What happens to jobs at Otkritie if it’s acquired by Nomos?
Will Nomos, Russia’s 13th biggest bank, acquire Otkritie Financial Corp to create Russia’s second largest privately owned bank? The Financial Times puts the likelihood of it happening at 50:50. Some people are treating it as a certainty, however.
If you’re working at Otkritie,the prospect of being acquired by Nomos may exciting if you want to work for a large privately owned bank in Russia, it’s less exciting if you joined Otkritie because you wanted to work for a hungry, privately owned brokerage house that's planning its own IPO.
Otkritie staff will be absorbed into Nomos rather than the other way around. Nomos’s assets are three times higher than Otkritie’s and Otrkritie Securities only has around 100 employees. The Otkritie ‘culture’ seems unlikely to survive a merger as a result.
On the plus side, analysts point out that a merger with Nomos will drive down Otkritie’s funding costs, making its future more assured and potentially allowing it to expand further. Otkritie has hired heavily over the past year, but has been struggling to contain the fallout of a $160m fraudulent transaction allegedly committed by George Urumov, whom it hired from Knight Capital in 2011.
Otkritie claimed this week that Urumov’s sister bought a Ferrari, a luxury home in Spain, and a Bentley with the proceeds of the fraud.
