Vičiūnų Grupė (Vičiūnai Group), controlled by Kaunas Mayor Visvaldas Matijošaitis and his partner Liudas Skierus, is planning to renovate its factory in Sovetsk, a town in Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad.
RuGrad, the news website in Kaliningrad, reported on Wednesday that Vičiūnai Rus would renovate its fish processing unit having received the necessary documentation in April.
However, Skierus says that the unit was renovated before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“It was done earlier but was not formalised. The renovation started before the war,” he told BNS on Thursday. Skierus did not specify when exactly the renovation was carried out.
According to him, all the necessary documents for the renovation were obtained earlier this year, but the information about this has only now been made public.
“We’ve just formalised. The sale process is ongoing, so we want everything to be flawless. All our real estate and the paperwork are in order. They were put in order in January or December, but apparently, the information has just come out,” he said.
In Skierus’ words, the factory underwent a minor renovation, and the completion of the formalities will speed up the sale of the company in Russia.
Vičiūnai Group announced that it would leave the Russian market after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year but has not done so yet.
In April last year, Vičiūnai Group‘s CEO Matijošaitis said that the company would close its business in Russia within three to four months.
At the end of August, the group announced that it found five potential buyers for the Russian business but said it could not predict how long the sale and handover would take.
It was reported earlier that Vičiūnai Group earned a profit of 24.8 million euros in Russia in 2022 – the highest in the last five years.
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