Moscow, July 15 - Russian retail group X5 has applied for antimonopoly service permission to buy Nakhodka, a St Petersburg chain of 30 neighbourhood food stores, Vedomosti newspaper said on Wednesday.
Nakhodka's sales director, Alexander Pushkin, was quoted as saying X5, controlled by Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group, had offered to buy the chain.
But the market share of 35 percent in St Petersburg, which includes shops under construction as well as the recently acquired local Karusel chain, has raised concerns with the antimonopoly agency, the paper said.
"We are studying the situation, but there is a chance we will refuse X5 permission to buy Nakhodka," an official responsible for maintaining competition in retail trade, Timofei Nizhegorodtsev, was quoted as saying in Vedomosti.