The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is lending US$32.5mn to a local subsidiary of Turkey’s Anadolu Cam group to build a bottling plant near the city of Ufa in central Russia.

The bank is lender of record for the full amount but is taking US$16.25mn on its own books and syndicating the remaining US$16.25mn to a group of international banks under an EBRD A/B loan structure. ABN Amro and Calyon will each take US$8.125mn of the B loan.

The total cost of the Ufa project is US$65mn and the borrower is Ruscam-Ufa, a Russian subsidiary of Anadolu Cam, the largest producer of food and beverage containers in Turkey and a member of the leading Turkish industrial group Turkiye Sise ve Cam Fabrikalari.

Hans Christian Jacobsen, director of agribusiness at the EBRD, says the project will help improve the quality of glass packaging offered to food and beverage producers in central and eastern Russia.

In 2004, the EBRD lent €18.9mn to another Russian subsidiary of the Anadolu Cam group to modernise a bottling plant bought in northwest Russia earlier that year. In the agribusiness sector alone, the EBRD has signed more than 220 projects worth €3.3bn across the bank’s 27 countries of operation.