Shabalov Ivan Pavlovich biography. Trader Ivan Shabalov: pipe workers learned about the cancellation of the South Stream from the newspapers. Gazprom to Double Pipe Purchases

Such as in the winter of 2005, the quiet village of Babaevo on the border of the Vologda and Leningrad regions has never been seen. In a 30-degree frost, giant pipes were unloaded from the cars - with a diameter of almost human height. Tractors drove them to a cleared clearing, cranes laid out in a line that went beyond the horizon. On the railway tracks, they put up the same endless, hundreds of wagons, train loaded with pipes.

The performance was meant to impress a delegation led by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov and German Economy Minister Michael Gloss, who flew to Babaevo in mid-December to launch the construction of the North European Gas Pipeline. (North Stream) .

The author of the impressive scenery was the entrepreneur Ivan Shabalov, one of the leaders in the Forbes rating. "Kings of the state order" . Memories of this ceremony still make Shabalov smile with satisfaction. Foreigners could not even think that they were signing on a Russian-made pipe (the country's first line for the production of large-diameter pipes was put into operation just six months before the start of the construction of Nord Stream).

Shabalov says that he started working with Gazprom back when Reme Vyakhireva in the late 1990s. And by 2010, through his company, the Northern European Pipe Project (SETP), the concern had already purchased more than 60% of the pipes for its construction projects. Shabalov then completed the sale of this company old acquaintances of Vladimir Putin - brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. But he did not leave the game himself: last year his other company, Pipe Innovative Technologies (TIT), won tenders from Gazprom for a total of about 31.5 billion rubles.

So who is this master of scenery - an assistant to the almighty Rotenbergs or just a lucky businessman?

Enterprising scientist

The career of Ivan Shabalov, a graduate of MISIS, an employee of the Central Research Institute of Ferrous Metallurgy, developed quite successfully by Soviet standards, although it did not go beyond the institute. By the age of 32, he became deputy general director, defended his doctoral dissertation and traveled to almost all the metallurgical plants of the Soviet Union. “I made good money in college. I recently found a party card - in 1990, my average salary was 2,000 rubles a month, at that time a lot, - recalls Shabalov. “For 9,000 rubles, I then bought myself a Zhiguli.”

But to sit all his life at the research institute was not part of his plans. When in 1991 an old acquaintance of Shabalov, the former general director of the Karaganda Iron and Steel Works Oleg Soskovets headed the Ministry of Metallurgy, he quickly made an appointment with the minister. “All right,” Soskovets said after listening to Shabalov, “sit down, take paper, write. "Statement. I ask you to fire me of your own free will. Did you write? Well, that's it." Taking the paper, Soskovets immediately granted the request and escorted Shabalov out of the office. “I didn’t understand anything at all, I went out into the corridor, what should I do next? Shabalov throws up his hands. “Almost on the street I was already, and then they call me back.” "Well, you understand? Soskovets asked sternly. “The leader always knows what he is doing.” On the same day, Shabalov was appointed general director of the foreign trade company TSK-Steel. And when, two years later, Soskovets took the chair of the first deputy chairman of the government of the Russian Federation, Shabalov also became his adviser.

Shabalov was born in the city of Chirchik, 40 km from Tashkent - several industrial enterprises were evacuated here during the war. The choice of where to go to work was not for Ivan: “Of course, metallurgy. It was such a rich industry." After school, he got a job at a combine of refractory and heat-resistant metals, received a referral and went to enter MISIS. “I applied for the most promising faculty - metal forming. During the holidays I went to work. At the plant named after Ilyich, for example, he worked at the cold rolling mill in the team of one Hero of Socialist Labor. I earned 250 rubles in a month, but this worker drove me all over the camp, through all the stands, ”says Shabalov. He graduated from the institute with honors, entered graduate school and got a job at the Central Research Institute of Chermet.

The Soviet-Swiss joint venture "TSK-Steel" rented premises for its representative office in the building of the same research institute. So Shabalov knew well both the company itself and its then head, the future NLMK owner Vladimir Lisin . The joint venture, which turned out to be a goldmine, was established back in 1989 Karaganda Iron and Steel Works (its CEO was then Soskovets) and the Swiss trader Sytco. The Swiss, says Shabalov, brought equipment, the plant allocated areas on which several hundred people worked, “it turned out to be a small plant that processed rejected steel, and also supplied the resulting products for export.”

In fact, only state intermediaries were allowed to export metals abroad, but the bans did not apply to marriage. The joint venture's foreign exchange earnings reached "tens of millions of dollars a month," says Shabalov. Partially, with this money, spare parts for tape recorders, radio tape recorders, food processors, televisions were purchased, the screwdriver assembly of which was organized right there at the plant. All this was a "terrible deficit" in the USSR.

Accounts were opened for employees of the joint venture in Beryozka stores, to which part of the salary was received; executives went on business trips abroad and could afford, for example, a mobile phone (the first devices weighing 3 kg in 1991 cost $4,000 from Delta Telecom).

The activities of the joint venture could not but arouse the interest of local clans and criminals. Newspapers wrote that in the early 1990s, the KGB and the prosecutor's office of Kazakhstan were investigating the case of the "Temirtau mafia" at the Karaganda Iron and Steel Works. And in 1992, Alexander Svichinsky, Soskovets' successor, was shot from a sawn-off shotgun right on the threshold of the plant management.

Shabalov explains that the attack on the general director was organized by former employees of the plant fired by the director (the killers and organizers were found and imprisoned. - Forbes), and the “Temirtau mafia” is a myth created by several law enforcement officers. They profited from the money and property of the joint venture seized during the searches and were later dismissed from the bodies. The case was closed.

The well-established work of the joint venture was interrupted with the collapse of the USSR - non-payments began, ties between plants were broken, the Karaganda Iron and Steel Works was privatized. When barter and offset schemes began, Shabalov realized that it was possible to earn money by restoring production chains between enterprises of the former Soviet Union, and in 1995 he registered his first trading company, Russian Chrome.

Larger image

trader in the civil service

“The Kachkanar GOK received gas, could only pay with ore, Gazprom was not interested in the ore, it was taken to the Orsk-Khalilovsky Iron and Steel Works, it produced billets, it was taken to pipe plants, etc.,” lists the links of only one of its barter chains of Shabals. Not only did no one have money, but also “people changed every day,” he throws up his hands. - With whom you will run into at the combines tomorrow - you don’t know what can happen - you don’t know either. It was such an original time.” The redistribution of the metallurgical market in the 1990s is raider seizures, shooting and blood. “Some Nizhny Tagil Iron and Steel Works could be bought for $2-4 million,” recalls Shabalov. He himself bought up shares of smaller metallurgical enterprises, but quickly changed his mind: “I saw this world very well, but I didn’t want to see myself inside it.”

Shabalov managed even briefly to head a large metallurgical production - in 1999, the co-owner of the group Autobank Andrei Andreev invited him to the post of general director of the Orsk-Khalilovsky plant (Nosta). “Shabalov was very well versed in metallurgy,” Andreev recalls in a conversation with Forbes. “Besides, I hoped that he would be able to provide the plant with raw materials.” But very soon troubles fell on Andreev's head, the apotheosis was the seizure of his assets by "business sharks" led by the structures of Oleg Deripaska. In this situation, Shabalov “one of the few behaved decently and did not pour water on the mill of my opponents,” says Andreev. Shabalov, by his own admission, also has something to regret: Nosta owes him about $10 million for raw materials that the company of the general director supplied to the plant. The fact that Shabalov was earning at the factory did not bother Andreev. “They are now hiring managers without their own business,” he assures. “Then people with experience had a business, and we were not interested in this, but whether their team could organize everything.”

“Deripaska's people”, who became the new owner of the plant, offered to buy receivables from Shabalov, but they insisted on a 50% discount. “According to my morals, it is impossible to negotiate on such terms,” Shabalov explains gloomily. - I did not agree and preferred to simply give this receivable.

As a businessman, Shabalov focused on trading, and as an adviser to Soskovets, he focused on fulfilling important government assignments. Whenever the Russian government tried to get a gas debt out of Ukraine, he went to negotiate with local metallurgists, the largest consumers of raw materials. “I knew the owners of Ukrainian plants well. For example, Victor Pinchuk - in general since the end of the 1980s, ”explains Shabalov.
At that time, Shabalov names Vyakhirev's deputies, Vyacheslav Sheremet and Alexander Pushkin, as his counterparties in Gazprom. However, neither one nor the other in a conversation with Forbes, no matter how hard they tried, could not remember Shabalov. But he is well remembered by the former Minister of Industry of Ukraine Valeriy Mazur. He has known Shabalov since the days of the Central Research Institute of Chermet and says that Soskovets' adviser's entrepreneurial spirit has always been stronger than his love for science.

Entry to Gazprom

“I saw that Gazprom needed good equipment, good service, and pipe workers were also looking for contact with the concern,” recalls Shabalov. The first attempt to agree on everything, according to him, was made in the late 1990s, and the initiator was the future owner of Metalloinvest Alisher Usmanov . Together with Gazprom, Usmanov then achieved control over the Oskol Electrometallurgical Plant and Lebedinsky GOK. Usmanov proposed to create a base for Gazprom at these enterprises. The project fell on the table to Vyakhirev, but he instructed to coordinate it with other metallurgists. And they, of course, objected to the creation of a powerful competitor. Usmanov's idea “smoothly died, but left a trace,” Shabalov jokes.

He himself went the other way, deciding first to negotiate with trumpeters . It was not a big deal: “I have known all these people for many years. For example, Tolya Sedykh [the main owner of OMK] came to work at TsNIIChermet a couple of years after me. I worked with pipe enterprises of Dima Pumpyansky [TMK] according to credit schemes, I knew Alexander Fedorov and Andrey Komarov [ChTPZ group] from the Orsk-Khalilovsky plant.” “Ivan Pavlovich is a professional metallurgist, he has been in the industry for 30 years and knows it perfectly, in addition, he is well versed in the gas market,” comments Andrey Komarov, Chairman of the Board of Directors of ChelPipe. Pumpyansky also confirmed to Forbes that he has known Shabalov since the mid-1990s. “I promised the metallurgists two things,” recalls Shabalov enthusiastically, “firstly, that I would never enter the pipe industry myself, and secondly, that I would love them all equally.”

So the pipe makers agreed to create an Association of pipe manufacturers, and Shabalov was to become the chairman of its coordinating council. In 2002, they prepared a program for the development of the pipe industry. The first time, Gazprom turned it down, but the following year (“to our great surprise”) approved it, says Shabalov: the proposal “resonated” with Alexei Miller, who replaced Vyakhirev at the head of Gazprom. Moreover, Shabalov assures that at that time he did not even know Miller: “We sent the program by mail, and then they just called me and said that there was a solution.”

The association, officially established in 2004, includes both Gazprom and pipe manufacturers. But neither before nor after this event did Gazprom give metallurgists any guarantees for purchases. “Of course, it was a risk,” Shabalov shrugs, “because metallurgists huge investments had to be made in their factories.” The only way to minimize this risk they saw in the general program for the development of the industry signed by Miller. The trumpeters received the signature, and the program approved in 2003 turned out to be very realistic in the end. In less than 10 years, pipe manufacturers have invested more than $10 billion in the industry and now cover the Russian market's need for pipes by almost 100%, says OMK President Vladimir Markin.

And what did Shabalov himself get from this? He continued the trading business, becoming an intermediary.

Communication through Germany

“There were no strict agreements with metallurgists that they would supply pipes to Gazprom only through my companies. There are good conditions – we work, there are no conditions – we don’t work,” Shabalov assures. He founded the trading company "Northern European Pipe Project" in 2005, and a year later his second structure appeared - "Pipe Innovation Technologies". Of course, both became major pipe suppliers for Gazprom. In 2007, the total revenue of SETP and TIT reached almost 50 billion rubles, and further, with the exception of the difficult year 2009, this figure only grew. In 2010, the revenue of SETP alone approached 90 billion rubles and accounted for over 60-70% of the total supply large diameter pipes"Gazprom". “I think that random people do not win the Gazprom tender for LDP,” Mikhail Korchemkin, head of East European Gas Analysis, comments on these transactions. - It's like in the construction of gas pipelines - Stroygazmontazh of the Rotenberg brothers and Stroygazconsulting of Ziyad Manasir win tenders.

But the phenomenal successes of Shabalov were not limited to this. In 2005, one of the largest suppliers of German large-diameter pipes to Gazprom was the German Europipe. It supplied 97% of longitudinally welded pipes for Russian oil and gas pipelines. However, since 2006, the company has assigned the exclusive rights to supply its products to Russia and the CIS to the German Eurotube. Why did Europipe need an intermediary? “In other export directions, they used to trade through traders,” Waldemar Grust, one of the co-owners of Eurotube, answers this question. “The same, however, as Mannesmann, although at first his own company acted as a trader.”

But Eurotube was created not by a native of Mannesmann Greust, but by the same Ivan Shabalov. He says that he offered Europipe services for the sale of their products to domestic nuclear power engineers, automakers and, of course, oilmen. As a result, the German trader began working with Rosatom, Transneft and other Russian companies that consumed a large number of specific pipes. And the services of Eurotube, in addition to Europipe, began to be used by some other European manufacturers.

At the start of the project, Shabalov invited Grust and his former Mannesmann colleague Klaus Raermann to join Eurotube, who were supposed to manage the company on the spot. For this, Shabalov offered them 50% of the trader's shares. “After a year or two, we already reached a turnover of about €100 million,” he says, “due to the fact that initially we set the condition for manufacturers that they should be exclusive suppliers on the Russian market.”

How did Shabalov, who, for example, does not have roots in St. Petersburg, manage to turn around in Gazprom? Moreover, next to him all these years, powerful competitors have been gaining strength - the leaders of the "Kings of the State Order" rating, the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg.

“We met Boris Rotenberg in the winter of 2002-2003,” says Shabalov. - He had an interest in the pipe theme, he called, we met in St. Petersburg. It was a very comfortable conversation. Then the three of us met -
with Arkady. They asked how the pipe industry would develop, where the market would go. They wanted to see if it makes sense to be in this business.” And, it seems, Shabalov painted cloudless prospects for new acquaintances.

Traders for the Rotenbergs

Since the mid-2000s, only a select few began to supply pipes for Gazprom - the concern has set a course to reduce the number of intermediaries. This is because "more than half of Gazprom's counterparties were one-day firms, you can stick around and you won't find any ends," explains Shabalov. To "clean up" the procurement system, one of Gazprom's subsidiaries established a company "Gaztaged" , he claims. And Boris Rotenberg became the owner of 25% of this company in 2003.

The general public did not suspect the existence of Gaztaged until 2005, when a minority shareholder of the concern declared war on Gazprom - fund Hermitage Capital . Fund director Vadim Kleiner then published data that Gaztaged was selling pipes to Gazprom for up to $1 billion a year, and the concern's expenses on materials were only growing (by 82% in 2004, while producer prices rose by only 29%) .

Hermitage raised such a scandal in the press and among minority shareholders, who counted on the growth of dividends and the value of shares, that Gazprom decided to get rid of the irritant of public opinion. The liquidation of Gaztaged, according to Shabalov, was entrusted to him - "so the shareholders decided."

In 2009, Shabalov became the general director of the trader in order to gradually close all the contracts hanging on him. Gastaged was liquidated in 2010. Gaztaged's business was clean, he assures: the company worked for a modest commission of 0.2-0.3%, and numerous checks of the trader by tax authorities and other controllers did not reveal anything. “In our country, [Russian] traders are treated badly in general,” Shabalov laments. - before any Glencore will be bowed down, and our company will simply be crushed into powder.”

But Boris Rotenberg, it seems, was not satisfied with a profitability of 0.2% for long. Back in 2007, he registered two companies with the unpretentious names Pipe Industry and Pipe Metal Roll, which continued to trade with Gazprom. From 2007 to 2009, the total turnover of these companies, according to Rosstat, amounted to 75.8 billion rubles.

And in the same 2007, the Rotenbergs began to officially penetrate Shabalov's business. At first they were interested in Eurotube. “I sold them two-thirds of my 50% stake,” says Shabalov (he has 16.65% left - Forbes). He did not disclose the amount of the deal. The German co-founders, Greust says, did not object to the appearance of the Rotenbergs among the owners. It was Shabalov's lot, and they didn't interfere. Although he cannot assess whether the appearance of the brothers contributed to the development of the company.

And in 2010, Shabalov sold his 60% stake in SETP to the Rotenbergs. From his story it turns out that in 2009 the Rotenbergs themselves turned to him with a proposal to unite the pipe business. Everything related to that deal has to be pulled out of Shabalov with tongs. As at the first meeting, the conversation with the Rotenbergs turned out to be “comfortable”. Shabalov chooses his words: “I tried to explain that I love independence in life, it’s easier for me to be alone. Of course, I can be wrong, and it happened - I lost money. But I have no one to blame but myself for this.” A month and a half later, they agreed on a deal. Its amount was never disclosed by the parties. “They offered me a good price, believe me,” Shabalov convinces us. - Bargained, of course. I named the price, they knocked down. Well, I also overestimated it from the very beginning.”

But when compared with the public pipe trader, the American Edgen Group, it turns out that the entire SETP at the time of the transaction could cost $600 million, and 60% of Shabalov - $360 million (the remaining stake belonged to TMK and OMK at that time, now SETP's capital includes all four manufacturer of large diameter pipes, including ChTPZ and Severstal).

Color decor

“The office of my first company was on Trubnaya Square, it’s just some kind of fate,” Shabalov jokes. Now his office and personal apartments are located in the Moscow business center "Legend of Tsvetnoy" on Tsvetnoy Boulevard. Shabalov bought part of the building (about 4,000 sq. m.) from the developer - Capital Group. He furnished his office for a long time and carefully. Love for the scenery is noticeable here. The room is crammed with details that should line up by themselves in an associative array. The world's financial capital is London, from there the clock at Shabalov's table, stylized as Big Ben. A huge aquarium is built into one of the walls, and all the furniture in the office is made to order by a company that equips yachts. Finally, instead of photographs of the leaders - a portrait of the industrialist Nikita Demidov.

But what if Shabalov himself is also a kind of decoration, a screen behind which the interests of other people are hidden? We won’t get an answer to this question, but it keeps spinning on the tongue, and here’s why.

According to Rosstat, the Rotenberg pipe business has always been much more profitable than that of their competitor Shabalov. Despite the fact that in 2007-2009 the total revenue of SETP was 1.6 times greater than that of the Rotenberg companies, their profit for the same time was almost 10 times higher (9.9 billion rubles against 1 billion rubles).

Does this mean that SETP's profits could have settled somewhere on the side? Shabalov argues that this is not the case, and the figures in the financial statements do not reflect the overall picture. As the SETP developed, it acquired more and more new functions (equipment, technical supervision, logistics, covering cash gaps, etc.), and the margin grew accordingly. According to him, SETP's profitability increased from a few percent to 8-9% by the time of the sale.

He also has another explanation: with the growth in turnover, SETP could increase lending limits and reduce purchases from other traders, which it needed just because of the restrictions on loans. But Shabalov does not name the names of these traders. By the way, the Rotenbergs brought the SETP profitability to 10-15%. It's just that Gazprom's purchases in 2010 and 2011 were record-breaking, Shabalov explains.

Another question is why Shabalov, who claims to highly value his independence, did not sell his entire stake in the European trader Eurotube to the Rotenbergs, but remained their partner? “I’m not so interested there anymore,” Shabalov replies with a smile: almost everything that was previously produced only in the West can now be made in Russia.

It is also surprising that the prudent Rotenbergs, having bought out SETP, agreed that such a strong competitor as Shabalov would remain in this business. And so, for example, in 2012, Pipe Innovative Technologies outperformed the Rotenbergs in the Gazprom tender by 18.3 billion rubles.

Shabalov claims that he himself insisted on staying in the pipe business: “[When selling SETP], I immediately made a reservation that I should have the right to work in this market - there should not be any moratorium. From the very beginning I understood that I would not leave this business, I still have a lot of ideas, a lot needs to be done.” As for competition, it is not so often that he and the Rotenbergs intersect. “We do not divide the market, we do not agree - everyone has their own way in business. I just try to take those contracts that are more difficult to execute.

“This is artificial competition,” comments Mikhail Korchemkin. “It is strange that Gazprom, the only buyer of pipes with a diameter of 1400 mm in Russia, purchases pipes through intermediaries. And not just pipes. Therefore, 1 km of a gas pipeline in the south of the European part of Russia costs 2-3 times more than on a similar project in Germany or the Czech Republic.”

Alexander Levinsky
Irina Malkova

Our ancestors created the country not so that a handful of political adventurers, obviously unable to answer for their own words and deeds even to us, personified our Motherland in the international arena with pronounced selfish interests. First, it's insulting. And here I mean, first of all, the older generation, who left the stage robbed and humiliated, who created the country's oil and gas industries for the development and prosperity of the whole society, and not so that notorious nonentities, like St. from themselves "leaders", to open their mouths in the international arena as "representatives of the nation".

What suits the West there, what opinion do other countries have… frankly, purple. If only because these countries benefited from the destruction of 30 million people in Russia, the destruction of normal specialists was beneficial, the collapse of education, healthcare, social guarantees and the welfare of the population was beneficial. It was beneficial for them for a long time to have from Russia as "representatives" - outright crime. They have more understanding with such people.

From an engineering point of view, a barrier to the penetration of obviously criminal elements into power, the protection of a normal law-abiding population. able to work productively for the good of the Motherland, as well as protecting the domestic market from Western expansion - was domestic regulatory space.

It was possible to destroy the domestic normative space only with the participation of special services, whose task was to protect it. Therefore ... what doubts there are that the special services, which have always carried out monopoly communications with the foreign sector, have betrayed the people and the country, counting on a complete understanding of the West.

Could such results be achieved by pegging the ruble to foreign currencies without the approval of the West? This is beneficial because it certainly is not for us.

The MICEX ruble index (MICEX) lost 2.98% during trading on the Moscow Exchange and amounted to 1696.49 points. The RTS dollar index fell by 4.77% to 701.8 points.

We also note that world oil prices continue to decline today. February futures for WTI light crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) fell 2.02% to $32.49 per barrel. On the London ICE Futures Exchange, futures for Brent crude for February delivery fell 1.77% to $32.49 a barrel.

And this is precisely the main result of the entry to the international level of those who have always been approved by the West.

Vladimir Putin gave an interview to the German magazine Bild. Western publications noticed in the arguments of the Russian president accusations against NATO and the United States, a statement about the absurdity of sanctions and recognition of difficulties in the economy. The West does not want cooperation with Russia. So is it worth throwing pearls in front of pigs?

Reuters version. The Russian version of the interview is published on the Kremlin website. Reuters begins the review by saying that Russia "wants to fight terrorism together with the rest of the world." "We are facing common threats, and we still want all countries to join forces in the fight against these threats, and we still strive for this," Putin was quoted as saying by the agency.

However, the author of the review immediately emphasizes that the Russian president is not constructive. "He repeated his accusations against the West at the UN General Assembly in September." These are allegations that "previous Western military interventions in Iraq and Libya have contributed to the surge in terrorism."

Putin also pointed to the main mistake of the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union - the expansion of NATO and the movement of the missile defense system to the borders of Russia, again "accusing the West of the expansion of the Cold War, which led to the aggravation of international crises, in particular, the Ukrainian conflict," Reuters continues.

Of course, all this became possible with the cessation of the development of our society, with the destruction of the industrial potential. If the West does not need another “blah blah” of Putin about the “fight of terrorism”, then all this is past the money for us.

But oil and gas are flowing down pipelines in different directions in order to rob Russia even more. And who is left with the profit? And complete squalor, dummy figurines, for a while portraying "effective owners."

Here is an article with personalities of such squalor ... which the West definitely does not intend to tolerate as "Putin's friends." A strange result of the "fight against terrorism", to be honest.

How Ivan Shabalov became a supplier of Gazprom and a partner of "Putin's friends"

Ivan Shabalov Photo by Dmitry Ternovoy for Forbes

Ivan Shabalov built a business that involves Russian metallurgical enterprises, the Rotenberg brothers, and Gazprom, the country's main monopoly

Traders for the Rotenbergs

Since the mid-2000s, only a select few began to supply pipes for Gazprom - the concern has set a course to reduce the number of intermediaries. This is because "more than half of Gazprom's counterparties were one-day firms, you can stick around and you won't find any ends," explains Shabalov. To "clean up" the procurement system, one of Gazprom's subsidiaries established the company Gaztaged, he claims. And Boris Rotenberg became the owner of 25% of this company in 2003.

The general public did not suspect the existence of Gaztaged until 2005, when the minority shareholder of the concern, the Hermitage Capital fund, declared war on Gazprom. Fund director Vadim Kleiner then published data that Gaztaged was selling pipes to Gazprom for up to $1 billion a year, and the concern's expenses on materials were only growing (by 82% in 2004, while producer prices rose by only 29%) .

Hermitage raised such a scandal in the press and among minority shareholders, who counted on the growth of dividends and the value of shares, that Gazprom decided to get rid of the irritant of public opinion. The liquidation of Gaztaged, according to Shabalov, was entrusted to him - "so the shareholders decided." In 2009, Shabalov became the general director of the trader in order to gradually close all the contracts hanging on him. Gastaged was liquidated in 2010. Gaztaged's business was clean, he assures: the company worked for a modest commission of 0.2-0.3%, and numerous checks of the trader by tax authorities and other controllers did not reveal anything. “In our country, [Russian] traders are treated badly in general,” Shabalov laments. “Glencore will be bowed down before, and our company will simply be crushed.”

But Boris Rotenberg, it seems, was not satisfied with a profitability of 0.2% for long. Back in 2007, he registered two companies with the unpretentious names Pipe Industry and Pipe Metal Roll, which continued to trade with Gazprom. From 2007 to 2009, the total turnover of these companies, according to Rosstat, amounted to 75.8 billion rubles.

And in the same 2007, the Rotenbergs began to officially penetrate Shabalov's business. At first they were interested in Eurotube. “I sold them two-thirds of my 50% stake,” says Shabalov (he has 16.65% left - Forbes). He did not disclose the amount of the deal. The German co-founders, Greust says, did not object to the appearance of the Rotenbergs among the owners. It was Shabalov's lot, and they didn't interfere. Although he cannot assess whether the appearance of the brothers contributed to the development of the company.

And in 2010, Shabalov sold his 60% stake in SETP to the Rotenbergs. From his story it turns out that in 2009 the Rotenbergs themselves turned to him with a proposal to unite the pipe business. Everything related to that deal has to be pulled out of Shabalov with tongs. As at the first meeting, the conversation with the Rotenbergs turned out to be “comfortable”. Shabalov chooses his words: “I tried to explain that I love independence in life, it’s easier for me to be alone. Of course, I can be wrong, and it happened - I lost money. But I have no one to blame but myself for this.” A month and a half later, they agreed on a deal. Its amount was never disclosed by the parties. “They offered me a good price, believe me,” Shabalov convinces us. - Bargained, of course. I named the price, they knocked down. Well, I also overestimated it from the very beginning.”

But when compared with the public pipe trader, the American Edgen Group, it turns out that the entire SETP at the time of the transaction could cost $600 million, and 60% of Shabalov - $360 million (the remaining stake belonged to TMK and OMK at that time, now SETP's capital includes all four manufacturer of large diameter pipes, including ChTPZ and Severstal).

Color decor

“The office of my first company was on Trubnaya Square, it’s just some kind of fate,” Shabalov jokes. Now his office and personal apartments are located in the Moscow business center "Legend of Tsvetnoy" on Tsvetnoy Boulevard. Shabalov bought part of the building (about 4,000 sq. m.) from the developer - Capital Group. He furnished his office for a long time and carefully. Love for the scenery is noticeable here. The room is crammed with details that should line up by themselves in an associative array. The world's financial capital is London, from there the clock at Shabalov's table, stylized as Big Ben. A huge aquarium is built into one of the walls, and all the furniture in the office is made to order by a company that equips yachts. Finally, instead of photographs of the leaders - a portrait of the industrialist Nikita Demidov.

But what if Shabalov himself is also a kind of decoration, a screen behind which the interests of other people are hidden? We won’t get an answer to this question, but it keeps spinning on the tongue, and here’s why.

According to Rosstat, the Rotenberg pipe business has always been much more profitable than that of their competitor Shabalov. Despite the fact that in 2007-2009 SETP's total revenue was 1.6 times greater than that of the Rotenberg companies, their profit over the same time was almost 10 times higher (9.9 billion rubles against 1 billion rubles).

Does this mean that SETP's profits could have settled somewhere on the side? Shabalov argues that this is not the case, and the figures in the financial statements do not reflect the overall picture. As the SETP developed, it acquired more and more new functions (equipment, technical supervision, logistics, covering cash gaps, etc.), and the margin grew accordingly. According to him, the profitability of SETP increased from a few percent to 8-9% by the time of the sale.

He also has another explanation: with the growth in turnover, SETP could increase lending limits and reduce purchases from other traders, which it needed just because of the restrictions on loans. But Shabalov does not name the names of these traders. By the way, the Rotenbergs brought the SETP profitability to 10-15%. It's just that Gazprom's purchases in 2010 and 2011 were record-breaking, Shabalov explains.

Another question is why Shabalov, who claims to highly value his independence, did not sell his entire stake in the European trader Eurotube to the Rotenbergs, but remained their partner? “I’m not so interested there anymore,” Shabalov replies with a smile: almost everything that was previously produced only in the West can now be made in Russia.

It is also surprising that the prudent Rotenbergs, having bought out SETP, agreed that such a strong competitor as Shabalov would remain in this business. And so, for example, in 2012, Pipe Innovative Technologies outperformed the Rotenbergs in the Gazprom tender by 18.3 billion rubles.

Shabalov claims that he himself insisted on staying in the pipe business: “[When selling SETP], I immediately made a reservation that I should have the right to work in this market - there should not be any moratorium. From the very beginning I understood that I would not leave this business, I still have a lot of ideas, a lot needs to be done.” As for competition, it is not so often that he and the Rotenbergs intersect. “We do not divide the market, we do not agree - everyone has their own way in business. I just try to take those contracts that are more difficult to execute.

“This is artificial competition,” Mikhail Korchemkin comments. “It is strange that Gazprom, the only buyer of pipes with a diameter of 1400 mm in Russia, purchases pipes through intermediaries. And not just pipes. Therefore, 1 km of a gas pipeline in the south of the European part of Russia costs 2–3 times more than on a similar project in Germany or the Czech Republic.”

Here is such a "light", Lord forgive me. And others, as everyone understands, will not. There are others, only they are neither for a star nor for the Red Army. Only hang on ties.

Let's return to our topic about pipes and pipelines ...

Let me remind you that in May 2014 he decided to celebrate holidays on the Black Sea. But they took him and didn't let him in.

How many shouts were ... against the Bulgarian tomatoes. And then it turns out that they are quietly negotiating and winking at each other, raising the price of the “national treasure”.

SOFIA, 11 January. /Corr. TASS Igor Lenkin/. Work on the South Stream project will be resumed in the next few weeks. According to the Standard newspaper, "Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov received a similar signal from Russia."

“There are two main reasons why Moscow will resume the project, which was frozen in the summer of 2014 by the Oresharski cabinet (Plamen Oresharski is the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, who, after meeting with a group of US senators, announced in 2014 that the project was frozen). One of them is a sharp deterioration in relations between Russia and Turkey. The second reason is the recession of the Chinese economy, due to which the Power of Siberia, a gas pipeline that is supposed to deliver blue fuel to China, is stalling, the publication claims, citing experts and sources in the government, the reanimated South Stream project will meet the requirements of Brussels and fit into the EU-supported idea of ​​building the Balkans gas distribution center, which cannot be realized without Russian gas.”

According to the newspaper, the gas pipeline construction project is likely to be one of the items on the agenda of the meeting of the Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation, which will be held in Sofia at the end of January after a five-year break.

On December 1, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that under the current conditions, Russia would not implement the South Stream project. In turn, the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, noted that the South Stream project is no longer relevant. In December 2014, the Italian Saipem, which is part of the Eni group, the Italian partner of Gazprom, received a notification about the suspension of South Stream. The South Stream project worth €15.5 billion was designed to supply Europe with 67 billion cubic meters. m of gas per year.

Just note that here they found an “Italian partner”, only to unscrew their own shish! And they have an intergovernmental commission ... all the rank of plane trees. After all, they are only declaring “international sanctions” for us to impose on Israel instead of Egypt and Turkey.

All trips to China, therefore, were initially a failure. Well, even China does not want to save at the cost of worsening the living standards of those who have already robbed their citizens, moreover, for real national wealth, which they had no right to dispose of outside the interests of the national economy.

What is relevant for Russia at the moment, Russia knows better. You say, dear Western partners: Frozen galleries? Or do you need more than just gas? I am tormented by vague doubts - you need help and urgently! And you are ready to forget everything, continue negotiations on the South Stream, turn inside out, if only Russia would get involved in your showdown with refugees! Or even worse, with the Pindos? Well, well ... Then they invited His Serene Highness to Munich ... wait for an answer ... wait for an answer ... wait for an answer ... .

I remember the 90s, when questions about a unified state infrastructure first arose ... Well, or about that. that the current camarilla, representing the republics of the former USSR, does not have state thinking in its infancy. Yes, and where can he come from if we are dealing with people who are unable to think with the breadth of the Soviet scale, who decided to simply appropriate the national property by the methods of "privatization".

Already in the 1990s, it was clear what the destruction of a professional ministerial management system entails, when corporations like OAO Gazprom suddenly begin to represent the country, which can easily be declared a “national treasure”, explaining that such a level of corporation is “in itself” ... ministries.

These are people who do not understand that the main thing in the management of the industry is financial discipline and control. They came to rob the state, flush everything down the toilet, not realizing how quickly the money withdrawn from the economy depreciates.

And just in the 90s, a wonderful plan arose in these bright minds: to buy Turkmen gas for a pittance, pump it, selling it at a completely different price in the international arena. And this arena, with citizens who betrayed their homeland for the sake of their personal prosperity, began to begin at the first Ukrainian mound. Viktor Chernomyrdin entered such an "international arena" almost as an "international figure." Although the current situation with the gas conflict shows what an illiterate upstart and complete crap he is.

So then, on central television (how, they are “rulers”!) They showed a conversation between Vyakhirev and Chernomyrdin, where Vyakhirev smugly giggled about “Turkmenbashi”: “The client has not yet matured, but will soon mature!”

Both just did not realize that both would become unnecessary as soon as the Ministry of Oil and Gas Industry was finally destroyed, and all the clients were ripe. Ukraine was forgiven gas debts, and Chernomyrdin went there as an envoy of goodwill. Gazprom "got" to completely different people.

February 12, 2008 MOSCOW (Reuters) - Gazprom made a gift to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at five minutes to the last corporate party, the gas monopoly ordered British rock veterans Deep Purple, the favorite band of Gazprom's board of directors and successor Vladimir Putin.

Frontman Ian Gillan's attempts to rock the six-thousand-seat hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, where Gazprom celebrated its 15th anniversary on Monday, did not have much effect on the audience, which filled the Kremlin wardrobe with furs and the parking lot with limousines.

Six thousand well-dressed employees and friends of Gazprom steadfastly sat through the hour-long concert of the once "world's loudest" band in their places, only occasionally answering the rockers with clapping. Medvedev, who is leaving Gazprom in the event of an inevitable victory in the March presidential election, greeted the idols with a shake of his head. In the end, he gave vent to his feelings: he clapped his hands and tapped his foot without getting up from his chair.

Participation in what was happening on the stage was shown only by a small group of students and young employees of Gazprom, waving their hands in the gallery.

Putin, who opened the evening with a short speech about the power of Gazprom, did not hear "Smoke on the Water" - he left the celebration before the performance of artists from the UK, with which Russia has radically ruined relations during his rule.

Medvedev's understudy remained in the hall in the status of a successor, the "second" First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, who phlegmatically looked at what was happening from the first row of the stalls.

And now, after a series of inevitable victories, the sweet couple Miller and Medvedev ... finally "brought the house into a ball" ...

01/15/2016 Gazprom not only stopped buying Turkmen gas from the beginning of the year, but also unilaterally terminated the contract with its exporter Turkmengaz. Both sides do not comment on the reasons for the rupture of relations, but, apparently, they are connected with disagreements on the price of gas and Ashgabat's refusal to strengthen military cooperation with Moscow.

"Turkmengas" reported that "Gazprom Export" from January 1, 2016 unilaterally terminated the contract for the purchase of Turkmen gas. The company does not indicate the reasons for this. The Russian exporter also does not comment on the information. A little earlier, on January 4, it became known that Gazprom Export informed Turkmengaz that it would stop receiving Turkmen natural gas from January 2016. Deliveries in 2015 amounted to about 3.1 billion cubic meters of gas, in 2014 - 10 billion cubic meters.

Turkmen gas is now... well, just like Iranian oil! After all, Gazprom has one task: to sell Russian property in the international arena... it is possible even at a loss, because they are not greedy people. Not his all the same, stolen, that's why it's not a pity.

The problem is that the "international arena" began to shrink rapidly. It turned out that Ukraine is no longer the “international arena” where even people like Chernomyrdin can lazily scratch their belly with a dirty hand… For some reason, everyone around starts counting money. Maybe because not all and not all of them are stolen, like those of Alyosha and Dimon? ..

For the most part, all this is because Dimon and Lesha turned out to be rare rednecks. They are accustomed to solving the problems they create themselves - at the expense of others. And it has long become a habit to disregard the opinion of those at whose expense they do it. And you can’t get rid of such things overnight. And not everyone likes that.

And there are no longer any stories about “gangs of extremist terrorists”, about which on New Year's Eve the tipsy director of the FSB of the Russian Federation Alexander Bortnikov sent telegrams around the cities and villages ...

At the same time, in 2010, Turkmenistan began supplying gas to China, which strengthened its position in negotiations with Russia, and Ashgabat refused to give new discounts. As a result, without reaching an agreement for several years, in mid-2015, Gazprom filed a lawsuit against Turkmengaz with the Stockholm Arbitration Court over raw material prices. Since then, the Russian company has reduced the payment for gas supplies. At the same time, at the beginning of the year, the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, said that Russia could buy gas from Uzbekistan. But in general, Gazprom has enough of its own gas, and pressure on Turkmenistan, according to analysts, is necessary to achieve political concessions from Ashgabat, in particular, to strengthen military cooperation and secure the border with Afghanistan.

"Biography"

Education

After graduating from MISIS in 1983, Shabalov entered graduate school, worked as an employee of the Central Research Institute of Ferrous Metallurgy

Activity

"Ratings"

"News"

Gazprom stopped the purchase of pipes for Nord Stream 2

The volume of shipment of pipes for the "Power of Siberia" and "Ukhta - Torzhok-2" in 2016 amounted to 800 thousand tons

The volume of shipment of large-diameter pipes (LDP) for the Power of Siberia and Ukhta-Torzhok-2 projects in 2016 amounted to 800 thousand tons, the Association of Pipe Manufacturers said in a statement.

These projects have become the main equipment in the segment of large diameter pipes (LDP) for plants.

The Association of Pipe Manufacturers and Gazprom signed an agreement

On December 26, Chairman of the Coordinating Council of the Association of Pipe Manufacturers Ivan Shabalov and Chairman of the Management Board of PJSC Gazprom Alexey Miller signed an agreement on cooperation on the voluntary certification system for pipe products Intergazsert. The signing ceremony took place at the Gazprom office in Moscow.

Back on the pipe

The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has been attacking Gazprom for several years, demanding the removal of intermediaries in the supply of large-diameter pipes (LDP), complained to President Vladimir Putin, but recently the flow of claims has dried up.

As follows from the data of the public procurement website, Ivan Shabalov's trading company Trubnye Innovatsionnye Tekhnologii (TIT) LLC signed contracts with Gazprom for 57.7 billion rubles over the past 12 months, and in just three years - for 90.8 billion rubles . We are talking mainly about the supply of large diameter pipes and parts for main pipelines, which corresponds to a fifth of the total volume of Gazprom's purchases for these items.

Shabalov even managed to head a large metallurgical production for a short time - in 1999, Andrey Andreev, co-owner of the Avtobank group, invited him to the post of general director of the Orsk-Khalilovsky Combine (Nosta). “Shabalov was very well versed in metallurgy,” Andreev recalls in a conversation with Forbes. “Besides, I hoped that he would be able to provide the plant with raw materials.” But very soon troubles fell on Andreev's head, the apotheosis was the seizure of his assets by "business sharks" led by the structures of Oleg Deripaska.

In this situation, Shabalov “one of the few behaved decently and did not pour water on the mill of my opponents,” says Andreev. Shabalov, by his own admission, also has something to regret: Nosta owes him about $10 million for raw materials that the company of the general director supplied to the plant. The fact that Shabalov was earning at the factory did not bother Andreev. “They are now hiring managers without their own business,” he assures. “Then people with experience had a business, and we were not interested in this, but whether their team could organize everything.”

Ivan Shabalov, the founder of the pipe trader SETP, about the deal with the Rotenberg brothers and about working with Gazprom

By the end of the year, the FAS must decide whether to punish pipe companies for coordinating the schedules of deliveries to Gazprom and whether to change their existing principle of working with the gas monopoly through traders. The head of the coordinating council of the Association of Pipe Manufacturers, IVAN SHABALOV, the creator of the largest pipe trader, the Northern European Pipe Project, told Kommersant what the trader is paid for, whether the company used administrative resources and why the pipe manufacturers consider the claims of the FAS unfounded.

Chairman of the Association of Pipe Manufacturers Ivan Shabalov met with Alexey Miller

The meeting was attended by Deputy Chairmen of the Management Committee and members of the Management Committee of OAO Gazprom, heads of the company’s specialized divisions, a number of its subsidiaries, Chairman of the Coordinating Council of the Association of Pipe Manufacturers Ivan Shabalov, Chairman of the Board of Directors of CJSC United Metallurgical Company Anatoly Sedykh, Chairman of the Board of Directors OJSC Pipe Metallurgical Company Dmitry Pumpyansky, shareholder of OJSC Chelyabinsk Pipe Rolling Plant Andrey Komarov, General Director of OJSC Severstal Alexei Mordashov, heads of other companies.

Ivan Shabalov: Pipes go through tenders - schedules are no longer needed

- I think that this is an absolutely balanced decision - the process was long and difficult, but in the end the case was dismissed, since the actions of the pipe companies were recognized as “permissible” under the law “On Protection of Competition”. The pipe companies, together with Gazprom, have approved a program for the development of the pipe industry for 2008-2011. It was this period that was considered by the FAS. But the law allows concerted actions if they result in investments and modernization of production. What actually was done by the pipe companies together with Gazprom - in fact, the Russian production of large diameter pipes was created from scratch, investments in it exceeded $ 10 billion. Now the needs of the Russian market are almost completely covered by domestic producers.

How Ivan Shabalov became a supplier of Gazprom and a partner of "Putin's friends"

Ivan Shabalov built a business that involves Russian metallurgical enterprises, the Rotenberg brothers, and Gazprom, the country's main monopoly. The quiet village of Babaevo on the border of the Vologda and Leningrad regions has never been seen like this in the winter of 2005. In a 30-degree frost, giant pipes were unloaded from the wagons - with a diameter of almost human height. Tractors drove them to a cleared clearing, cranes laid out in a line that went beyond the horizon. On the railway tracks, they put up the same endless, hundreds of wagons, train loaded with pipes.

Ivan Shabalov - state order for 40 billion rubles.

Shabalov is a rating newcomer. He says that he started working with Gazprom back when the concern was headed by Rem Vyakhirev, and with the advent of a new team, he turned out to be one of the largest intermediaries of the gas monopoly. Since 2005, Gazprom has been buying pipes not from manufacturers directly, but from traders. It was Shabalov who founded the Northern European Pipe Project (SETP), which in that year accounted for more than 90% of pipe deliveries to Gazprom. In the same year, Shabalov sold a controlling stake in the company to the leaders of the "Kings of the State Order" rating, the Rotenberg brothers. Since 2004, he has been the head of the Association of Pipe Manufacturers, which also includes the producers of Gazprom's subsidiary. In 2012, another Shabalov company, Pipe Innovative Technologies, participated in Gazprom's tenders, which received contracts worth almost 40 billion rubles. In February, his company won a large contract for the purchase of pipes at the SETP tender (lots cost 3.9 lord rubles).

Gazprom and Russian pipe manufacturers introduce a new pipe price formula

price formula. The principles for recalculating prices for seamless pipes and external anti-corrosion coatings are similar to those that have been applied since 2012 for the supply of large diameter pipes (LDP). The formula for seamless pipes will take into account price quotes for metallurgical raw materials, pipe blanks and pipes themselves, as well as the index of changes in prices of industrial goods producers in Russia. For exterior coatings - oil quotes and industrial indices.

Gazprom to Double Pipe Purchases

In 2010, Gazprom intends to double its purchases of large-diameter pipes (LDP) in connection with the intensification of the construction of major pipeline projects. This was stated by Ivan Shabalov, Chairman of the Coordinating Council of the Association of Pipe Manufacturers. According to him, in 2010 the total volume of pipe purchases by Gazprom will amount to about 1.9 million tons. Of these, 750,000 tons of pipes have already been shipped in the first half of the year. In 2009, purchases amounted to 950 thousand tons. The share of imported pipes last year was 3%. “The increase in pipe purchases this year is due to the entry into the active phase of such gas pipeline projects as Bovanenkovo-Ukhta, Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok, Pochinki-Gryazovets and Ukhta-Torzhok,” Shabalov explained. “In 2009, due to the crisis, Gazprom was short-delivered a total of 700,000 tons of pipes, mainly from OMK.”

The hereditary white magician was born in the most beautiful and historical city - Baku. According to the psychic, he was born in an unusual place, he was born on the shores of the Caspian Sea. As a little boy, he often stayed with his grandmother, who then decided to pass on her gift of foresight to him. The grandmother decided to tell the parents of her grandson about this, but they considered it nonsense, and therefore they did not take her words seriously.

Over time, ghosts and spirits began to come to Ivan, he was afraid of them at first, but then he managed to accept his gift. Every year his abilities grew at an unprecedented rate, and he could move through time, communicate with demons, spirits and other mystical creatures.

A lot of energy was spent on talking with otherworldly forces, but Ivan did not care, and he tried to entice all the knowledge and wisdom from them.

Capabilities

• when Ivan Shabanov was nineteen years old, his father decided to send local shamans to Khakassia to attend a meeting so that his son could understand and delve into all the subtleties of shamanism. Ivan spent several days in Khakassia, but even that was enough to understand, upon returning home, that he was again, as it were, reborn. Ivan immediately felt an unlimited influx of otherworldly power;
• and one day he had a dream in which higher powers told him to get certain tattoos all over his body in order to be closer to the spirits. As he got older, he realized that everything he had done was right and that this path should be followed further;
• throughout his life he perfected his psychic abilities. Thanks to his talent, he managed to achieve success not only in his homeland, but also in Moscow itself.

Participation in the Battle of psychics

Ivan is an experienced psychic and once he came to the "Battle", but, unfortunately, he did not manage to go further. But he did not stop there and came to the casting several times, but it was all in vain. When he found out that at the end of September 2017 the new eighteenth season of the Battle of Psychics was starting, Ivan decided to go and find out if he could get through this time, and he succeeded. He passed the casting, and the task of finding a man in the trunk, he passed without any problems.

Ivan gets in touch with otherworldly forces with the help of his main attributes: Tarot cards, a human skull and a tambourine. His many tattoos help him communicate with spirits and mystical beings.

Participation in the new "Battle" for Ivan Shabanov is very important, he is very worried that due to the fact that he has many young rivals who are doubtful about his abilities, he can spill. In addition, Ivan is fond of not only spirits, but also esotericism and drawing cats.

Social networks

The psychic loves to be photographed and therefore he often uploads his photos, various videos and posts. He is very excited about the fact that he has a large number of fans who support him every day and predict him victory in the new "Battle of Psychics." Unfortunately, nothing is known about Ivan Shabanov's personal life.

What do you think about Ivan Shabanov? We are waiting for your comments!

Who are they, modern Russian billionaires who grew up in the Soviet Union? How did they manage to earn such capital? The director and sole owner of the Pipe Innovative Technologies company is one of those people who built their business after the collapse of the USSR. The biography of Ivan Shabalov is the answer to the questions asked.

First steps

The future entrepreneur was born on January 16, 1959 in Uzbekistan. The family of Ivan Shabalov then lived in the small town of Chirchik, which was located 40 km from Tashkent. Outside the southern gates of the city, the city-forming enterprise, OJSC Uzbek Combine of Refractory and Heat-Resistant Metals, spread its buildings, for which young Ivan Shabalov got a job after graduating from school.

Note that in Soviet times it was not easy to enter a higher educational institution, especially in the capital. Therefore, there was a practice of referrals: when the management of some large enterprise or collective farm sent its workers to a certain institute. There was a condition that after graduation the person would return to work at the enterprise. Applicants with such directions were considered by the selection committee in the first place, therefore the chance of admission was higher. Perhaps even then the entrepreneurial spirit of the future billionaire began to appear, but after a short work at the plant, he received such a direction and entered the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys (MISiS).

Scientific activity

After graduating from the institute with honors in 1983, Shabalov did not leave to work at the plant, but entered graduate school. In the same year, he got a job at the Central Research Institute of Ferrous Metallurgy. I. P. Bardina. Started as an ordinary employee. During ten years of work at the institute, Ivan Pavlovich Shabalov rose up the career ladder to the position of deputy director. During this time, he received his doctorate in engineering.

Shabalov's scientific interests extended to the steel and pipe industries. Ivan Pavlovich published more than 100 scientific papers during his life. Here are some of them: “Investigation of the formation of rolls on a plate mill 2800” (2004), “Efficiency of gas pipeline construction using pipes of various steel strength classes” (2007), “Current state and features of the economy of the pipe industry” (2008). In 2004, Ivan Pavlovich Shabalov was awarded the Prize of the Government of the Russian Federation in the field of science and technology for the development of new generation steels using naturally alloyed ores of the Khalilovskoye deposit for critical metal structures in bridge building, construction, mechanical engineering and the introduction of an integrated technology for their production.

healthy ambition

At 32, being a deputy director of a scientific institute is not a bad career for a provincial guy. As Ivan Shabalov recalls those days, in 1990 he received a very large salary of 2,000 rubles a month, when compared with prices. For example, he then bought a Zhiguli car for 9,000 rubles. But he did not plan to spend his whole life within the walls of the institute. Acquired contacts during the work in it served a good service.

In 1991, the former general director of the Karaganda Metallurgical Plant, Oleg Soskovets, headed the Ministry of Metallurgy. Shabalov made an appointment with the minister, because they had known each other when Soskovets was the general director of the plant. After the conversation, on the same day, Shabalov was appointed general director of the foreign trade company TSK-Steel.

The first lessons of entrepreneurship

Joint ventures with foreign firms were a new trend in perestroika. There were not so many of them, and they were strikingly different from Soviet enterprises. The joint venture had Western equipment, the salary was not an example higher and in foreign currency. For employees of "TSK-Steel" foreign currency accounts were opened in the then cult store "Beryozka". It was one of the few stores in the Soviet Union where foreign currency could buy scarce imported goods.

TSK-Steel was established in 1989 by the Karaganda Iron and Steel Works and the Swiss trader Sytco. The company employed several hundred people. A small plant processed rejected steel and exported it. Here Ivan Shabalov got his first experience in managing an enterprise and interacting with foreign buyers. Despite the fact that at that time, according to the law, only state-owned enterprises could export steel, there was no such ban on steel marriage. Therefore, the commercial organization headed by Shabalov freely exported its products.

When one door closes, another opens

The joint venture was a goldmine. The profit was very significant: up to tens of millions of dollars a month. Part of the money was spent on the purchase of parts for tape recorders, food processors, and radio tape recorders, which were later assembled at the plant. All these products were in great demand. The leaders of the enterprise went on permanent business trips abroad, they could afford mobile phones, which cost $ 4,000 from the then only operator. Of course, such wealth could not but attract the attention of the criminal world.

Rampant banditry in the 90s had a large scope. No one was surprised by criminal showdowns, murders, division of territories of influence, racketeering. We can say that Shabalov was lucky when in 1993 he took the post of adviser to the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Oleg Soskovets. Because then the heads of enterprises were shot with enviable regularity. Shabalov escaped such a fate, but later, when the USSR completely collapsed, the joint venture ceased to exist due to non-payments and lost ties between enterprises in the post-Soviet space.

Gift

The country began to leapfrog. Many enterprises were closed, wages were not paid, contractual obligations were not fulfilled. Due to the lack of money, they were calculated by manufactured products. Barter (interchange) was then the only way to survive. At that moment, Ivan Mikhailovich showed his talent as a trader, thanks to numerous connections and his own authority. In 1995, he registered the Russian Chrome trading company, which dealt with the settlement of issues of mutual exchange between many enterprises and the supply of products from the metallurgical industry.

Here is one of the barter chains built by Shabalov. The Kachkanar mining and processing plant received gas from Gazprom, and could only pay with ore. Gazprom did not need the ore, so the ore was transported to the Orsk-Khalilovsky plant, which produced the harvesting. These blanks were transported to pipe factories, and the finished pipes were delivered to Gazprom. In this way, the Kachkanar GOK paid for gas. The time was vague and unreliable. For years, the relationships built up collapsed with the arrival of new heads of enterprises, which then changed very often. To survive in those difficult conditions, of course, we needed a strong character and the gift of foresight.

Business sharks

One interesting episode in the life of Ivan Shabalov reveals another facet of his character, which helped him survive and rise in the metallurgical business. This is the acceptance of any situations and a concession if there are no other ways out. This happened with the Orsk-Khalilovsky plant. In 1999, the owner of the plant, Andrei Andreev, invited Shabalov to the position of general director, in the hope that he, as an expert in the metallurgical industry and the owner of a trading company, would be useful to the enterprise. And in fact, Shabalov provided the plant with raw materials and managed well.

But already from the beginning of the 2000s, "attacks" on the part of business sharks began on Andreev. And in 2001, the Orsk-Khalilovsky plant, along with other assets of Andreev, passed to the concern of Oleg Deripaska. Naturally, Shabalov vacates the chair of the general director, but the plant did not pay the trading company for raw materials. The new management was willing to return the debt, but with a 50% discount. Shabalov preferred to "give away" the debt than to agree to a predatory discount.

Gazprom

Thanks to his work on credit schemes, Ivan Shabalov was known in the entire metallurgical industry of the country. When the problem arose of supplying large-diameter pipes (LDP) for Gazprom, Shabalov suggested that the leading pipe factories create an Association of Pipe Manufacturers. In 2002, he became chairman of the coordinating council of the Association. And with his proposals he goes to the leadership of Gazprom. then these proposals were not considered, but a year later the new head of the concern, Alexei Miller, approved the cooperation.

Forbes

Ivan Pavlovich Shabalov in 2005 established the Northern European Pipe Project (SEPT) trading company, which supplied LDP for Gazprom. In addition, he went out to foreign suppliers. The German company Europipe supplied large-diameter pipes for Gazprom. Ivan Pavlovich offered the Germans his services in expanding the Russian sales market, adding oil and nuclear workers there. This is how Eurotub, an intermediary organization, was born, which already a year later reached a turnover of about 100 million euros.

The expanding business required new steps from Shabalov Ivan Pavlovich. Pipe Innovative Technologies is a new trading company in the assets of the entrepreneur, which he opened in 2006. Both of his firms work closely with Gazprom. Shabalov in these years is one of the largest suppliers. According to Forbes, Ivan Shabalov is part of an elite group of entrepreneurs who are called the kings of the state order.

Pets

Gazprom is the largest consumer in the Russian pipe products market. For the implementation of the projects "South Stream", "Nord Stream", "Nord Stream 2" billion-dollar contracts were mastered. Not so many enterprises that produced products of this nature participated in the tender for the supply of pipes. In the early 2000s, there was still a big risk of running into fly-by-night companies and losing money, so Gazprom enters into contracts with trusted partners. In 2003, in order to minimize the risks, Gazprom organizes the Gaztaged company, 25% of whose shares belonged to Boris Rotenberg.

In 2010, the company had to be liquidated due to scandals that erupted around it. The liquidation of the company was entrusted to Shabalov. Since then, little has changed. Tenders for the supply of large-diameter pipes, as a rule, are won by the same entrepreneurs: the Rotenberg brothers, Valery Komarov, Anatoly Sedykh, Dmitry Pumpyansky and Ivan Shabalov.

We had a nice conversation

One gets the impression that Shabalov is a minion of fate, and everything is easy for him. Only he alone knows what it takes to part with an established business when a stronger competitor comes along. In 2007, the Rotenberg brothers began to look at Shabalov's companies. The businessmen have known each other since 2002, when he met with Shabalov to find out the prospects for the pipe business. According to Ivan Pavlovich, the conversation was comfortable.

And already in 2007, he sells two-thirds of the shares of 50% of Eurotub to the Rotenbergs. And in 2010, after another comfortable conversation, the Rotenbergs received 60% of the CEPT. The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

Conclusion

Now Ivan Pavlovich Shabalov and Pipe Innovative Technologies are still on the market. And still he wins Gazprom's tenders. Let not in such volumes as before, but it is better than nothing.

Quite a lot is known about Ivan Pavlovich as a businessman, but there is nothing about his personal life. You will not meet Ivan Shabalov and his wife anywhere. No family information. In the photo, Ivan Shabalov is either alone or with partners. The conclusion suggests itself that business for Shabalov has become the only attachment in life.