Frankmedia — Transneft acquired a 7.52% stake in Gazprombank’s voting shares for RUB 40 billion, RBC reports, citing two sources in the financial market and a person familiar with the deal.
Earlier, Transneft disclosed in its filings that in July it acquired 7.52% of voting securities from an organization whose ultimate controlling party is the Russian Federation. The company did not specify the name of the asset or the seller. In the same month, the Bank of Russia registered an additional issuance of 50.6 million shares of Gazprombank, and in August the bank’s charter capital increased by 4% to RUB 623.9 billion. The bank does not disclose the current structure of its shareholders.
The most obvious logic of the deal is financial-strategic rather than operational, believes the chief analyst at Trinfico Private, Maksim Vasilev. In his view, Transneft and Gazprombank have points of intersection in financing major infrastructure projects, settlement-and-banking services, and working with companies in the fuel and energy complex. The stake is large enough not to consider it an ordinary market investment, but it does not provide control over the bank, Vasilev noted.
Among the possible motives, Maksim Vasilev named obtaining dividends and income from the growth in the bank’s value, strengthening relations with a systemically important financial partner, and expanding cooperation in financing infrastructure projects. Since the seller was a state-controlled organization, the deal may have “a broader corporate-and-financial meaning than an ordinary market investment,” the analyst added.
An independent energy expert, Kirill Rodionov, suggested that acquiring the stake from a state-controlled organization could be related to the fiscal interests of the Ministry of Finance. He noted that the federal budget deficit for January–July 2026 reached RUB 6.46 trillion versus RUB 4.62 trillion a year earlier.
Gazprombank is among systemically important credit institutions and as of August 1 ranked third in Russia both by assets—RUB 17.82 trillion—and by equity—RUB 1.72 trillion. In the first half of the year, its net profit under IFRS increased by 34%, to RUB 96.5 billion; however, in the second quarter the figure fell by more than 40%, to RUB 31.8 billion. In December 2025, the bank also received RUB 82.6 billion from the National Wealth Fund in the form of a subordinated deposit, and the total amount of the NWF’s investments in its preferred shares is RUB 194.95 billion.