Gunvor Values Employee Stock at Close to $900 million

Oil trading house Gunvor has given shares allocated to managers and traders a nominal value of nearly $900 million, giving the firm a minimum nominal value of $2.3 billion, filings seen by Reuters show.

Gunvor's co-founder and majority owner Torbjorn Tornqvist has made the share allocations to top staff over the past year to help recruit and retain talent in an expansion drive.

The Swedish citizen founded Gunvor with Russian businessman Gennady Timchenko in 2000. It has since diversified away from Russia and changed its ownership structure to resemble rival global trading houses such as Vitol and Trafigura.

After buying out Timchenko's half of Gunvor in 2014, Tornqvist owned 100 percent of the voting rights. He has since cut that to 61 percent, with the balance owned by senior employees, the company says on its website.

According to a Nov. 22 filing made by the company in Cyprus, where it is based, each voting share for the employee plan has a nominal value $708.387.

As of the end of November, Tornqvist's family foundation held 61.1 percent of Gunvor and the remaining voting shares allocated to Gunvor's employee share plan amounted to 1,265,538.

Based on that price, the entire group would have a nominal value of $2.3 billion, although this would not necessarily be a representative price if Gunvor were to list.

Most trading houses have so far ruled out floating on public markets and their valuations remain opaque. The notable exception was trading and mining giant Glencore (GLCNF), which listed in London in 2011 at the height of the commodities boom.

Gunvor's rival Trafigura estimated the value of its shareholder equity at $5.6 billion as of December 2015. Trafigura had revenues of $198 billion last year, while Gunvor's were $64 billion.

Gunvor has expanded aggressively by buying refineries in Europe and opening new offices in Asia and the United States as it reduces its exposure to Russia.

Over the past two years it has sold most of its significant assets in Russia including profitable terminals on the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, and posted record 2015 profits of $1.25 billion.

While Tornqvist has allocated shares to around 200 Gunvor employees, the firm's filings do not disclose their identities.

The Gunvor employee plan is managed by a local Cyrpiot company through various intermediaries so as to preserve their anonymity, filings by the companies who are shareholders of the plan showed.

(By Julia Payne, Additional reporting by Dmitry Zhdannikov)