Prominvestbank Purgatory
All multiple possible outcomes look bad
The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs. - Thomas Kuhn
If everyone had a their own personal investment adviser and they all predicted large transactions in Ukraine’s financial sector during 2021 then nobody would buy anything.
The forecast would be automatically negated by critics who say the exact opposite. It's a kind of liar's paradox for economists who think its a better idea to take an inductive approach to buying and selling assets of a country in time of war.
The economy in Ukraine, like anywhere else, is the set of ongoing arrangements market players make. The operative word is ongoing - because the situation keeps on changing. It's the arrangements and actions taken to fulfil needs. It could be barter, Donbas cash-for-coal deals on the the contact line, or it could be a villager engaged in subsistence farming who doesn't want to sell his land plot to the nearby factory that makes chicken feed.
The essence of economics is mergers and acquisitions and prices and things being produced. In the standard neoclassical economic sense that’s very important, but the essence of economics is people trying to make decisions in a situation where other people are trying to make decisions.
It's not just complicated. It's complex.
An example that's totally trivial is the Russia-owned Prominvestbank (PIB), which loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to corrupt Kremlin-friendly Ukrainian state monopolies during the 2000s.
In March 2020, Ukraine’s Justice Ministry sold 99.8% of PIB shares on the Ukraine’s PFTS Stock Exchange to Russia’s state-owned VEB (Vneshekonombak), bypassing the decision of Stockholm arbitration and the standards of the National Bank of Ukraine.
The PIB asset essentially became “suitcase without a handle” after the deal because the bank’s new management tried to aggressively collect collateral and not engage in classic banking. VEB will eventually have to sue in international arbitration if it wants to get any of its money back.
The moral of the story is Russia owes Ukraine a lot of money. PIB’s loans to Ukraine’s state-owned railways Ukrzaliznytsia before Russia invaded are unlikely to be paid back anytime soon because any reimbursement would constitute an immoral - if not illegal - act that does not benefit Ukraine.
The strategy PIB’s supervisory board has come up with so far to solve the bank’s liquidity problem have been based on assumptions that the bank’s borrowers would be rational and could optimize their loan arrangements in any setting in order to privatize gains and nationalize losses. It has failed.
n.b. VR Capital Group’s so-far failed attempt to monetize high-quality non-performing loan collateral in “factoring agreements” involving PIB and Ukrzaliznytsia may ultimately succeed, although hopefully not in our lifetime.