Good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to VEON's Third Quarter Trading Update for the Period Ending 30 September 2022. I'm Nik Kershaw of VEON's Group Direct of Investor Relations. I'm pleased to be joined in the room today by Kaan Terzioğlu, our Group CEO; as well as Serkan Okandan, our Group CFO. Today's presentation will begin with an operational overview from Kaan, following by a financial review from Serkan, and then Kaan will come back and close before we move to the Q&A. All participants will be in listen only mode, and the question-and-answer session today will be facilitated through the Q&A function in the web link. If you could please share any questions you have in the Q&A function. We will look to answer as many of the questions we can in the time allotted. Before getting started, I would like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements during today's presentation, which involve certain risks and uncertainties. These statements relate in part to the company's anticipated performance and operational guidance, future market developments and trends, operational network development and network investments, and the company's ability to realize its targets and commercial and strategic initiatives, including current and future transactions. Certain factors may cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements, including the risks detailed in the company's annual report on Form 20-F and other recent public filings made by the company with the SEC. The trading update and the presentation can be downloaded from our website. With that, let me hand over to Kaan. Kaan Terzioğlu: Thank you, Nik. Once again, we started today with a song from Pakistan. We condemn the assassination attempt to Imran Khan and wish him quick recovery. Good morning and good afternoon to all…

Thanks, Kaan. Good morning and good afternoon to all the participants. On the following slides, I will elaborate on the financial highlights for our third quarter and nine months results in more detail. For the first nine months of 2022, we reported solid local currency growth in both revenues and EBITDA. Service revenues and EBITDA were up by 4.7% and 2.8% year-on-year in reported currency, respectively. As we noted previously, CapEx for this year will be lower than we originally anticipated and also lower than last year. For the first nine months, CapEx was $1.2 billion, down by 8.4% year-on-year. Moving now to Slide 19, which covers the same metrics but for the third quarter. Similar to the nine months results, we saw strong local currency performance in revenues, while Group EBITDA year-on-year performance was impacted by a number of extraordinary non-recurring items in the third quarter this year and the third quarter last year, as noted in the Country Performance section of the trading update. Excluding these one-off items, Group EBITDA increased by 1.9% year-on-year in local currency. On the coming slides, I will discuss the quarterly performance in more detail. Moving first to revenues on Slide 20. Third quarter saw a solid service revenue performance across all our markets, especially with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, all delivering double-digit growth. In Ukraine, we achieved 5.2% year-on-year revenue growth despite the current operating environment. As Kaan already mentioned, this is a testament to our team in Ukraine. In Russia, reported revenue was negatively impacted by lower handset sales due to supply chain issues, while service revenues were up by 2.2% year-on-year. Our non-telecom related revenues in Russia continue to decline and constituted 7.9% of total Group reported revenues in the third quarter this year versus 10.4% in Q3…

Thank you, Kaan. We have received a number of questions already through the webinar. And please, if you have any additional questions, please submit them through and we'll do our best to answer as many as we can. And those who we don't cover, I will come back to on an individual basis. Actually, Kaan the first question for you, why is VEON making this divestment of Russia now and has it been prompted by any sort of government request? Kaan Terzioğlu: Thank you. And thank you for the question. The answer is a clear no. This is not being pushed for a certain type of a decision. We are taking a business and commercial decision and we basically announced a process, a competitive process that has been ongoing. And it's also important to understand that we will make the best interest of company decisions for all stakeholders, including our shareholders, creditors, employees, business partners and every person that is doing business in Russia with us. I am clearly excited with one fact, over the last three years, we have built a strong successful business in Russia. And I'm glad to see multiple partners from the spectrum of competitors to Russian businessmen and also our management to be excited about this opportunity. We will run this competitive process and we will keep the market posted with any other developments. Thank you.

Thanks, Kaan. Serkan, it's a question for you. Would you consider buying back your longer-dated bonds given the current pricing?

Thank you, Nik. As we have also discussed in our second quarter results earnings call, our recent priority is to keep a strong liquidity position at the Group level, for which we have further increased our cash balance at the HQ level to $2.6 billion at the end of the third quarter. In the meantime, we are also currently evaluating various options around our overall capital structure.

Thanks. Kaan back to you. Could you maybe give us an update on the status of the tower transactions? Kaan Terzioğlu: Sure. About a year ago, we sold our towers in Russia. And since that disposition, we still have almost 36,000 towers in our portfolio mostly concentrated in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Ukraine. Now clearly, we have been on this tower potential monetization process talking to various parties. And as I mentioned before, some of these, especially in Pakistan and Kazakhstan have come to quite a long process to come into an end. We will continue sticking to our strategy of being an asset-light operator. I strongly believe that towers is not an asset that needs to be owned by the telecom operators. Independent tower companies are much better positioned to create optimization of costs as well as multi-tenancy execution on the sales side. So we will stick to that strategy.

Thanks. And Kaan, another question for you. Maybe comment on the ability to increase pricing. I think that's particularly relevant in the current environment where we are seeing increasing inflation across the globe. Kaan Terzioğlu: Clearly, the macroeconomic environment around the world is having inflationary impact all around the countries. For us, when we look into a market and making market investment decisions, we look to markets with specific criteria. In addition to markets being having demographic dividends, population growth, low penetration of services, technology, 4G, openness to adjacent markets to us to be a player, one additional criteria is retail price control. We will see retail price control capability and our execution capability of inflationary pricing as a must have in terms of a market criteria. So far I'm very happy with the performance on this. Inflationary pricing is not presented as just increasing the prices, but also moving to a more for more strategy. We provide more cricket, more football, more music, more financial services, and the access to additional wallet share in the markets that we operate. So far, I'm happy with the execution.

Thanks. Serkan back to you. Just have you been able to make any interest payments from Russia on the intercompany debt? And can you maybe just update us on the concept of the current intercompany debt?

Thank you, Nik. Regarding the interest payments, during the second quarter of this year, we applied for a license to the Minister of Finance in Russia. And after obtaining the record licenses from the ministry, we’ve received an interest payment on the intercompany debt from intercompany through the second quarter. However, in Q3, we haven't received interest payments from Russia. Regarding the quantum of intercompany debt, following innovation of two commercial loans from HQ level to intercompany level in the second quarter, and also recent netting of various intercompany positions in the third quarter, at the end of September, the approximate overall outstanding debt, intercompany debt of towards HQ is around 50 billion ruble, on which we are charging floating and some part of it fixed interest. And payment of interest on these intercompany loans remains subject to obtaining record approvals from the Minister of Finance in Russia.

Kaan, could you maybe update us just on the process around the restructuring the ownership of Kazakhstan? Kaan Terzioğlu: Kazakhstan is a market which is actually mimicking our strategy in an excellent way. If you look to Kazakhstan, we have four important businesses running in parallel. One, on one side, we have our towers company, which is established this year owning our towers. We have our company where we have 50% market shareholder, the fiber business. And on the other side, we have our telecom operations cartel and our fintech company. I am happy with the fair performance of all companies in this picture. We will continue executing our strategies in terms of being an asset-light company in Kazakhstan. But we have no intentions to sell Kazakhstan. It is one of our bluechip markets. And we will address this issue in line with our process in Russia.

And Kaan another question for you. Would you consider sort of individual listing subsidiaries such as Pakistan? Kaan Terzioğlu: Jazz in Pakistan, Banglalink in Bangladesh, these are bluechip brands. And I'm sure you know that the investors in these countries are dying to own part of these brands. So we will be keeping an open mind into this. And we will explore if there are enough interest in these markets for us to look for local IPOs. Again, nothing decided at this moment, but we will keep the markets updated about this.

Serkan could you maybe just update us about why you're engaging with bondholders?

I would say one thing on this subject. Over the last eight months, since February of this year, we have successfully strengthened our HQ liquidity position. And this remain -- still remains a very key priority for us going forward. In addition to that, we will leverage our local operating companies which continue to be largely self-sufficient from their financing perspective. And in the meantime, we have also made good progress optimizing the HQ capital structure for the longer term. So taking into consideration the challenges that we may face in the local markets in the current environment, so this is very important for us to have a longer term perspective. In this context, we would like to engage in discussions with our bondholders, or our indirect subsidiary or Holdings B.V. only for the '23 notes, which I mentioned that they will be doing in April and February next year, and explore alternatives for the Group.

And what will you be proposing to bondholders?

Actually, VEON Limited, which is making the discussion with the bondholders, '23 bondholders. First we'd like to intend to discuss with the larger holders our '23 bonds in a private discussion restricted basis. And as soon as such discussions conclude, then we expect to be in a position to update the market in the coming weeks.

Serkan, sorry, one more question on the same topic is I mean, are you looking to refinance and what are you doing around this and what will happen if you can't reach an agreement with the bondholders?

In the current circumstances, Nik, it will be very difficult for VEON to access the debt and capital markets for various reasons, as you know, and as the refinancing is currently not feasible from our perspective. So therefore, these discussions relate to our short term '23 notes only, not the longer ones, which represent approximately $1.2 billion over total debt. Since VEON Limited’s discussions with the larger bondholders still ongoing at this stage, we cannot comment in further details, but we are confident that we can reach a mutually agreeable solution with the bondholders.

Thanks very much. Thank you very much, everyone, for your time today and for the questions you've submitted. I know there are one or two more questions that have come through which we will get back to you individually after this call. So I think we're out of time. So thank you very much for your time and appreciate you dialing in. Thank you. Kaan Terzioğlu: Thank you.

Thank you.