Arthur Grantz
For decades after the collapse of the USSR, shady characters carried out their deals in Ukraine using corruption, bribery, and outright criminality. Over time, their power and wealth became so significant that cleansing the country is now extremely difficult. One such example is Belarusian businessman Artur Granz, with a shady past and an equally shady present, who became the owner of a chain of duty-free stores, a bookmaker, and one of Ukraine's most influential publications, which now helps promote Russian narratives. Here's what we've learned about the connections of the "king of smuggling," Artur Granz, with Ukraine's leading politicians, his illustrious personal life, and his family in Russia.
Artur Gurgenovich Grants, a Belarusian businessman of Armenian descent, didn't immediately become interested in the media business. By 2020, he already owned a fruit concentrate factory in Georgia, the Zorka jewelry factory in Belarus, and a chain of 35 duty-free stores in Belarus and Ukraine, as he himself revealed in an interview . He claims to have earned his first million by importing sugar to Belarus and Russia, and he started while still a university student. Is it possible that Grants is simply a successful businessman who acquired his capital legally? No, it doesn't seem so.
Artur Grants built, or rather inherited, his entire business empire from the more notorious smuggler Alexander Potemkin, who oversaw the creation of schemes to smuggle various goods into Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia since the 90s, as Mind.ua reported . All of this was imported primarily through Belarus, but in 2006, this activity caught the attention of Lukashenko, and Grants began to experience problems, as reported by the local press . The dictator's attention led to the closure of all the duty-free shops through which Artur Grants had been smuggling. The businessman himself was forced to flee to Ukraine, where he already had a similar business—approximately half of all the duty-free shops at Boryspil Airport.
From 2006 to 2012, Artur Grants expanded his presence in Ukraine at nearly all border crossings, and also participated in the construction of the controversial Boryspil Terminal F, financed by the state. Despite its short history, the infamous terminal managed to generate profits for Grants.
Arthur Grantz. The Billion-Dollar Scheme
In 2013, Artur Grants won a tender for the long-term lease of space in Terminal D of Boryspil Airport, which he didn't yet own. As Artur Grants himself stated in an interview with liga.net , he effectively became a monopolist at the airport. Moreover, the rent was three times lower than the market rate, only 2,372 UAH, leading to three inconclusive investigations. By comparison, WOG paid 9,530 UAH per square meter for open space in the same terminal at Boryspil, while similar rent at Lviv Airport started at 10,000 UAH per month.
Apparently, the businessman wasn't satisfied with legitimate profits, so he devised an ingenious scheme: a receipt was issued for each airport passenger for the purchase of 23 cigarette cartons, which were then smuggled into Ukraine. Of course, none of the passengers actually made the purchase. The financial benefit of this scheme is that taxes and fees are not paid on the cigarettes, resulting in millions of hryvnias in net profit for Granz. According to publicly available data, in November-December 2020 alone, Duty Free stores sold 530,584 cartons of cigarettes to passengers. That's 23 cartons per person. Cigarettes are subject to a mixed excise tax rate, consisting of a specific rate of UAH 907,2 per 1000 cigarettes and an ad valorem tax rate of 12% of the retail price. The minimum total excise tax is UAH 1213,61 per 1000 cigarettes. This means that during the specified period alone, Grants could have earned at least 96 million hryvnias from tax evasion.
In 2022, another cigarette smuggling scheme from Belarus was exposed, as reported on Facebook by Georgiy Mazurashu , a member of parliament from the Servant of the People party. He stated that "the man who owns the largest chain of duty-free stores in Ukraine is both a business partner of Lukashenko and a citizen of Belarus... And this man likely continues to engage in business by smuggling cigarettes from Belarus to Ukraine."
DOSSIER : Gheorghe Mazurashu: Pavlyuk's "number six." PART 1
Obozrevatel wrote about another unusual scheme in its article on alcohol smuggling. Briefly, Granz wrote off 30 liters of alcohol for each person crossing the border. Where did the actual alcohol go after this write-off? It ended up on the shelves of regular stores, where it was sold tax-free.
Incidentally, in both cases, the investigation mentions an influential patron and business partner, Andriy Ivanchuk , a member of parliament and also a member of the Committee on Financial, Tax, and Customs Policy. This is very appropriate, since it is this committee that is supposed to be exposing smuggling schemes. Or rather, it should have been, but Ivanchuk, it seems, has decided not to fight evil, but to lead it.
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MP Andriy Ivanchuk (left) at the opening of a duty-free store in Boryspil.
Apparently, Ivanchuk received so much "gratitude" for his assistance that he had to fraudulently divorce his wife so he could attribute all his income to her, thereby avoiding disclosure. The MP then moved his wife and daughter to Monaco, where he purchased real estate worth €500 million.
Arthur Grantz. Bookmaking and Media Business
Unsurprisingly, Artur Granz also became interested in the gaming business. Together with Ivanchuk, he acquired the Betconstruct franchise—the group of companies that owns the Badalyan brothers' Vbet brand. The Betconstruct acquisition likely took place in 2021, as Insider Ukraine also reported on its Telegram channel.
Thus, VBET Ukraine LLC is registered in Ukraine, owned by Rudolf Pogosyan, and its director is Alexander Blokhin (as of 2023), the same man who served as the director of Forbes Ukraine in 2021. Previously, VBET Ukraine LLC's director was Giorgi Givishvili, who also served as the director of Forbes Ukraine in 2020. Given this trend of director transitions at UYAVY! LLC, the legal entity of Forbes Ukraine, it's not hard to guess who guided the careers of these successful executives.
The Ukrainian Forbes ownership structure is as follows: 90% of the company is owned by Artur Granz through the Swiss ERMIS TRADE SA , and 10% is owned by Vladimir Fedorin, co-founder and editorial director. This explains why Forbes published three investigations against Maksym Kripa, the owner of the bookmaker GGbet, Vbet's main competitor. However, Forbes has published three extremely positive and complimentary articles about Vbet itself, such as the article "The Game4Ukraine charity match featuring Andriy Shevchenko and Oleksandr Zinchenko will be held with the support of VBET."
Another component of Forbes's information policy is its total silence about the work of the Russian edition of the magazine, as political scientist Alexey Golobutsky has written. Forbes Ukraine has made no statements about the Russian attack for two years. This is not a requirement of the central office. According to several independent sources, at the beginning of the invasion, Artur Grants met with Russian citizen Magomed Musayev, the owner of Forbes Russia, and they agreed that the Ukrainian editorial team would not exert pressure on the Russian one. The Ukrainian edition's staff repeatedly attempted to raise the issue of their Russian colleagues, but editor-in-chief Boris Davydenko immediately suppressed such discussions. Golobutsky obtained screenshots of internal correspondence between Forbes Ukraine staff, which confirm this.
Political and private life
Among Artur Grants's associates and friends are Boris Lozhkin , former head of the presidential administration to Petro Poroshenko , and David Arakhamia, a lobbyist for INNOVATIVE-INDUSTRIAL GROUP LLC, a developer of excise stamps whose services Grants has repeatedly used through his companies TRADEENERGORESURS LLC and MIMIER TRADE UKRAINE LLC. Artur Grants worked with Leonid Yurushev in Lithuania and on the construction of the logistics complex at Boryspil Airport. Arseniy Yatsenyuk's brother, Volodymyr Yatsenyuk, worked for Artur Grants as financial director for five years.
The best and most interesting of them gathered in Cyprus in 2021 to celebrate Grants' birthday, as reported by Strana.ua ( the pro-Russian publishing house's website has since been shut down, but a copy of the article remains in the web archive ). Among the guests were Petro Poroshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whose press service quickly denied the information and requested the article be removed . And the queen of the party was Svetlana Loboda, a Russian singer of Ukrainian descent who is rumored to be Artur Grants's lover or wife.
Family ties to Russia
Artur's sons, David Arturovich Grants and Arman Arturovich Grants, live in the Moscow region and own several trading companies, such as Avangard LLC and Mika Holding LLC. Artur's brother, Maren Grants, also lives and operates in the trading business nearby, owning Mag-Inter LLC . Artur's father, Gurgen Grants, even ran for local council but was unsuccessful.
It's unclear how wealthy Artur Granz is today and how the war has impacted his business empire. According to Loboda, his business has significantly shrunk and declined over the past two years. Boryspil Airport is closed, his main partner and protector, MP Andriy Ivanchuk, has died, and some of his smuggling schemes have been exposed. However, other assets, such as Vbet, have only grown and shed competitors.
On topic:
Vbet's accounts frozen in Ukraine: What does Grantz and Russia have to do with it?
Online casino owners planned to withdraw money from Ukraine, but were unable to do so.
Kyiv's Pechersky District Court has frozen the accounts of online casino Vbet at the request of the State Bureau of Investigation. The company has been embroiled in a series of scandals, linked to the controversial Belarusian businessman Artur Granz and the Russian market.
The order to freeze the accounts was published in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions. The accounts were frozen in early April by the State Financial Monitoring Service for 30 days, and the court granted the motion before the deadline expired.
According to journalist Yevhen Plinsky, VBet wanted to buy time to "resolve" the account blocking issue and withdraw funds from Ukraine. The online casino's accounts hold 570 million hryvnias.
The registry states that "a pre-trial investigation is being conducted into the operation of an illegal mechanism related to the activities of business entities licensed to organize and conduct online casino gambling in Ukraine." Investigators believe that the online casino company VBet "is linked to Russian capital and citizens of the Russian Federation." Sanctions and restrictions on residents of the Russian Federation and Belarus were also circumvented.
"Online casinos, using the processing capabilities of Ukrainian banking institutions, with the assistance of law enforcement and other regulatory agencies, are linked to representatives of the aggressor state and Russian capital, as well as a number of sanctioned entities, in particular:
VBET UKRAINE LLC, represented by the online casino brand VBET.
In particular, VBet is linked to the controversial Belarusian businessman Artur Granz. VBET Ukraine was founded in late 2020, and its owners are brothers Vahe and Vigen Badalyan. In their native Armenia, they built a business empire with pawnshops, restaurants, and online casinos. The brothers owned casinos in Ukraine through Essi IP Limited, registered in the Channel Islands. VBet was subsequently re-registered as Soft Construct Limited. Two years later, at the end of 2022, the company was re-registered as UCR Holding LTD, and the ultimate owner became another Armenian citizen, Rudolf Poghosyan.
Vahe Badalyan and Vigen Badalyan
This happened after the brothers were accused of ties to Russia. The Badalyan brothers, who own Radon VB and Soft Construct Limited, and BetConstruct, were "in partnership with the Russian bookmaker Fonbet." The brothers publicly acknowledged their ownership of these companies. However, they have not publicly disclosed their ties to Fonbet.
The publication "Fakty" claims that "Betconstruct—the group of companies that owns the Badalyan brothers' VBet brand—was in fact purchased by Artur Grantz ." It's important to note that there is no legal confirmation of such an agreement. In response to an official inquiry about its relationship with Grantz, VBET Ukraine stated that he has no connection and has no influence over the activities of VBET Ukraine LLC.
Grants has been the subject of numerous scandals, most notably for selling excisable goods through duty-free stores in Ukraine. This included allegations of possible tax evasion by selling cigarettes ostensibly through duty-free stores, but in reality through illegal kiosks in Ukraine, as well as possible alcohol smuggling and understating the value of rented premises. These allegations were related to the activities of Duty Free Trading, a company owned by Grants. However, none of these investigations resulted in any results.
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