On October 27, the Bolshevik plant went under the hammer of the auction. The starting price of the lot was $522 million. The buyer was General Commerce, which paid $537 million for the machine-building plant.
The State Property Fund, as the head of the program and the auction, said that the buyer reserves the right to relocate the production of Bolshevik to the territory of its branch in the Cherkasy region (the city of Zhashkov). The plant was sold on the condition that the buyer met some of the requests:
- Maintaining core activities;
- Repayment of debts in the amount of $1,89 million;
- Investing UAH 57 million in the modernization of the industrial infrastructure of the branch plant in Zhashkiv.
The "First Kyiv machine-building plant" was built in 1882 by Swiss engineers as a plastic and rubber processing plant. Today the plant is in decline and a large privatization program aimed at giving a second life to old enterprises will fix this.
There are 23 state objects on the list for privatization from the State Property Fund. The very first object sold into private hands through a state auction was the Krivorozhstal plant in Kryvyi Rih. Now it is the world-famous ArcelorMittal.
