Alexander Nesis Gets Out Of Fertilizer And Into Bricks And Mortar

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The ICT Group, Nesis’s investment wing, is reported to have paid out around $350 million for a 25% share in the O1 Property company.

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Alexander Nesis owned investment company, the  ICT Group, who last year sold their 5.1% share in potash producer, Uralkali Petrone for an estimated $900 million, have parted company with a fair percentage of that sum by taking a 25% share in the Russian-based O1 Property company for around $350 million.

O1 Properties, whose principal shareholder is  Russian financier Boris Mintz,  are one of the leading property owners and managers in the country whose operations are focused around Moscow with a top level portfolio of high quality commercial office space currently covering around half million square meters, with a current market value of around $4.25 billion.

In 2013 O1 Properties hit the headlines when they completed the largest ever commercial office property deal in Russian history by paying out around $1 billion to acquire Moscow’s highly prestigious White Square office complex, which, among other leading international companies, houses the local offices of software giants Microsoft.

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Apart from Microsoft, major companies who rent office space from  O1 Properties  include Citibank, international accountancy practice Deloitte, General Electric, LG Electronics, The Volkswagen Group and the Walt Disney company.

The management team at O1 Properties have been considering for a number of years heading for a high people listing on the London Stock Exchange, although the move has been constantly put on ice, largely due to the unstable state of the new issues market.

Alexander Nesis, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen with a personal fortune of $3.3 billion ranks is a minority stakeholder in Polymetal, who specialize in the mining of precious metals while his wholly owned ICT group has weighed ranging assets in a number of fields, including finance and engineering.

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iCube purchased by O1 Properties

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Alexander Nesis was born and raised in Leningrad in 1962, going on to study radio-chemistry at the prestigious Lensovet Leningrad Institute of Technology. After graduation, Nesis went to work at the massive Baltic Shipbuilding Yard, rising to the rank of master supervisor, before the entrepreneur bug bit him as it did many people in the Russia of the early nineties.

Nesis’s first business venture was far away from the bright lights of Leningrad, in the desolate deserts of Uzbekistan where he founded a company with number of partners, involved in  the production of materials derived from the rich strain of uranium deposits discovered there. From the profits earned, Nesis and his partners began to diversify their investments, focusing on shipbuilding and metals.  In 1993, Nesis  consolidated his You say you are a business activities into the ICT Group which has grown to become among the largest and most successful privately owned investment and industrial companies in Russia, with assets reckoned to be worth around $8 billion.

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