MOSCOW, October 30 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's richest man will receive a $4.5 billion state loan to help him retain his stake in the world's largest nickel company, Norilsk Nickel, financial media reported on Thursday. (Richest Russians - Image gallery)

Russian business daily Vedomosti, along with the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, said billionaire Oleg Deripaska's aluminum company RusAl would be the main beneficiary of a $10 billion state credit bailout to be disbursed by development bank VEB.

RusAl, in which Deripaska holds 57%, bought a 25% stake in Norilsk Nickel from billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov in April this year, taking a syndicated loan from 11 Western banks, and pledging the stake as collateral.

One month later, Norilsk's stock began to plummet, and has since lost almost 75% of its value amid the stock market crisis and falling nickel prices. The deadline for repaying the loan arrives on Friday.

VEB declined on Thursday to release the names of its loan recipients.

However, Vedomosti said sources close to VEB, a RusAl shareholder, and two staffers at the Western banks that provided the credit to RusAl had confirmed the report.

The paper said that the funds, part of a $50 billion Central Bank bailout to ease the credit crunch, must be repaid by December 31, 2009. As VEB requires equity as collateral for the loans, RusAl will forfeit its interest in Norilsk Nickel if it fails to repay the funds by the deadline.

The paper said the loan to Deripaska is unprecedented, as the bank has a $2.5 billion limit on loans to a single company. However, it cited an analyst at the Capital investment company as saying RusAl was helped along by its top officials' lobbying power in the Kremlin.

In addition, the Russian government would be reluctant to risk seeing a large stake in a strategic company enter the open market, causing Norilsk Nickel's share price to plummet further.

Vedomosti said the second-largest beneficiary of credit from VEB is oligarch Mikhail Fridman. The bank has loaned Fridman's Alfa Group $2 billion to prevent it losing its 44% stake in VimpelCom, the country's second-largest mobile phone operator, which has been pledged to Deutsche Bank as collateral for a loan.