Russia’s online bank and subsidiary of TCS Group Tinkoff Bank has ended a $5.5bn sale to internet services company Yandex.
Yandex had reached an agreement in principle to buy Tinkoff Bank for $5.48bn last month.
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TCS group founder Oleg Tinkov rejected the deal as it was more of an acquisition than a merger, terminating a year and a half of talks.
In separate statements, both the parties said that the discussions around a potential deal has been concluded.
In a letter to its employees, Tinkov said: “We started by talking about a merger, looking for synergy and quick growth of our customer base. We wanted to build the biggest private company in Russia.
“Essentially it all turned into a sale — they just wanted to buy Tinkoff, with all the attendant negative consequences for us.”
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By GlobalDataYandex CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan said that it plans to develop its fintech capabilities on its own.
Khudaverdyan said: “We constantly tried to accommodate Oleg’s additional demands. And of course, we agreed that Oleg would be involved in running the bank after the deal and help Yandex more generally, which would have been logical, because he would have become a major Yandex shareholder after the deal.
“But unfortunately, more and more new demands appeared at every stage of the negotiations. So, when we learnt today that Oleg made the decision to exit the deal, we were not surprised.”
As a search engine, Yandex has a higher local market share than Google.
Recently, it also forayed into taxis, e-commerce, and entertainment sectors, which led to its growth.
This growth ruined its partnership with Russian government-owned Sberbank, which offered to take a controlling interest in Yandex back in 2018 but was refused.
Sberbank then sold half of its e-commerce joint venture back to Yandex for $600m and set up various businesses to compete with its tech rivals.
