OREANDA-NEWS. May 23, 2012. Agroton is pleased to announce the hiring of Oleg Platonov as its new Head of Investor Relations.  Mr. Platonov, a communications and foreign language specialist, will be based in the Group headquarters in Luhansk reporting directly to CEO Yuriy Zhuravlev. He replaces the former Head of Investor Relations Markian Senyk who was based in Kiev.
 
Yuriy Zhuravlev, CEO of Agroton commented:
‘On behalf of Agroton Public Limited I welcome Oleg Platonov to our company. Having a full-time Head of Investor Relations based alongside me in Luhansk will help us to best communicate our corporate news and messages into the market. During recent weeks I feel that Agroton may have lost sight of its corporate message in the eyes of the marketplace.
 
I wish to address recent events surrounding our company.  Firstly, as already reported in the news, Agroton has changed its financial auditor from Baker Tilly to KPMG.  We believe that switching to a Big Four accounting firm will improve our future reporting transparency and this will greatly benefit our company in the near and long terms, starting with our forthcoming 2012 semi-annual report.
 
Secondly, I would like to comment on Agroton’s recently published 2011 year end financials and qualification.  I can emphatically state at this moment that our 2012 semi-annual financials are far more robust, and clearly will show that our company is financially strong and we intend to remove the qualification issued by Baker Tilly as a matter of company priority. We strongly believe that qualified trade receivables will be settled by the end of June and we plan to issue an update in this respect.  We have changed our auditor and we believe that this important change, in combination with Agroton’s financial performance in the first half of this year, soon shall reinforce our value proposition as a publicly listed company. We expect that our new financials will be published without any qualifications and this should result in a ratings upgrade from S&P based on their recent report. Agroton is the same strong company that we were last year, even larger.
 
Agroton has repaid all of our loan facilities apart from the Eurobond notes, and we do not plan to attract any new debt in the near-term.  We have no problem servicing our Eurobond notes which are at a far lower interest rate than the local borrowing rates Ukrainian firms can possibly hope to attract now.
 
Based on Agroton’s 2012 performance and financial numbers to date, we can forecast strong 2012 financial performance and we are continuously implement our growth strategy in line with company objectives and improve the value of our business with every milestone we achieve.’