Cleary Gottlieb acted as U.S., English and Russian counsel to Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, in its $8.85 billion equity offering, which closed on March 26. The Russian subsidiaries of Credit Suisse and JP Morgan acted as brokers for the offering. Sberbank’s offering is the first public equity offering of a Russian bank and is the second-largest Russian equity offering to date (the largest being the July 2006 $10.6 billion Rosneft offering, on which Cleary Gottlieb also advised the issuer).
The offering was carried out under Russian procedures for an open subscription of shares, using only a Russian statutory prospectus. Current shareholders, exercising their preemptive rights, took up approximately $5.6 billion of the offering; new investors took up the remainder.