Izvestia: "Vladimir Putin finds two Tom football clubs"
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised to find sponsors for the Tom Tomsk football club, which finds itself in severe financial straits. While meeting with students at the Tomsk Polytechnic University Putin answered the question that is constantly being put to him by residents of this city. Football supporter Alexander Hikulin once again asked the prime minister to rescue FC Tom Tomsk from bankruptcy. He did this once before when Putin met with football fans in St Petersburg on 19 January.
Earlier, Tomsk regional governor Viktor Kress had spoken out in support of his local team. In 2009 he asked Vladimir Putin to look into the issue of sponsorship for FC Tom Tomsk. The governor said that Putin had written in a letter to Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin a resolution entitled Working With Tomskneft Shareholders. At that time FC Tom Tomsk received money from a pool of seven state-owned companies (Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, Transneft, Tomskneftekhim, Territorial Generation company № 11, IDGC Holding and the Allianz group of companies), and in 2010 from six.
The Tomsk Region also helped out with financial support for the football club, providing them with state guarantees for loans with commercial banks. Deputy Governor of the Tomsk Region Alexander Fedenev told Izvestia that the club was only being asked to pay the interest on these loans. However, in 2011 only one company from the original pool was still funding the club - IDGC Holding. And after FC Tom Tomsk opened a criminal case in the autumn after money from the transfer of Pavel Pogrebnyak was stolen, the regional budget also cut off their financial support for the club.
Admittedly, this time Putin is being asked for less money, only 340 million roubles instead of the 480 million of two years ago. But how this figure was arrived at was something Vladimir Putin could not understand.
“In 2011 they’re again saying Give us some money, we liked it last time,” Putin told the students. “We gave them money but the companies we asked for help are not going to reach into their pockets again. They claim that FC Tom Tomsk has two faces, it exists both as a non-commercial partnership and as a joint-stock company.”
The organisational structure of the club was in such a muddle that sponsors were unable to find its ultimate beneficiaries. In addition, almost all the club’s shareholders have been declared bankrupt. Under these circumstances they are not prepared to continue financing the club.
Putin said that Rosneft’s subsidiaries and the division of Gazprom Neft who are operating in the Tomsk Region need to understand who the shareholders in FC Tom Tomsk are and what the management structure of the club is.
“If these are sober-minded shareholders or participants in a non-profit partnership, if it becomes clear who owns what and how the cash flows are distributed then they would be ready to offer stable funding tomorrow,” Putin suggested.
In conversation with Izvestia the club’s management immediately cited the address where money should be sent: Non-Commercial Partnership Tom Tomsk Football Club.
“Without entering into a dispute with the prime minister, I would like to point out that our city is situated on the banks of the River Tom, and there are dozens of organisations here that go by the name Tom,” said the club’s General director Yuri Stepanov. “In all the 14 years of its existence it has been a non-commercial partnership. As general director of the club I can say that the club has never existed in any other legal organisational format.”
Presumably Tomskneft is a shareholder in the club or member of the partnership. The company owns Rosneft and Gazprom Neft in equal shares. In addition, Yuri Stepanov is prepared for the club’s new owners to replace the entire management team.
“This is not about having certain companies simply as sponsors. They should join the club’s management structure and as co-founders determine policy and the development strategy and direct financial flows. Tom Tomsk is currently the only club in the country where all the power is concentrated in the hands of a hired manager,” said Stepanov. “I would have nothing against staying at the club but thinking about it right now just drives me crazy.”
Legally, according to the SPARK database, there are in fact at least two Tom football clubs in Tomsk. One, a non-commercial partnership, the one Stepanov is talking about, plays in the Russian Football Championship. The other, OAO Tom Tomsk Football Club, was founded in 1998. They are connected with one another: according to a report on the issue of securities for this company, a 100,000 rouble 10% share of this company belongs to the non-commercial partnership Football Club Tom, and on its board of directors is Boris Weinstein, who until 16 January 2012 worked as Stepanov’s deputy.
The telephone numbers given in the report for the OAO company belong to a private individual, who told Izvestia that he knows nothing about any football club. Yuri Stepanov himself said that OAO Tom Tomsk Football really was founded 13 years ago in order to drum up investment, that it had absolutely nothing to do with the team that played in the Russian Championship, was not engaged in any real activity and that everyone had forgotten about it now.
Ilya Desyaterik, Anastasia Novikova
