Alcoa Plans to Buy 20% Stake in Krasnoyarsk

The Aluminum Company of America, one of the world's leading aluminum producers, plans to buy the state's remaining 20 percent stake in the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Factory and invest $500 million in modernization over six years, a company official said Wednesday.


Alcoa's announcement comes on the heels of a major scandal at the factory, in which directors deleted from the company register most of a 20 percent stake held indirectly by British metals trading firm Transworld.


Analysts said that the Transworld incident, widely reported in Russia and abroad, had been scaring foreign investors away.


But Michael Mohagery, general director of Alcoa Russia, said he had never heard of it.


"The Russian Federation is selling shares at a public auction and our purchase, if it happens, will be absolutely legitimate and safe," Mohagery said in a telephone interview. "Our share purchase would mean that we plan a long-term investment into the company."


Mohagery said that the idea of a share purchase had only arisen recently, although Alcoa had been doing studies of the Krasnoyarsk plant's production facilities for the last 18 months.


The factory's economics director, Mikhail Vasilyev, said the plant welcomed the foreign investment. "For us, cooperation with Alcoa means reconstruction of the company and resolving many social problems," he said in a telephone interview from the company's headquarters in Krasnoyarsk.


Under the reconstruction plan, called Troika, Alcoa plans to re-equip the factory to reduce pollution and increase production capacity by 15 percent, Mohagery said. According to Vasiliev, the factory presently pays "billions of rubles" every year to compensate the local government for environmental damage.


Krasnoyarsk, which currently produces about 750,000 tons of aluminum a year, would in return supply Alcoa with $400 million worth of the metal, Mohagery said.


Krasnoyarsk also stands to profit directly from Alcoa's share purchase. Under Russia's second-stage privatization program, 51 percent of proceeds from sales of state shares go directly to the company. At Krasnoyarsk's present market valuation, that would mean a windfall of more than $20 million.


But Sergei Mestechkin, Transworld's representative in Moscow, said that based on his company's experience with Krasnoyarsk's directors, he doubted the sale to Alcoa would happen.


Transworld, which had purchased its stake through Russian intermediaries at a voucher auction, ran into trouble when it tried to influence the company's management, according to Mestechkin. Vasiliev claims that Transworld improperly registered its shares and never invested in the company.


"The Krasnoyarsk factory's administration wants to get all control for themselves," said Mestechkin, predicting that the directors would place a higher bid if and when the auction took place.


But Larisa Chernyshova, an expert with the State Property Committee, which oversees privatization, said that investors who have dealt directly with management -- as Alcoa has -- are generally in a better position than those who have bought stakes in other ways, such as at voucher auctions.


The latter, she said, tend to run into more problems with company directors unwilling to cede control to outsiders.


"They buy shares in the way established by the state and they are deceived twice: by the government and by the factory," Chernyshova said.