MDM Bank

MDM Bank (Russian: МДМ Банк) is a Russian Joint Stock commercial bank, one of Russia's largest private banks based in Novosibirsk. As of August 2009, the bank completed a merger with Novosibirsk-based URSA Bank. The new bank will operate under MDM Bank brand name as an Open Joint Stock Company, but the merger is actually structured as an acquisition of MDM by URSA. The new corporate headquarters will be based in Novosibirsk. The merger was announced in December 2008;^[1] MDM and URSA estimated that the new MDM Bank would have capital of 2.5 billion and total assets of 18.7 billion US dollars, although in practise the numbers ended up being somewhat lower.^[2]

Igor Kim, chairman and shareholder of URSA, has been the new bank's chief executive officer during the transition period; Oleg Vyugin chairs the board of the bank's holding company and the former MDM CEO Igor Kuzin is chief executive of the holding company.^[1]

MDM Bank was founded in December 1993 and holds a General Banking License issued by the Central Bank of Russia (#2361 dated 13 February 2003, which will be voided as the bank migrates under URSA Bank license #323).^[3] It had one of the highest credit ratings among privately-owned Russian banks – Standard & Poor's (BB, stable), Fitch Ratings (BB, stable) and Moody's (Ba1, stable) – and is the only Russian financial organization that has been given a public corporate governance rating by Standard & Poor's (6+).

URSA Bank was founded in 1990 as Sibakadembank by the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences. It was restructured from a privately held bank to a joint-stock bank in 1997. After a series of mergers with local Siberian banks, in 2006 Sibakadembank merged with Yekaterinburg-based Uralvneshtorgbank (established 1991) and assumed the new name, URSA Bank.

References

External links

As of June 18, 2008 sites of "old" MDM and URSA banks operate independently:

• MDM Bank (in English)
• URSA Bank (in English)