OREANDA-NEWS. Freedom Holding Corp., operating under the Freedom Finance brand, plans to acquire 100% of the Zerich Capital Management investment company. The holding filed a petition with the Federal Antimonopoly Service, the Federal Antimonopoly Service informed and the Freedom Finance press service confirmed to the Russian media. The application was filed on September 20 and registered on September 26. The standard review period for such documents is 30 days.

Freedom Finance is a brokerage company operating primarily in the markets of Russia and Kazakhstan, as well as in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. In Russia, it's among the ten largest brokers by the number of registered customers (36.5 thousand), expert noted in June, of which about 6 thousand were active. The company's commission income over the past year amounted to 775.8 million rubles (in 2017 - 145 million rubles), net profit - 147.6 million rubles (in 2017 - 487.6 million rubles). The size of the company's assets is 5.1 billion rubles (3.1 billion rubles a year earlier), and capital - 4.3 billion rubles (It was 2.4 billion rubles).

Zerich Capital, as stated on its website, is one of the oldest brokers in the Russian stock market. According to Expert RA, last year’s assets of the company amounted to 1.7 billion rubles, and equity amounted to 304 million rubles. The volume of commission income amounted to 338 million rubles, and net profit - 2 million rubles. The company has 16.3 thousand customers, of which 1.6 thousand are active.

Freedom Finance ranks first in the ranking of Kazakhstan stock exchange activity, which takes into account the volume of operations with shares and bonds, and is three times faster than its closest competitor. Turlov bought the company in 2013. According to Bloomberg, Freedom Finance opened positions in several Kazakh companies for borrowed money, critics warned of the negative consequences of the strategy, but regulators didn't give alarming signals.