Jt5688
Player Valuation: £950k
There was a good piece in the Financial Times earlier this year setting out a lot of information on USM, which is a composite of Usmanov, Skoch, Moshiri. Usmanov controls it, but they are the three “main shareholders” - 48% Usmanov, 30% Skoch and 10% Moshiri (as of 2016 at least).
Skoch and Usmanov merged their companies - Moshiri is Chairman of the Board, but Usmanov is the decision maker and one who holds power. He dropped to less than 50% in 2014 after the Russians invaded Crimea - this just so happens to be the level at which sanctions from the US apply.
Usmanov is very close to some very powerful people - good relationship with Putin, and related by marriage and extremely close to the Uzbek dictator - Mirziyoyev.
Alexei Skoch, the S in USM is also something of a red flag. He lent Moshiri $14m in 1993 - an unfathomable amount in newly capitalist Russia at that time. Supposedly he turned this into $84m in a year and they went into business together. In 1999 Skoch went into the Russian parliament (the Duma), at which point he transferred his 30% to his father Vladimir. In 2014, the US placed Alexei under sanctions for long-standing ties to Russian organised crime.
The worry I have is whether or not UEFA consider USM a “related party”. Their definition of this is similar to, but less codified and more subjective than the rules of a developed stock exchange like the LSE. For examples related entities include where:
“One entity has significant influence over the other entity”
“One entity is an associate or joint venture of the other entity”
Now, by my reading of this, USM is probably not a related party, but I don’t know what the threshold is in terms of cross holdings that Moshiri has or the fact that he sits on their board. They must have discussed this with UEFA though, like they did with the stadium naming options.
I read that it does mean though that there’s no way Usmanov can own any part of EFC and still sponsor anything using USM.
