In a landmark case, Russia’s Prosecutor General's Office has filed a lawsuit to nationalise the Russian assets of UK-based Raven Russia, Russia's largest owner of warehouse properties, Kommersant daily reports citing unpublished court documents.

Notably, this would make the first case of reversing an exit deal of a major foreign company, as previously Raven quit Russia through an MBO (management buyout). As covered by bne IntelliNews, an MBO, sometimes with a buyback option for foreign owners, had been a go-to exiting strategy for major Western companies since the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine.

Raven Russia is Russia's largest owner of warehouse real estate with a portfolio of 1.9mn square metres. The company owns 17 logistics parks, 10 of them in the Moscow region, and the rest in major cities with over 1mn population. According to The Bell, the analysts estimated the market value of the company's Russian business at RUB75bn-RUB100bn ($1bn-$1.3bn).

The founders of Raven Russia are British investors Anton Bilton and Glyn Hirsch, but amid the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the company was delisted from the London Stock Exchange's Alternative Investment Market (AIM), sold to its Russian executives Igor Bogorodov and Yaroslav Shuvalov, and renamed Phoenix Property Group.

Now, reportedly, the Prosecutor General's Office has filed a lawsuit demanding that Raven Russia business be transferred in favour of the state, making two claims: buying up such “strategic assets” as logistics terminals in Russia without special government permission and illegally re-registering the company from Cyprus to UAE after the exit MBO.

According to the court documents cited by Kommersant, the British company “created the appearance of transferring the organisation to a jurisdiction friendly to the Russian Federation”, yet in fact “retained full control” over Russian strategic assets. Notably, the documents also highlight the “fictitious” buyer’s Bogorodov’s US citizenship.

To remind, since 2022 a special government commission approves any foreign asset sale (at a minimum discount of 50%) and the government is mulling at least two additional “exit taxes” for companies pulling out of Russia and their new local beneficiaries.

A presidential decree was also signed that paved the way for the nationalisation of foreign assets, already applied to Finnish and German energy majors Fortum and Uniper and brewing and dairy majors Carlsberg and Danone (latter two unabashedly handed to Vladimir Putin's cronies).

But until now none of the completed exit deals had been reversed.

As followed by bne IntelliNews, amid a large-scale redistribution of wealth in Russian elites following the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, a number of major assets privatised in the 1990s have been de-facto renationalised by the state. Lawsuits by the Prosecutor General's Office play a main role in reclaiming the assets for the state.

Previously, RBC business portal calculated that from the end of February 2022 to the beginning of November 2023, at least 55 lawsuits were filed to reclaim shares or real estate from private ownership in favour of the state. In particular, the largest cases were filed against the assets of the Siberian Coal Energy Company, the Rostov Optical and Mechanical Plant and the Ivanovo Heavy Machine-Tool Plant.

Nationalised assets also included Russia’s largest producers of wheat, soya, sugar beet, sunflower and rapeseed agro group AgroTerra has also been de-facto nationalised, followed by Russia's largest winery Kuban-Vino and major fishing and crab assets in the Far East.