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Russian potash in suspended animation By John Helmer
MOSCOW - The failure of senior Russian government officials to decide whether to create a powerful new fertilizer monopoly continues to delay release of the results of a commission of inquiry into fault, penalties and costs of a two-year-old collapse of a potash mine in the central Urals region town of Berezniki. The longer the delay, the firmer potash prices are likely to become in the Asian market, dominated by China and India.
Mine-1, owned and operated by Uralkali, was forced to halt operations, and was abandoned, after a massive sinkhole opened at the surface in October 2006. Initial government investigations ruled that the loss of the mine and its potash reserves was force majeure. In the geology of potash deposits, such events are not unusual.
However, over the past 10 weeks, the incident has been exploited by officials in Moscow seeking to engineer a takeover of the Moscow and London-listed Uralkali (ticker URKA:LI).
Uralkali and Silvinit are the two principal producers of potash for export to China, Asia's most important consumer, India and the palm-oil plantations of Malaysia.
Although linked by a minority cross-shareholding, the two companies trade independently of one another. Uralkali is joint owner of Belarusian Potash Corporation (BPC) with Belaruskali, the Belarus potash exporter. Together, they control 25% of the world's potash production, supplying about 12 million tonnes of potash to the international market per annum. As a result, BPC has become the swing producer and market-setter for the global potash fertilizer trade, taking over from Canpotec, which trades for North American potash producers.
Uralkali says 40% of its exports went to China in 2007. This was cut in 2008 to 15% as the company sought to take advantage of higher spot and short-term contract prices in the Southeast Asian, Indian and US markets.
For 2009, Chinese importers have been delaying contract commitments on imports of potash, as they seek to lower prices for imports. Uralkali has responded by lowering potash supplies, cutting about 500,000 tonnes from production in the fourth quarter of 2008, and planning for a first-quarter cut of between 20% and 30% from annual capacity of about 5.5 million tonnes.
Meanwhile, Uralkali has come under pressure of a different sort. Moscow rumors of a takeover of the company, which is controlled by Geneva-based Dmitry Rybolovlev, has added to the downward pressure on Uralkali's share price and dramatically cut the company's market capitalization - and thereby its asset takeover price. At peak, in June 2008, Uralkali was valued at US$34.3 billion. It ended the year's trading on December 31 at $3.8 billion. The free-float in Uralkali's shares amounts to about 30%.
At the start of the two-week Russian New Year holiday on December 31, there was no announcement from the Ministry of Natural Resources of a ruling from the special commission, which had been ordered into action on October 29, to reassess Uralkali's liability for the subsidence at Mine-1 and the loss of the associated potash reserves. Nor was the ministry, or the investigating organ Rosteknadzor (Federal Environmental, Engineering, and Nuclear Inspection Service) commenting on the commission ruling, which had been promised before the month closed.
The government also remains silent on whether the commission decision is a preliminary to a state reorganization of the fertilizer sector, and the consolidation of Uralkali and Silvinit, the two potash producers, with PhosAgro's Apatit, a phosphate producer in which the government took over a 20% stake by a court ruling in early December. Apatit is Russia's dominant producer and exporter of apatite concentrate (phosphate). According to the federal government's position in the courts, Apatit was illegally privatized in the mid-1990s by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, who were convicted and sent to prison in 2004, principally for offences relating to the oil company Yukos and their Menatep banking group.
Uralkali itself has not commented on the takeover speculation; the company has been officially silent since December 25.
On December 26, Russian industry reports indicated that Uralkali had agreed at a meeting at the Ministry of Natural Resources in Moscow that it is ready to cover 3 billion rubles (US$103 million) of state budget expenses associated with the flooding of Mine 1, at Berezniki, in Perm region, since October 2006.
At the December 26 meeting, it has also been reported that Rosteknadzor reported its preliminary conclusions into the reasons behind the mine subsidence and flooding, and the potential fault or liability of the mine owner and operator, Uralkali. No word of these conclusions has so far leaked. Industry analysts judged that the signals from the meeting were positive for Uralkali. But the failure of the Russian government to announce anything definitive before the Russian holiday commenced on December 31 is anything but positive, at least for Uralkali's controlling shareholder, Rybolovlev.
Both Uralkali and Silvinit had announced earlier that they were each ready to contribute 1 billion rubles to the cost of construction by Russian Railways (RZD) of a 53-kilometer rail line that must be constructed to skirt the area of subsidence and ground risk. Ongoing negotiations with RZD have also been held since the October 29 meeting, when Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin initiated the new commission.
Sechin reportedly said at that meeting that the cost of the new rail line would be 13.4 billion rubles. An RZD source says that the estimate of cost by RZD ranges between 9 billion and 11 billion rubles. The difference in estimates, he explained, is that the larger one includes what RZD has already spent on bypassing Uralkali's Mine-1 sink-hole, after the subsidence began two years ago.
Sechin is the most powerful figure in the Russian government after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the key official responsible for supervision of major mining and metal concessions. In 2003, he had led the government's attack on Khodorkovsky. He now chairs the board of the Rosneft oil company, the state-controlled concern which took over Yukos's oilfields after it had been broken up, following Khodorkovsky's conviction and government tax claims.
Sechin's interest then extended to the transportation of oil to Russia's export markets as he backed the ouster of chief executives of Russia's two largest tanker fleets, reorganized the management of the state oil pipeline company, Transneft, and promoted a costly new oil terminal on the Baltic Sea shore, plus a new pipeline to load it.
In expanding his supervision of the Russian oil sector, Sechin has clashed with Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller and Miller's prominent Kremlin supporter, President Dmitry Medvedev.
Sechin's interest in restructuring the Russian potash sector had been limited until the October 29 meeting. Before that, he had an interest in the court and shareholder conflicts over Apatit; and also in claims against Russia's leading ammonia producer and exporter, Togliatti Azot (ToAZ), which is controlled by Vladimir Makhlai. Gazprom, which supplies the gas for Togliatti Azot to convert into ammonia, has also had its own internal arguments over the company's future.
Makhlai was able to fight off a challenge from the Renova group of Victor Vekselberg, an oligarch with interests in the TNK-BP oil company and its gasfields, winning a recent appeal against lower court rulings to annul the privatization of a 6% stake in ToAZ dating from 1996. The pressure on Makhlai then intensified from other directions, and under threat of prosecution and arrest, he reportedly fled to London, where, according to London sources, he is seeking political asylum.
Not a word has been said officially, or speculated in print in Moscow, to suggest there is a link between Makhlai's predicament and Rybolovev's future. The only evidence that a parallel is suspected is in the dramatic fall in Uralkali's share price between October and November. Since then, however, the share price has drifted modestly upwards on the reassurances issued from the Ministry of Natural Resources.
If the new government commission rules to limit the financial exposure of Uralkali and other companies using the new Berezniki rail line, then Rybolovlev's shareholding can be expected to be unaffected. Uralkali's share price and market capitalization should rise once share trading resumes this month. The company is being supported by Minister of Natural Resources Yury Trutnev, who was mayor of Perm city and then governor of Perm region before taking his federal post in 2004.
However, the opposition to Uralkali surfaced just before the December break, with a Russian wire service report attributed to unnamed government officials. This claimed that the government was considering the formation of a single fertilizer holding, buying Rybolovlev out and combining Uralkali, Silvinit and Apatit.
Uralkali and Silvinit appear to be unaware of the proposal, while industry sources believe that the publication may have been prompted by efforts of domestic fertilizer consumer groups to persuade the government to take a stronger role in regulating sector output, supply and pricing.
In a report by Troika Dialog analyst Mikhail Stiskin, it was noted that the idea of forming a state-owned company in the fertilizer industry has been discussed in the government many times over several recent years, "but it has never led to anything, as its realization was fairly complex and mechanics unclear". The relative smallness of the sector and the recent high market capitalization of the listed companies have also deterred state action.
According to Stiskin, this "has markedly changed recently, warranting increased interest from the state. A merger between Uralkali and Silvinit would make perfect economic sense, as both entities mine the same ore body and used to be a single company in Soviet times. A merger with Apatit is a less straightforward idea, though one that is also reasonable, as it would enable the creation of a diversified fertilizer holding with exposure to potash and phosphates, an essential emulation of the strategy implemented by Canada’s PotashCorp and Mosaic."
Since the shareholders of the three companies are rivals, they are unlikely to agree to merge along the lines reported as under government consideration. For this reason, market speculation has focused on Sechin, and on the outcome of the commission of inquiry into Mine-1, to determine what will happen next.
If the Moscow market is right in suspecting Sechin of an ulterior motive, then it is near-certain he will run into the rivalry from Medvedev and the Gazprom group, to whom, it is likely, Rybolovlev has applied for help. There has been just one public sign of this. This came in a press conference by Medvedev's front man, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, who claimed in November that the government was interested in having "strong business", and no one wanted to bankrupt Uralkali. But Shuvalov, who has so far not dared to challenge Sechin directly, equivocated. Rybolovlev and Uralkali had been exonerated by the first government commission, Shuvalov said. However, if the second commission ruled differently, he said that a "new proprietor will be found".
The longer the suspense, the further Sechin's shadow is cast.
John Helmer has been a Moscow-based correspondent since 1989, specializing in the coverage of Russian business.
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