LONDON (Reuters) – Political rehabilitation doesn’t get much better. Just over a year ago Russian aluminium producer Rusal was hit with swingeing sanctions by the U.S. government.
The company’s owner, Oleg Deripaska, was accused of a litany of misdeeds by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), all of which he denied, and his sprawling industrial empire, including Rusal, was slapped with secondary sanctions.
Those sanctions were lifted in January after Deripaska agreed to reduce his control in Rusal. Just three months later in April Rusal landed a major equity and supply deal with Braidy Industries, which is planning a state-of-the-art aluminium rolling mill in Kentucky.
The deal, which will see Rusal invest $200 million for a 40-percent stake in the plant, is an obvious win-win for both parties. Braidy gets an investment booster towards its construction costs of $1.6 billion and Rusal gets political cover against any future punitive action by the U.S. government.
But the deal is also significant for what it says about the state of the U.S. and global aluminium markets. Braidy’s Atlas mill is scheduled to come on stream in 2021. Extraordinarily, it will be the first greenfield aluminium rolling mill in the United States in 37 years.
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