IT Kingpin Alexey Melnikov Goes Bust: When Being a Guarantor Backfires
It seems that even in the world of high-stakes IT, being a billionaire on paper doesn't stop the bank from knocking on your door. Alexey Melnikov, the big boss at Fplus, just got a reality check that even the smartest spreadsheets can't fix.
The Arbitration Court of Saint Petersburg finally put the stamp on the inevitable: Alexey Melnikov, the face of Fplus, is officially bankrupt. The trouble started brewing back in 2023 when Melnikov decided to play the hero by signing as a personal guarantor for a loan taken by MKT, a subsidiary within his own tech empire. That signature ended up costing him 2 billion rubles, a sum that the Bank Saint Petersburg has now firmly cemented as his personal debt.
Melnikov, who climbed the ladder from the Sberbank ranks to building a distribution behemoth like Marvel-Distribution, once enjoyed a spot among the top IT billionaires. His firm even hit the top of the CNews Analytics charts with a staggering revenue of over 200 billion rubles. However, the market proved to be a fickle friend when Fplus saw its distribution volume crater by nearly a third due to cooling demand and tighter budgets.
The domino effect kicked in when Sovcombank stopped playing nice, first reducing its capital investments and then filing for bankruptcy against MKT. Soon after, other lenders like BBR Bank and Bank Saint Petersburg lined up to ensure the Fplus ecosystem—including its retail arm VseSmart—would be stripped for parts. With total creditor claims against Marvel-Distribution now ballooning toward 58 billion rubles, the corporate structure is essentially a sinking ship.
It is truly impressive how a former finance expert managed to turn a top-tier tech conglomerate into a cautionary tale about the dangers of excessive leverage. When the personal assets of an industry titan are sacrificed to cover corporate burn rates, it becomes clear that the golden age of easy credit was just a fever dream that finally broke.
Source: CNews
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