Metropolis Shopping Center (The Loft)

History

2023: Change of Ownership

On April 6, 2023, it became known that the Armenian investment fund Balchug Capital, founded by brothers David and Vardan Amaryan, became the new owner of the Metropolis shopping and entertainment center on the Leningradskoye highway of Moscow.

Metropolis is one of the largest shopping and entertainment centers in the Russian capital: the area of ​ ​ this facility is approximately 205 thousand square meters. It was built by the Kazakh developer Capital Partners in 2009, and in 2013 it became the property of the investment fund of the American bank Morgan Stanley: the deal amounted to $1.2 billion. Later, half of the complex was bought by the fund of the American developer Hines, and after a while Morgan Stanley completely left the project.

Balchug Capital became the new owner of the Metropolis shopping center

According to the Vedomosti newspaper, Balchug Capital (formerly Copperstone Capital) manages assets worth over $250 million. The cost of the transaction for the acquisition of Metropolis is not reported. But it is known that IBC Real Estate acted as a consultant as part of this procedure, and the purchase was approved by the government commission for control over the implementation of foreign investments. As a result, Metropolis was actually divided into two parts: one of them is owned by Balchug Capital, the other by Capital Partners. Market participants say that the cost of this shopping center can range from 60 to 65 billion rubles.

It is noted that earlier Balchug Capital acquired in Russia from the Finnish companies EKE and Vicus a Pulkovo Sky business center with an area of ​ ​ about 76 thousand square meters, located next to Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg. According to David Amarian, the company will continue to invest in high-quality real estate in the Russian Federation, the demand for which "will always remain at a high level."^[1]

2022: Selling visitor data on the dark web

Data on the number of user bonuses, the date of registration and update of the profile in the application and the hashed password (you can calculate the original password with it) have also become available. An SQL dump containing data from registered users of the Metropolis application (iOS and Android) was posted publicly on the shadow forum. In total, the database includes data from about 86.8 thousand visitors to Metropolis.

The darknet sells data of 87 thousand visitors to the Moscow shopping center "Metropolis"

The head of the information security threat analysis group Positive Technologies Vadim Solovyov, in a conversation with RBC, confirmed the fact that the post selling the database of registered users of the Metropolis application was previously created on the shadow forum, but then it was deleted.

According to the expert, the reason may be that the seller could not sell the base at the displayed value or changed his mind. According to Solovyov, a new proposal has appeared on the darknet related to this base, but this time the author offers to distribute the base for free.

According to the Telegram channel "Information Leaks," the database was made publicly available on February 18, 2022. On February 6, the user who posted it published a post about the sale of access to the database for 3.7 million rubles in cryptocurrency.

This is not the first data leak to a Russian retailer. Thus, personal information of clients of the Lenta and Krasnoe & Beloe networks got on the Internet. In both cases, they also tried to sell the base at first, but then it was made publicly available.^[2]

Notes