The Tashkent Metallurgical Plant is added to the list of companies in which the government stake will be put up for public auction on the international market while engaging consultants. This is provided for by the President’s April 19 Measures to transform and accelerate the processes of privatization of large enterprises with state participation Decree.
49.9% stake, owned by the Uzbekistan Fund for Reconstruction and Development (UFRD, the country’s sovereign wealth fund), is planned to be put up for auction before the end of Q2 of 2025.
The working group responsible for coordinating the pre-privatization of the stake in TMZ includes the executive director of the UFRD Shukhrat Vafaev, the deputy director of the Agency for State Asset Management Alisher Miraliev and the first deputy minister of mining and geology Omonullo Nasritdinkhodzhaev.
About the project, owners and possible bankruptcy
In early December 2020, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev attended the launch ceremony of the $420 million Tashkent Metallurgical Plant worth.
The total capital investment in the project is estimated at over 334.5 million euros, of which 164.56 million euros are a loan from the Russian Export-Import Bank for 10 years, 154.7 million euros are own funds (about half - UFRD), 15. 1 million euros - loan from Asaka Bank. The estimated payback period was about 8.6 years. Initially, the project cost was estimated at 278.2 million euros, but after changes were made to the project in order to expand production capacity, it increased, as did the payback period, to 9.3 years.
The plant project on 49.7 hectares was completed by the Russian group Metprom on a turnkey basis, that is, the group acted as both the designer and general contractor of the project. The enterprise is equipped with technologies and automated equipment from Italian Danieli.
The project was managed by a foreign company, SFI Management Group (billionaire Alisher Usmanov told in an interview with Forbes that the company belongs to the family of billionaire Fattah Shadiev’s brother, Kabul Shadiev, who was present at the opening of TMZ and made a presentation to the president), which fully supervised all stages of construction and commissioning, including project development, negotiations with all interested parties, attracting investments, loans and recruiting foreign specialists.
