ARMA preparing fourth tender for IDS Ukraine: company reiterates conditions for retaining asset
The National Agency of Ukraine for Finding, Tracing and Management of Assets Derived from Corruption and Other Crimes (Asset Recovery and Management Agency; ARMA) is preparing to announce the fourth tender to select a manager for the corporate rights of the IDS Ukraine group of companies (“Morshynska,” “Myrhorodska”). The previous third round was officially declared void due to an insufficient number of participants, as only one bid was submitted for the tender. IDS Ukraine has released an official statement on the situation and outlined the conditions without which the upcoming tender would lose its economic significance for the state.
Experts attribute the failure of the third round to the high legal and financial risks that ARMA included in the tender terms. Despite this, the Agency is determined to resume its search for an external manager for the producer, which holds about 40% of the bottled water market in Ukraine. Currently, the group’s companies employ over 3,000 people, and over the past four years, the amount of taxes paid has exceeded UAH 4 billion . The scale of this business is prompting IDS Ukraine’s management to insist on including requirements for a potential manager in the future management agreement with ARMA.
Among the critically important provisions that protect assets and employees, IDS Ukraine cites a complete ban on the disposal or write-off of property, a moratorium on staff reductions during the first six months, a requirement to maintain tax revenues at least at last year’s level, and the mandatory continuation of payments to mobilized employees, among others. The company emphasizes that the current management has fully complied with all these obligations since the first day of the full-scale war, which proves the feasibility of such measures in practice.
The manufacturer’s statement emphasizes that without strict conditions regarding the preservation of assets and social guarantees, the new selection process will lead to the destruction of the business. If officials consider these conditions too onerous and believe they will complicate the search for candidates, then the question arises as to the feasibility of the entire process.
“Unfortunately, in Ukraine today, officials and managers lack personal accountability for safeguarding seized assets. In this situation, the conditions we have proposed could partially protect businesses from depreciation ahead of a potential nationalization, which could take place in just a few months,” the company concludes.