Mass departure of Russian companies from Cyprus continues

A mass departure of Russian companies from Cyprus is underway and is likely to continue, according to media reports on Wednesday.

Several major companies which had been headquartered in Cyprus have transferred their operations either back to Russia’s special administrative region or to neighbouring countries such as Kazakhstan, according to daily Philenews.

In addition, other companies with large work volumes have announced in recent months that they will soon leave Cyprus with the trend expected to continue in the near future.
The companies span a broad range of sectors from finance and real estate to retail, medical centre management, software development, and food delivery.
The specific companies reported on are TCS Group Holding, Etalon Group, Fix Price, United Medical Group CY, Transmashholding, Noventiq Holdings, EuroMedCenter, MD Medical Group Investments and Sbermarket.

TCS Group Holding, a digital financial services provider and the parent company of Tinkoff Bank, will make a final decision by January 15, while the rest took their decisions to relocate between summer and last December.

TCS, which has been registered in Cyprus for 20 years intends to transfer to Russia’s special administrative regions of Oktyabrsky and Russky islands.
The shareholders of Etalon Group, a land development real estate company operating in St. Petersburg and Moscow, likewise took the decision to relocate back to Russia on December 15.

Fix Price, owned by Paphos FC football team manager Sergey Lomakin, on November 9 decided to transfer its legal headquarters from Cyprus to Kazakhstan. Fix Price is a chain of discount stores, which according to published figures, in 2022 had revenues of $4bn.

United Medical Group CY Plc is the parent company of EMC which manages a network of private clinics. It includes seven multidimensional medical centres, a maternity clinic and a rehabilitation centre, as well as three nursing homes in Moscow, and boasted an annual turnover at the end of 2022 of €326.3 million.

Three companies which decided to leave last summer include Transmashholding, the largest manufacturer of railway equipment in the Russian Federation; Globaltrans, one of the largest private railway management companies operating in Russia, the Baltics and Eurasia; and online retailer Ozon, dubbed the Amazon.com of Russia.

Russian media have highlighted the mass withdrawal of companies from the island with headlines tying the mass exit to visits from FBI agents and referencing the “new order” brought about by President Nikos Christodoulides which declared a zero-tolerance policy for sheltering the assets of Russian oligarchs and the circumventing of anti-Russian sanctions.