In Russia, Battle Between Rosneft and Private Firm Stirs Investment Worries<br />The dispute between Sistema and Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, dates back to a 2014 nationalization,<br />pitting two of the country’s most important companies against each other.<br />“The situation is a direct consequence of the plaintiffs, who must have known<br />that freezing our assets would lead to a technical default,” Mikhail Shamolin, Sistema’s director, said in a statement on Monday.<br />Sistema and its principal owner, Vladimir P. Yevtushenkov, have stayed away from politics — in one case, the company smoothly navigated<br />the ouster of a former mayor, even though many of its assets are in the city of Moscow, staying aloof from the political struggle.<br />The company said the technical default, a formal notice triggered by its failure to comply with some conditions on part of its debt, had occurred<br />because a court overseeing the case had frozen Sistema assets used as collateral for the loans.<br />“If Sistema wants to use a wholly formal process, such as freezing assets, to deceive its creditors,<br />that says a lot about the business style of this company,” he said.<br />“This conflict is causing a lot of harm to the investment attractiveness of Russia,” Aleksander Y. Abramov, a professor at the Russian Academy of National Economy<br />and Public Administration, said in a telephone interview.
