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EuroTrans default: bloggers wrote "scam" two weeks before the IPO, banks kept a "positive view" to the end

On 5 August 2026 the Moscow Exchange recorded a full default by PJSC EuroTrans, owner of the Trassa petrol station chain, on three bond issues at once. Sberbank and Bank Rossiya announced their intention to bankrupt the issuer. The share, placed in November 2023 at RUB 250, trades at about RUB 38.

This review is not about "how could this happen". It is about something else: who said what about EuroTrans before the default, with dates and quotes. A law regulating financial bloggers is now under discussion in the State Duma, and against the background of this case the question of "whose information exactly needs regulating" looks less obvious.

Below are two columns. In one, the analysis of banks and the assessments of licensed rating agencies. In the other, public reviews from Telegram channels and the community. All dates and wording can be checked via the links.

5-6 August: default on three issues, 19% of the coupon paid on one of them

The scheduled coupon date was 21 July 2026. Ten business days of "technical default" (a grace period during which a missed payment is not yet treated as a real default) expired on 5 August.

On that day the exchange recorded a default on the "green" bonds of series 01, series 002P-02 and the exchange-traded BO-001P-09. On two issues the company eventually paid: RUB 75.6mn and RUB 10.2mn. On BO-001P-09 it transferred about 19% of the coupon; RUB 33.3mn remained unpaid. The company's explanation was "a temporary shortage of funds due to uneven revenue receipts".

In parallel, on 3 August coupons on four more issues (BO-001P-04, -05, -06, -07) totalling RUB 168.4mn were not paid. The total volume of obligations on exchange-traded bonds, "people's" bonds and digital financial assets (DFAs) is close to RUB 37bn.

This was not a surprise. The first delay was on 19 March 2026, followed by an almost continuous series of technical defaults, a DFA default in June and bank lawsuits since May.

What is at stake: RUB 250 at the IPO, RUB 38 now, RUB 73.44 of dividends along the way

The IPO took place on 21 November 2023 at RUB 250 per share, and the company raised about RUB 13.3bn. The close on 6 August 2026 was RUB 38.35 (Moscow Exchange data). That is a fall of about 85%. Moves over the last few days: 3 August, RUB 44.45; 5 August, RUB 43.30; 6 August, RUB 38.35.

Since the placement RUB 73.44 per share of dividends has been paid, the sum of nine payments according to the company itself, from RUB 8.88 for 9M2023 to RUB 9.17 for 9M2025 (the last payment was on 18 February 2026). Across all 159.1mn shares this is about RUB 11.7bn.

The money was distributed in proportion to holdings. The free float is 53.1mn shares, one third of the capital; the rest belongs to the main owners. Rough arithmetic for public holders: about RUB 3.9bn of dividends received plus about RUB 2.0bn of current value of their stake, against about RUB 13.3bn paid in at the placement. Two thirds of the dividend stream went to the controlling shareholders.

The mechanics were visible in the reports: operating cash flow was not enough for such payments, and the gap was closed with new debt. From October 2025 to April 2026 the company placed bonds and DFAs at 20-26.5% per annum.

Four licensed agencies held an "A-" rating seven months before the default

EuroTrans had four credit ratings from agencies accredited by the Bank of Russia, all at "A-". That is "above average", about two notches from the top of the national scale.

Then the chronology:

From "stable A-" to default took seven months. None of the four agencies downgraded in advance: all reacted only to the fact of non-payment.

It is worth noting that the alarming figures were in the very same rating releases. As early as August 2025 NKR wrote about coverage of short-term liabilities and interest of 1.14 at the end of 2024 and absolute liquidity of 10%. A coverage of 1.14 means profit was barely enough to service the debt, with a safety margin close to zero. This was printed in the document, and the rating still stayed at "A-" with a "stable" outlook.

A telling detail: in March 2023 ACRA held the Russian Financial Market Forum, and EuroTrans (the Trassa brand) was listed among the partners of the event, next to FPK Garant-Invest, which also later went into default.

The paper reached retail through regulated infrastructure all the way

EuroTrans shares traded in the first-level quotation list of the Moscow Exchange, the highest listing category. The seller of the shares at the IPO was BCS Company LLC.

The placement itself was unusual. From June to November 2023 the shares were sold over the counter, through the company's offices and directly at Trassa petrol stations. Retail investors made security deposits that accrued up to 1.8% per month. The exchange part raised only 6.55mn shares for RUB 1.64bn; the over-the-counter volume of 11.96mn shares was bought by Invest Capital LLC.

EuroTrans "people's" bonds were distributed through Finuslugi, the retail platform of the Moscow Exchange itself. DFAs were placed on Alfa-Bank's A-Token platform. Petrol station leasing was financed, among others, by Gazprom Leasing at a floating rate: according to SPARK, 78 leasing contracts had been in force since 2022, of which 55 were for petrol station complexes (Monokl wrote about this in May 2026). Loans and factoring were provided by Sberbank, Bank Rossiya, Ak Bars, Sovcombank, Inbank, Rosagroleasing and others, the very ones that are now going to court.

The Association of Bondholders (AVO) explicitly names Gazprombank as the organiser of the bond placements and notes that the same bank was the organiser in the defaults of Garant-Invest and Monopoliya. In May 2026 a RUB 8.63bn claim against EuroTrans was filed by JSC Isource, which is part of the Gazprombank perimeter.

In other words, the paper's whole path to the private investor, from the first-level listing to the distribution platform and the sale at the petrol station till, went through the licensed and supervised perimeter.

What bank analysts wrote: a "positive view" six months before the first delay

BCS World of Investments, 15 November 2024 (a note by analysts Ronald Smith and Bulat Mudarisov, distributed by Interfax): "Our positive view is supported by a discounted dividend model valuation, according to which the target price is RUB 170 per share."

To the analysts' credit, there was a caveat: they noted a "risk to the total dividend against the background of a high debt load, given that most of the debt was placed with a floating coupon linked to the Bank of Russia key rate".

BCS World of Investments, 18 September 2025 – the positive assessment was kept. The key argument: "If the dividend payout ratio of 79% is maintained until the end of the year… about RUB 43.9 per share of dividends can be expected for the current year… the dividend yield on the current share price reaches 23%. The company may show the highest dividend yield of the year on the Russian market."

The actual result: RUB 20.35 per share was paid for 2025, and the final dividend was not paid at all. The first bond delay happened six months after this publication.

A separate BCS investment idea, "EuroTrans: high growth rates", kept a "Positive" view even in 2026, when the share traded at about RUB 120. Its main catalyst was the offer: the largest shareholders must buy back up to 20mn shares (38% of the free float) by August 2027 at a fixed price of RUB 350, "almost three times above current quotes". This is an obligation of the individual shareholders, not of the company; whether it can be fulfilled depends on whether they have RUB 7bn. And this for a company that could not find RUB 33mn for a coupon.

Alfa-Investments, 7 October 2025, the note "EuroTrans. Dividends vs. high debt" (analyst Darya Fyodorova). The view was formally neutral, with an "Alfa-Rating" of 5.6, and some of the caveats were right: "the practice of paying dividends at such a debt level can be called unusual", and the plans to raise profitability "look excessively optimistic".

But the key conclusions were: "The current net debt/EBITDA of 2.4x can be called moderate, it does not threaten the company's financial stability"; "Both the growth in working capital and capex are expected with revenue growth and do not indicate that the business model is unsound." The forecast dividend yield for 2025 was 16.2%.

This was published five months before the first delay.

Half a year later, on 13 April 2026, the same Alfa-Investments published "Why EuroTrans shares and bonds collapsed", already after two technical defaults, rating downgrades and claims of RUB 12.2bn.

What bloggers wrote: "scam" two weeks before the IPO

"Enhanced Investments", 7 November 2023 – fourteen days before trading began: "#EUTR EuroTrans is a scam (a value judgement). Among the successful IPOs (Astra, Henderson, UGC, which in my view will all be fine), the EuroTrans IPO deserves separate mention."

The next post addressed the counterarguments, the main one being "the valuation was confirmed by E&Y". The reply was that Big Four appraisers almost always accommodated the client, and the report itself states in its heading that the valuation holds only under the client's assumptions, while future projects are discounted at the rate of the core business. The second argument was that the petrol stations were not generating any noticeable margin at the time.

Further, in the chronology of the same channel:

Roman Weiss (The Buy Side), formerly an analyst at Enhanced Investments, published an extensive study on EuroTrans concluding that the stock would fall, and held a short position in it. The position turned out to be one of the most successful on the Russian market over the past year. There is no public link here: the channel is closed and the material was distributed within it.

"Invest Privet" is a channel with the same position and the wording "I have been writing about EuroTrans risks since the IPO". Its April 2026 review of the reporting figures:

The same review explains why an audit opinion is not a safeguard: the auditor answers the question "can these figures be trusted overall", not "is there manipulation of assumptions here". Wholesale turnover between related companies can be fully and correctly documented and still mean no real economics.

On 7 April 2026, when the coupon came in at RUB 1.53 instead of RUB 20, the same channel wrote: "The company is already saying outright: there is no money. One of the technical defaults will definitely become the final one… We keep the targets of the expensive investment houses." On 5 August, the day of the default: "Earlier I wrote that I expected a default at the company. That was April 26, when the bonds cost 80-87% of par (now 20-30%)… How bank analysts (including those who lent) missed this remains a mystery to me."

From earlier: the asset manager DOKHOD, back on 2 October 2023, a month and a half before the placement, put the fair price at RUB 187.5 against the IPO price of RUB 250 and gave the upside a score of 6 out of 20, citing the debt load of 4.2x and doubting the rise in profitability from 3-4% to the promised 9-11%.

The "Kot.Finance" channel formulated the main substantive thesis, which was hardly voiced anywhere else: EuroTrans is not retail, but about 90% wholesale by revenue. And then the industry conclusion: "the default rate in fuel wholesale is higher than among builders and leasing companies". The recommendation was a maximum of 5% of a portfolio and only in bonds.

The Association of Bondholders, formally not bloggers but just as unregulated a party, publicly commented on 10 January 2024 on the abnormal trading in the share with the words "the most likely explanation is a plain Pump & Dump". It also emerged then that on the last working day of December 2023, five weeks after the IPO, a court accepted Banca Intesa's petition for the personal bankruptcy of EuroTrans's CEO for RUB 89.3mn.

A fair caveat: the community was not unanimous, and this matters for the conclusion

If we stop here, we get a picture fitted to the answer. It would be inaccurate.

Part of the blogger community did buy EuroTrans. The author of one of the most widely read IPO reviews in November 2023, having listed all the negatives (P/E of about 17, debt, the one-off nature of revenue growth), still submitted an application. In November 2025, four months before the first delay, a public review of the BO-001P-07 bonds gave positive arguments and ended not with "do not buy" but with "it is expensive now; if the bond returns to par, it is worth considering for a portfolio". It did return to par and then went into default.

The company also ran its own advertising campaign with a media face and sold the paper to its own customers at petrol stations. There was plenty of positive information noise, and it had nothing to do with analysis.

So the correct formulation is not "bloggers were right and banks were not". The correct one is this: substantive warnings existed, were public, free and timely, and all of them came from the unregulated layer. In the regulated layer nobody had them. Not one of the four agencies, not the organiser of the placements, not the listing venue, not the brokers' analysts.

What is proposed for regulation is exactly the layer that warned

On 17 February 2026, a month before EuroTrans's first delay, the Bank of Russia issued a report for public consultation, "Regulation of the activities of financial influencers". The proposals: a register of financial bloggers, qualification requirements, mandatory labelling of paid material and liability "for the quality of the information distributed", up to compensating subscribers' losses.

The report's rationale: influencers "may lack a sufficient level of expertise and often pass off advertising information as a personal opinion". Comments were accepted until 30 April 2026; the head of the State Duma financial market committee stated an intention to adopt the law before the end of 2026.

The problem the report describes is real. Manipulation through Telegram channels exists, and so does paid material posing as personal opinion.

But if this framework is applied to the EuroTrans case, the picture is awkward:

And one more point, less obvious. In practice a "liability for information quality" wording is tested not on advertising but on criticism. Who will determine, and by what methodology, that a review concluding "EuroTrans is a scam" is of good quality if at the time of publication the issuer has four "A-" ratings from accredited agencies, a first-level listing and a valuation from a Big Four firm? Formally, such a text contradicted all the official assessments at once. In fact it turned out to be right two and a half years before the event.

A register with qualification requirements and liability for quality creates an incentive not to deviate from the official assessment. And what was valuable here was precisely the deviation.

After the default, AVO put its part of the agenda more sharply: fees for organising placements stay with the infrastructure, while credit risk is passed to the public, and no liability of the organiser for the quality of the issuer exists. That is a separate but neighbouring conversation about which market participant's liability should be discussed first.

A neighbouring story: short-covering is opaque, and it gives +72% on a defaulted stock

On 20 July 2026, when EuroTrans was already in a series of technical defaults, the share rose 72% in a day on forced closing of short positions. The National Clearing Centre banned short sales in the stock that day. The effect went beyond one issuer: the Moscow Exchange index also rose on Monday, because short sellers in other stocks were afraid of similar squeezes.

It is worth recording separately what this means for the market. The stock of a company that by then was already not paying on its bonds rose 1.7 times in a single day. This is not a revaluation of the business; it is the mechanics of closing positions.

We went through the NCC decision feed, 4,808 decisions from June 2025 to August 2026, to understand whether such bans can be predicted. The conclusions were as follows:

The real trigger in all three cases was not a price move but a corporate event in which the central counterparty cannot assess the risk of the paper: for Etalon, the resumption of trading after redomiciliation and conversion of depositary receipts; for UGC, a claim to seize a stake and an arrest of shares; for EuroTrans, the exit from technical default. The NCC's own wording for such measures is "in the absence of information on the issuer's financial condition".

The clearing centre's logic is understandable and in its own way justified: it protects itself against a risk it cannot measure. The issue is not the decision itself but that market participants learn of it after the fact.

Do the US and Europe have the same open-ended bans?

The short answer: there is no open-ended ban on shorting a specific stock, as happened with EuroTrans, in the US or the EU. There are restrictions there, and many of them, but all are built differently: each has either a term fixed by law or a trigger threshold published in advance. There are four designs in all.

1. There is a permanent ban, but not on shorting; on naked shorting. In the EU, Article 12 of the short selling regulation allows a short sale of a share only if it has already been borrowed, there is a borrowing agreement, or there is third-party confirmation that the stock has been located. In the US the same is achieved by the locate requirement of Rule 203 of Regulation SHO. This is indeed a permanent rule, applying always and to all stocks, but what it prohibits is not short selling but short selling without the stock.

2. A mechanical brake with a threshold known in advance. In the US, Rule 201 of Regulation SHO triggers automatically: if a stock has fallen 10% from yesterday's close, it can be shorted only at a price above the best bid, and this applies until the end of the day and through the whole of the next day. In the EU, Article 23 works similarly: if a liquid share falls by 10% or more, the regulator must consider a restriction before the next day's open, and the measure itself cannot last beyond the end of the next trading day. The threshold is published and the duration is limited.

3. Emergency bans, with a maximum term written into law. In the US, Section 12(k)(2) of the Exchange Act allows an emergency order for no more than 10 business days, and with extensions no more than 30 calendar days in total. The best-known case: on 19 September 2008 the SEC banned short sales in 799 financial stocks; the ban lasted about three weeks and was lifted. In the EU, Article 20 allows a national regulator to introduce a ban for up to 3 months, with extensions also of 3 months, and each such decision is published. An example is spring 2020: France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Greece banned increasing short positions in March and lifted the ban in May.

4. The impossibility of borrowing the stock. This is not a ban but the market: if nobody lends the stock, it cannot be shorted. But there is a lending market with visible rates, and from 2026 the US is additionally introducing reporting of securities lending transactions (SEC Rule 10c-1a, the FINRA SLATE system) so that volumes and rates are public.

Separately, we should name the closest structural analogue of the Russian design, Hong Kong. There one can short not any stock but only one on the Designated Securities list. So this is also a whitelist, as with us. But the inclusion criteria are published (thresholds for market capitalisation and for the ratio of annual turnover to capitalisation), and the list is reviewed quarterly and posted publicly. A market participant understands in advance why a stock is on the list and under what conditions it will drop off.

Long bans also happen in the world, but for a different reason. The most recent example is South Korea: short selling was banned from November 2023 to 31 March 2025, sixteen months. But that was a ban on the whole market at once, by regulatory decision, with a public explanation of the reasons and a publicly announced condition for lifting it: the launch of a system for detecting naked shorts.

How our design differs

The Russian restriction is not a regulator's decision but a risk parameter of the central counterparty. Formally shorting the stock is not prohibited: the risk rate is simply raised to 100%, and a short position requires full collateral, which makes it pointless.

We checked the status as of today, 8 August 2026, directly in the NCC reference book. For EuroTrans the risk rates stand at 100/100/100, meaning the restriction has been in force for the nineteenth day in a row, with no announced end date. For comparison, ordinary stocks from the same reference book: Severstal 20/26/33, Diasoft 25/35/50, DOM.RF 25/31/38, Etalon 33/50/75, Delimobil 70/80/95.

It is telling that the NCC does have an instrument with announced dates: a separate register of short-sale ban periods, in which each entry has a start date and an end date. But today it contains only foreign stocks with windows of two to five days. EuroTrans is not there; the restriction came through the risk-parameter channel, which has no term at all.

Etalon is a good counterexample here: after the September 2025 episode its rates returned to the normal 33/50/75. Restrictions are lifted. But the market learns of the lifting after the fact, just as of the introduction.

And the second half of the problem is the size of the short positions themselves. Under FINRA Rule 4560, US brokers must report short positions, and FINRA publishes short interest for each stock twice a month; since 2024 SEC Rule 13f-2 and Form SHO have been added, under which managers with a short position above USD 10mn or 2.5% of an issue report monthly, and the SEC publishes the aggregate. In the EU a net short position is notified to the regulator from 0.2% of capital and then at each 0.1%, and from 0.5% it is disclosed publicly, calculated at midnight and published by 15:30 on the next trading day. In Russia the aggregate short interest in a stock is not published at all.

From this comes a practical conclusion worth a separate discussion with the exchange and the regulator: publishing short interest by stock and announcing in advance the conditions for introducing and lifting a restriction, instead of a decision that people learn about on the day of its consequences, would remove a large part of the lottery that makes a defaulted stock gain 72% in a session. Neither requires banning shorts or changing the risk-management logic: it is only about making the rules and figures visible in advance.

Summary

Regulating one layer while the others remain unaccountable does not solve the stated problem. The retail holder of BO-001P-09 lost money not because they read a blogger. In many cases it was because they did not.

The chronology in one line: November 2023, "scam" on Telegram; July 2025, ruA- "stable"; September 2025, "the highest dividend yield on the Russian market"; October 2025, "the debt load does not threaten financial stability"; March 2026, the first delay; July 2026, +72% on short covering; August 2026, default and bankruptcy statements from two banks.

Tickers

Mentioned: EuroTrans (EUTR). Extended issuer cards on our portal: frontier.eninvs.com.

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