Novolipetsk to control Maxi Group

Archiv – Russian steelmaker and scrap processor Maxi Group will sell a 51% stake to Novolipetsk Steel by the end of the year after a deal to sell to billionaire Alisher Usmanov fell through. Alfa Bank, which is organising the transaction, says the deal would involve Novolipetsk supplying an immediate US$400 million loan to Maxi as well as refinancing debt incurred by its subsidiaries and funding an expansion program.Russian steelmaker and scrap processor Maxi Group will sell a 51% stake to Novolipetsk Steel by the end of the year after a deal to sell to billionaire Alisher Usmanov fell through. Alfa Bank, which is organising the transaction, says the deal would involve Novolipetsk supplying an immediate US$400 million loan to Maxi as well as refinancing debt incurred by its subsidiaries and funding an expansion program.
Novolipetsk -owned by billionaire Vladimir Lisin- says that it has reached an agreement in principle on the acquisition of a controlling stake in Maxi and that a deal was expected by the end of the year, subject to shareholder approval.
Yekaterinburg-based Maxi plans to build a network of steel furnaces and rolling mills with annual capacity of up to 10 million tonnes of finished products – five times what it currently produces- in the Kaluga region near Moscow and in several other regions of Russia.
The Maxi Group is a vertically integrated group comprised by two major divisions: a production division OJSC Metallurgical holding and a raw materials division CJSC Uralvtorchermet, that form the production chain from scrap collection and processing to production of high value added steel products. The company owns CJSC Nizhneserginskiy Metizno-Metallurgicheskiy Zavod, a hardware producer, and CJSC Revdinskiy Trubnyi Zavod, a tube producer.
The company said this month that it had signed a deal to sell a 50% stake to Usmanov, the main owner of steel maker and iron ore miner Gazmetall. But Usmanov’s company issued a statement saying the deal had been scrapped.