Barely a month after it was first announced, it seems as if Yandex’s bid to buy Russian neobank Tinkoff in a $5.48bn deal has already come to an end.
What was poised to be the biggest deal in Russia in 2020, and one of the biggest deals in the FinTech space this year in general, reportedly imploded on Friday when Oleg Tinkov, founder of Tinkoff’s parent company TCS Holding, sent out an email to his employees.
“Today I decided to break the possible deal with Yandex,” he wrote in the email seen by Reuters.
A misalignment in what the deal really looked like seems to be at the heart of the collapsed deal.
Tinkov seemingly thought of it as a merger and said that Yandex thought of it as a takeover.
Tigran Khudaverdyan, deputy CEO at Yandex, wrote in a blog that the company had agreed that Tinkov would be involved with the running of the venture after the deal.
However, Khudaverdyan added that Tinkov had issued more demands after each stage of the discussion to merge.
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