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Before becoming general director, Severstal's Alexei Mordashov had owned Severstal-Invest Corp., which was busy buying the plant's shares on instructions from its management. When the controlling share was in the hands of Severstal-Invest, Mordashov elected himself general director ?€” much to the astonishment of his predecessor, Yury Lipukhin, who had instructed his young favorite to buy out the shares.
Last year, Severstal showed a profit of $600 million, which made other metal plants pale in comparison. It seems that having plunged into a war with SibAl and the Urals Mining and Metals Co., or UGMK, Mordashov intended to sell part of the shares to foreigners as an insurance policy of sorts. The high profits were necessary for a good credit history. Nice-looking charts comparing Severstal with foreign metallurgical giants popped up on the factory's walls.
While Severstal was beating production records, Mordashov's former wife lived in a small, three-room apartment, drove a Daewoo Nexia and received $300 to $1500 in alimony. Mordashov paid his wife and son much less than an average oligarch pays an estranged mistress without kids. It turned out to be worse than a crime. It was a business mistake because the out-of-favor wife is far from the only person unhappy with Mordashov.
It is through the efforts of Mordashov that Severstal became involved in the fight for the Magnitogorsk metallurgical plant. Iskander Makhmudov's UGMK claims 30 percent of the that plant. (On a side note, the suit to protect the interests of underage Ilya Mordashov was filed by the same prosecutor, Vladimir Ponevezhsky, who once hounded Dzhalol Khaidarov ?€” Makhmudov's former partner and now sworn enemy).
Together with the head of St. Petersburg Promstroibank, Vladimir Kogan, who is believed to be close to President Vladimir Putin, Mordashov had intended to play the dual roles of a St. Petersburg team member and a white knight salvaging the plant from an insidious aggressor, in other words to shoot the prey that UGMK had hunted down. Now, instead of fighting for the Magnitogorsk plant, Mordashov will have to defend Severstal.
Severstal's other front is the fight with SibAl for control of the Zavolzhsky Motor Plant.
Just like SibAl's Oleg Deripaska, Mordashov decided to build a vertically integrated company by purchasing automobile factories. Deripaska bought Nizhny Novgorod's GAZ and Mordashov took Ulyanovsk's UAZ and Zavolzhsky.
Rumor has it that when Deripaska found out that Zavolzhsky had been bought under his nose, he said: "We are SibAl, and SibAl never loses." After this remark, the tax police, the Anti-Monopoly Ministry and even the agency in charge of state reserves took a keen interest in Zavolzhsky.
Well, Mordashov has enough enemies in his own town of Cherepovets. Take, for example, his former deputy Valery Sikorsky, in whose bank Yelena Mordashova had worked until recently. Sikorsky had once been considered a sort of second general director of the plant but was thrown out. Clearly, he is interested in creating a situation that many would like to exploit (and get paid for).
This "Santa Barbara" has many episodes to come. So far, two things are clear. First, Yelena Mordashova, who had been kept by her husband on the edge of starvation, could hardly find the money to move to Moscow and pay for an expensive advertising campaign. Second, it is hardly advisable to claim the role of a white knight in national industrial wars when there is dirty laundry in your family closet.
Yulia Latynina is a journalist with ORT.
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