RE: Forbes piece on CEO31 Aug 2021 12:59
Its behind a paywall but you can find it, Here's the text
From May 2021
Petropavlovsk: a token gesture
It’s never simple at Petropavlovsk. Even a clean-up operation by the London-listed Russian gold miner’s new management is creating more questions than answers.
Gazprombank this week signed off Petropavlovsk’s agreement to sell its 29.9 per cent stake in iron ore subsidiary IRC and free the company from $234m of linked credit line guarantees. Paying $10m for the IRC stake is Stocken, which Petropavlovsk calls a Liechtenstein-incorporated investment company.
Iron ore prices hit record highs in April, after it agreed the price in March 2020, so it looks a shrewd buy. But what exactly is Stocken?
Searches for the name lead only to a defunct website and dated references to its plans for a blockchain-powered token exchange. In a 2018 post on the Medium blogging platform, Stocken describes itself as an investment bank providing “tokenisation of shares of private Russian mining companies”. In the same year, the Russian news site IKSMedia interviewed Stocken chief executive Alexey Sizov, formerly of Renaissance Capital and JPMorgan, who said the exchange would be open for business within a few months.
Having missed that target and gone dark, the Stocken project seems to have come back to life of late. Its head of marketing has recently been advertising on Facebook for new recruits to its Moscow office.
How Stocken’s ownership of IRC fits with its earlier plans to revolutionise equities trading is unclear, since the shares already trade on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Such details won’t matter overly to Petropavlovsk, however, which is now rumoured to be weighing up a name change to something less Russian as a way to draw a line under its recent past.