Domodedovo Airport sold at about half price to Kremlin-linked Sheremetyevo

Domodedovo Airport outside Moscow was sold at a steep discount after a government auction on Thursday that allowed bids as low as 50 percent of an initial $1.7 billion asking price; Russian state media reported that Sheremetyevo Airport offered about $880 million and won. The government had seized Domodedovo last year from the reclusive billionaire Dmitry Kamenshchik after a court deemed it a strategic enterprise.

Privatized in the 1990s, the airport grew to become Moscow’s second-largest and was chosen by international carriers such as British Airways and Lufthansa. The airport’s decline began with the Covid-19 pandemic and deepened when international sanctions shut the door to Europe. A new terminal inaugurated in 2023 stands half-empty, passenger traffic has fallen by half from pre-pandemic levels to about 14 million a year, and the airport was saddled with an estimated $1 billion in debt.

“The second terminal was badly needed for the pre-Covid traffic,” said Andrei V. Kramarenko of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The sale highlights Russia’s international isolation and a wartime campaign of nationalizations that President Vladimir V. Putin greenlighted in 2022.

The state has nationalized assets worth at least $79 billion since 2022, according to some estimates, and critics say seizures have been used to enrich friends of the Kremlin. Sheremetyevo is co-owned by the Russian government and investors including Arkady Rotenberg; oligarch Oleg V.

domodedovo airport, sheremetyevo airport, sold for $880 million, domodedovo auction price, dmitry kamenshchik seizure, arkady rotenberg, nationalizations in russia, state asset seizures, domodedovo $1 billion debt, domodedovo passenger traffic, covid-19 pandemic impact, vladimir putin