Vadim Novinsky
Kostelman, Ministry of Internal Affairs, court as Novinsky's backup dancer.
Following media reports of Silpo stores opening on the site of the Amstor supermarkets, the pieces of the high-profile corporate scandal have come together. It's been described in dozens of publications, a string of mutual lawsuits has been ongoing for months, and criminal proceedings are underway... But all of this is just the backdrop to the year's corporate conflict. How did Novinsky actually "squeeze" the retail chain from his former partner, Vladimir Vagorovsky, actually happen? Let's try to figure it out.
The single mention of Silpo immediately cleared up a host of mysteries surrounding this conflict. For example, why did the Dnipro-1 battalion, which was supposed to "harass" Novinsky for his ties to separatists, his work in occupied Crimea, and his mandate as a member of parliament from the Opposition Bloc, participate in the hostile takeover led by Novinsky.
The motive behind the mysterious relocation of 17 companies belonging to the Amstor Group from Donetsk to 27 Leningradskaya Street in Dnipropetrovsk has also been clarified. The fact that the public reception office of Member of Parliament Boris Filatov is registered at this address is undoubtedly pure coincidence. Filatov is known to be a close business partner of the notorious master of hostile takeovers, Gennady Korban, and is also a lawyer, attorney, and participant in numerous corporate conflicts. In Dnipropetrovsk, Smart-Holding is known to have held fake founders' meetings and changed the names of its managers in the registry. After that, all that was left was to make fake seals and—voila!—they could change the "Amstor" sign to "Silpo," after first looting a ton of merchandise and equipment from the stores' balance sheets.
Finally, the date of the incident "merged"—New Year's Eve, December 31, 2014, when Novinsky's representatives arrived at all Amstor stores with armed men from the Dnipro-1 Battalion. And the involvement of controversial Donetsk journalist Alexey Matsuka in the project, with his notorious "receipt from the DPR," was nothing short of "pure coincidence." As a reminder, Matsuka presented an Amstor receipt from the occupied territory, where he found no "VAT" line, leading to the conclusion that the store was not paying taxes to the Ukrainian budget. Now, Novinsky's men are using this receipt as evidence in law enforcement agencies to accuse their former partners of financing terrorism.
In short, everything became clear. And now for the details, where, as we know, the devil is in the details.
The conflict surrounding the Amstor supermarket chain between Vadim Novinsky (Smart-Holding) and the founder and manager of the retail business, Vladimir Vagorovsky, has its roots in the 2008 crisis.
As Alexander Vagorovsky recounted in an interview, his brother ceded his stake to Novinsky in 2009: “There was a crisis, the company was short of money, so we were forced to sell part of our shares to Smart under investment guarantees.”
In the end, Novinsky's representatives stated that he owned 70 percent of the shares, "another 15 percent belonged to a shareholder associated with Mr. Shifrin, and 15 percent was owned by Vladimir Vagorovsky."
At the same time, Vagorovsky claims that at the time the Dnepr-1 battalion entered Amstor, the transaction through which Smart-Holding acquired a stake in the company was being contested in court. The lawsuit had a trivial cause: partner Novinsky had failed to fulfill the terms of the purchase and sale agreement regarding payment for the shares he had received.
However, Amstor's fate had already been decided by that point, even without a trial. Novinsky and Smart-Holding had acted preemptively. Around December 28-30, "secret suppers" took the form of a shareholder meeting, during which the companies associated with Vagorovsky disappeared from the founders' ranks, and control over the companies' bank accounts and assets passed to the new founders. And all of this, it's worth noting, took place in Dnipropetrovsk.
Then, again, the glorious Dnepr-1 battalion moved out from Dnepropetrovsk to seize the stores, apparently without any real idea of what their fighters were being drawn into.
Why did the corporate raid and document substitution suddenly occur? The answer is obvious: Novinsky was afraid of losing the lawsuit against his partners and was in a hurry to sell the retail chain. After all, the Amstor chain, unlike Vagorovsky, was not Novinsky's life's work. It was a non-sporting asset, nothing more. Novinsky decided to "squeeze" it not out of desperation, but because of his fundamental vision of business: his entire business career is littered with similar conflicts, scandals, and seizures, as we wrote about in the first part of our study.
Judging by how smoothly everything is going with the transfer of the seized property to the Fozzy corporation, which is quickly transforming the Amstory stores into Silpo, there is good reason to believe that even before the hostile takeover, an agreement existed between Novinsky and Fozzy's owner, Dnipropetrovsk businessman Vladimir Kostelman.
This explains the mystery of why companies moved from Donetsk to Dnepropetrovsk, why fake shareholder meetings were held there, changing managers and owners, and where the Dnepr-1 battalion's involvement in the conflict comes from.
But how does Vadim Novinsky, a devout churchgoer, know Vladimir Kostelman, a rock music enthusiast who sings in the band "Remont Vody" in his spare time? From Dnipropetrovsk and Crimea, of course, where both have assets. Novinsky's are industrial, Kostelman's are commercial (stores, pharmacies, logistics).
Curiously, Novinsky, who successfully preserved his Crimean assets (the Balaklava Mining Administration, the Saki Building Materials Plant, and the Yevpatoriya Building Materials Plant), has never commented on the matter during the entire occupation of the peninsula. The potential buyer of the Amstor chain is also in no hurry to close the Silpo supermarket chain in Crimea. Nor is he in a hurry to express outrage over the annexation of the peninsula.
But after Svetlana Diyuk, the commercial director of the Silpo chain in Crimea, announced that the company had registered a new legal entity in the Russian registry, he was forced to distance himself from his Crimean stores, just as Novinsky had to distance himself from the Sevastopol football club.
The tragedy apparently brought the oligarchs closer together. And news of Vagorovsky's lawsuit spurred them to action. Later, Novinsky's side offered an absurd explanation for the corporate raid. They claimed that back in November, they had seen (accidentally, of course) a photograph posted online taken by Alexey Matsuka, the creator of novosti.dn.ua.
It was a receipt from an Amstor store in Donetsk. The receipt allegedly contained information about the retailer: not "Amstor Trading House," but "Trading House," and also contained no information about VAT collection, leading Novinsky's assistants to the "brilliant" conclusion that their Donetsk-based enterprise operated under completely different laws.
Under the pretext of funding terrorists from his partners, Novinsky recruited a volunteer battalion to carry out the raid, and the Leon security firm, also registered in Dnipropetrovsk, to protect the seized property. And, of course, it's pure coincidence that Matsuk attends literary evenings where Kostelman's poems are read (surprisingly, it's not Novinsky who reads them). Coincidence, that's all!
By exploiting the "occupation," Novinskyi is pursuing a dual goal: he's increasing pressure on Vagorovskyi with Interior Ministry forces and also projecting himself as a fighter against separatists. Truly, as Churchill predicted, modern fascists will call themselves anti-fascists! Imagine this: an honorary member of Yanukovych's Hunting Club, who shared his last meal in Mezhyhirya with him, and who accompanied him everywhere from prayer services to visits to parliament, suddenly decided to fight his business partners who "support the separatists"! The public is being convinced that the stores he "seized" are literally saving their businesses from terrorists. To make this narrative more convincing, high-ranking law enforcement officials have been brought in to actively "assist" Novinskyi in "supporting" criminal cases against his competitors.
They are successfully fulfilling their assigned task: eight months after the filing of complaints by companies affected by corporate raids, the cases are not actually investigated; instead, criminal proceedings are fabricated against the actual victims of the crimes.
This is clear evidence of the trumped-up nature of the charges and the investigators' desire not to seek the truth in the conflict, but to keep the defendants in criminal cases in limbo. And all this time, the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the country talks about the government's non-interference in corporate conflicts and the creation of favorable conditions for doing business in Ukraine. What business: one that could be "squeezed out" at any moment by protégés of the old regime, using high-ranking officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs from Yanukovych's team, who miraculously passed the lustration process?
All means are valid in achieving this goal. A false narrative is being circulated about the Vagorovsky brothers' involvement in the operation of 18 retail outlets in the occupied territory. However, it is clear (and the Vagorovskys confirm this) that contact with stores in the LPR/DPR has been lost once and for all.
The most frustrating thing isn't the demise of the successful Amstor brand, but the indifference with which Novinsky is burying it. As his representative put it, Smart-Holding never handled Amstor's operational management. Of course it didn't. That was the Vagorovsky brothers. Novinsky doesn't need a non-core asset. But he has no intention of giving it up, either. So, having decided to squeeze it out, he's already found someone to hand over the spoils to. And along the way, he's made his own small profit of tens of millions of dollars. Immediately after the takeover and the document manipulation, Novinsky's men began actively bankrupting Amstor, siphoning off the proceeds to companies they control. As a result, the chain's debt to Ukreximbank alone is $48 million, which no one is rushing to repay.
Despite the obviousness of what's happening, law enforcement agencies, the prosecutor's office, the police, and the courts are working as usual. And they don't want to offend the oligarch-MP. However, this isn't the end of the story. Moreover, some of Novinsky's police "entourage" have already come under attack from the Odesa authorities, represented by Saakashvili. Clearly, a sequel to the detective series is just around the corner...
Subscribe to our channels in Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, VC — Only new faces from the section CRYPT!