawyer notes. 

This may also apply to the terms of lease payments for Chichvarkin.

“In some cases, we can even talk about less favorable lending terms for foreigners,” says the lawyer.

According to the lawyer, Chichvarkin "could become a hostage to circumstances and British realities."

The lawyer drew an analogy with Boris Berezovsky, whose financial collapse in Great Britain, according to one of the popular versions, led to the depression and death of the disgraced oligarch in 2013.

“The style of business in England is different from the way of doing business in Russia.

Therefore, the techniques that Chichvarkin is used to in Russia probably do not work in the UK, says Verbitsky.

- Our fugitive oligarchs who got there never received part of their money.

Many had their accounts blocked, problems began.

People were faced with the fact that assets were pulled from them by legal means.

That is, everything seems to be according to the law, but after a while you are left with nothing. "

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