Metinvest, the largest Ukrainian mining and metallurgical holding owned by Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov, bought the Dniprovsky Metallurgical Plant for $330 million (Hr 9 billion) on July 26, open data auction platform Prozorro showed.
The Dniprovsky Metallurgical Plant, located in Kamianske, a city of 235,000 people in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, is one of the largest mining and steelmaking facilities in the country, employing roughly 9,000 people.
The leading steelmaking plant serves as an important link in the steel production chain in Ukraine.
Metinvest, which bought the plant through his subsidiary company Dniprovsky Coke Chemical Plant, now owns 70% of Ukraine’s steel production according to analytics website SteelOrbis.
In April 2019, the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU) had already allowed Metinvest to buy more than 50 percent of the shares in the Dniprovsky coke chemical plant, through which Akhmetov bought its latest acquisition.
The plant was put up for sale as part of a bankruptcy lawsuit in October 2019.
On May 20, 2021, the AMCU allowed Metinvest to buy the Dniprovsky Metallurgical Plant from the metal conglomerate Industrial Union of Donbas (IUD), co-owned by Ukrainian lawmaker and businessman Serhiy Taruta and Russian businessman Oleg Mkrtchan.
Once a billionaire co-founder of the steel holding Industrial Union of Donbas, where he still owns a 24.9 percent stake, Taruta suffered a precipitous loss in fortune. Factories that he owned — including the Alchevsk steelworks — have been seized by Russian-backed separatists, cutting off his cash flow.
Akhmetov’s Metinvest revenues for 2020 were $10.54 billion, with a net profit of $526 million.
