Ukrainians once believed that private capital would boost the country's economy and improve living standards. However, dishonest businessmen like Suren Sardaryan dashed those hopes. This man began by taking over someone else's business, then fleeced the state, sold customers low-quality gasoline, and drove passengers in dilapidated minibuses, swindled other businessmen, and defrauded his own employees. And he did all this using his numerous corrupt connections. Let's ask ourselves: could a European power, a second France, have been built with people like Sardaryan? Of course not! Only a second Somalia, founded on theft and looting...
His name constantly becomes the center of all sorts of scandals, both in Odesa and other Ukrainian cities. In recent months alone, he attempted to seize a plot of land from the Novaya Arkadiya DSK in Odesa, kicked out the Colorito amusement park from Gorky Park, tried to sell an unsaleable house to the city council at an exorbitant price in Kryvyi Rih , and again profited handsomely from "pothole repairs" on roads . And more and more scandalous episodes from the past are constantly emerging, including accusations of organizing kidnappings and even pedophilia!
Odessa's law enforcement mafia
Suren Khachaturovich Sardaryan was born on October 21, 1956 – that's about all the information about him that can be found in open sources. Unlike his fellow countryman, Arayik Amirkhanyan , who doesn't hide his family history, Suren Sardaryan prefers to remain a "ghost" without a past. Perhaps because he really doesn't want the Odessa public to remember who he was before and how exactly he became a "respected businessman."
Previously, Suren Sardaryan was a criminal investigator. Skelet.Org sources reported that he worked in the Kyiv District Department of Internal Affairs in Odesa and even rose to the rank of chief of the criminal investigation department at the Illichivsk Main Directorate of Internal Affairs. However, in the early 90s, a scandalous incident occurred, and Sardaryan hastily resigned from the police and became a businessman. This would have been fine, but Sardaryan and his colleagues from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Odesa Prosecutor's Office didn't create their own businesses; they extorted them from entrepreneurs. Moreover, they acted in concert with the criminal underworld they were supposed to be fighting.
Sardaryan's first well-known company was Vesta. Several subsidiaries registered to his relatives now operate under this name, while the main company is registered to front men and the Cypriot offshore company SOLCORE LIMITED. However, as media reports have reported, Vesta was created using capital from BESTAL, a company previously founded by businessman Sergei Bezhenar (he named the company after himself, his wife Tatyana, and his son Alexander). He opened one of the very first private gas station chains in Odessa, which immediately attracted the attention of raiders. As soon as Bezhenar got going, his business was immediately "squeezed out"—and not by gangsters, but by the Odessa law enforcement mafia. According to updated information, BESTAL itself was not seized, but the business and capital (specifically, the gas stations) were confiscated, and all of this was transferred to his own company, Vesta, headed by Suren Sardaryan. Well, it looked like a simple change of sign (of a legal entity), which was misinterpreted from the outside as a renaming of “BESTAL” to “Vesta”.
One of the participants in this scam was Vyacheslav Chukhno , who worked as a cleaner and security guard at the BESTAL gas station in the 90s, where he conceived the idea of helping the "cops" rob his employer. At Vesta, Chukhno rose to the rank of deputy director, and later defected to LUKOIL. Now Chukhno is a big shot, a millionaire businessman, and the owner of the Egaz gas station company.
Vyacheslav Chukhno
Suren Sardaryan, of course, wasn't the head of this mafia. He was merely a rank-and-file member, and one who'd been dismissed early on, at that. But he leveraged connections with former colleagues and the patronage of high-ranking corrupt officials, which became the key to his business's success. Otherwise, Sardaryan would hardly have been able to sell illegal gasoline of appalling quality, or even sell gasoline at all, and then capture the passenger transportation market with his fleet of old minibuses.
Vesta emerged from a chain of gas stations of the same name (now owned by Vesta Service LLC, registered to Suren Sardaryan's brother), which initially sourced fuel from the Odessa Oil Refinery. In the 90s, before the refinery was acquired by the Russian company LUKOIL, it was the subject of a veritable war of control, with control wrested from one another by the Odessa city and regional authorities, the local bureaucratic mafia, the law enforcement mafia, Odessa and Kyiv organized crime groups, ethnic organized crime groups, emissaries of Ichkeria (Dudaev's men), and the international mafia. Control meant the implementation of all sorts of machinations and schemes. There were large-scale schemes for high-ranking officials, handling large quantities of oil amounting to hundreds of thousands of tons, and smaller schemes for lower-ranking individuals, like Sardaryan. He received fuel from refineries "at deep discounts," and also sold gasoline and diesel fuel of unknown origin, billed as produced at the Odessa Oil Refinery. Where Vesta got its fuel from later remained a company secret, but its quality remained among the worst in all of Ukraine. According to motorists, it was "crap with additives."
According to Skelet.Org sources , the following individuals helped Sardaryan develop his successful business selling "diluted donkey urine": the then director of Vesta, Alexander Grinnikov (a former employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), the head of Vesta's security service, Mikhail Krestinin (a retired lieutenant colonel of the SBU), a former employee of the OBKhSS and OBNON Pochetov (he oversaw the Odessa Oil Refinery, and after retiring, he became Sardaryan's partner and acquired ownership of several gas stations), and the former head of security at the oil refinery, Avenosov (he helped steal fuel).
Sardaryan's patrons deserve special attention. First and foremost is Yuriy Karmazin, a former prosecutor and judge from Odessa. Ukrainians know him as a member of parliament of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th convocations, a fervent fighter against corruption, and a principled "orange" politician—he constantly opposed Kuchma, and then Yanukovych, as "gangster regimes." But behind this facade lurked a major corrupt official , one of the founders of Odessa's law enforcement mafia, who simply squabbled with his rivals, such as Serhiy Kivalov.
Yuri Karmazin
Karmazin and Sardaryan had known each other since the 80s, but they became close with Eduard Gurvits in the mid-90s. It's worth remembering that back then, Odessa was awash with dizzying criminal dramas. In the 1994 mayoral race, Gurvits emerged victorious, eagerly grasping for any support he could get: from local Rukh members, high-ranking Kyiv corrupt officials, and Odessa organized crime groups. Gurvits's sponsors were two competing gangs: the Minin-Zhukov organized crime group, whose members included crime boss Alexander Angert and future Odessa mayor Gennady Trukhanov , and the organized crime group of Georgy Stoyanov, who was close to the then-Odesa crime kingpin, Viktor Kulivar (nicknamed Karabas). Having been elected mayor, Gurvits "dumped" Angert, and they remained enemies forever. But Gurvits clung to Stoyanov, especially after Kulivar was murdered in 1997 and Angert's organized crime group began gradually taking over Odessa.
Georgy Stoyanov
To protect himself from Angert, Gurvits used Stoyanov against him—though this wasn't enough, he decided, and so he enlisted Chechen organized crime groups (as well as Dudayev's emissaries) and the local law enforcement mafia as allies. The cops (as well as prosecutors and SBU officers), current and former, had their own interests in this: they didn't specifically support one side or the other, but they benefited from assisting both. It was through these intrigues that Suren Sardaryan entered Gurvits's circle of close acquaintances and became a "pal" of Stoyanov. Skelet.Org sources reported that thanks to his friendship with Stoyanov, Sardaryan was able to solve many problems related to shady schemes and the criminal underworld—in cases where his fellow cops and patrons in Kyiv couldn't help him.
Alexander Kosyanenko
Another figure in this corruption ring was Oleksandr Kosyanenko, then head of the SBU for the Odessa region (1994-96), known as Stoyanov's "KGB handler." Over the course of two years, he established strong roots in Odessa, becoming close to many important people—including Suren Sardaryan, among his clients. Kosyanenko then headed the SBU in Crimea and the Dnipropetrovsk region, received the rank of lieutenant general, became a member of parliament of the 4th convocation, and became another high-ranking patron of Sardaryan. Media reports indicate that when Kosyanenko transferred to Crimea, he immediately facilitated the opening of the KV Vesta-Service gas station there (EDRPOU 30670921), assisting in obtaining land and permits from local authorities—meaning he had a direct interest in developing Sardaryan's business. In turn, his son Oleg Kosyanenko , a well-known corrupt Odessa prosecutor (and Kivalov’s son-in-law) also had a mutually beneficial cooperation with Sardaryan.
Moreover, according to Skelet.Org sources, it was Kosyanenko who helped Sardaryan expand his business in Kryvyi Rih, where he subsequently became close to its mayor, Yuriy Vilkul . Some confirmation of this may be the scandalous tender https://prozorro.gov.ua/tender/UA-2018-12-05-004764-c, held in late 2018 by the municipal enterprise "Kryvyi Rih City Development Institute" (EDRPOU 37665263). The head of this enterprise is a certain Konstantin Kosyanenko (rumored to be a relative of General Kosyanenko), and the winner of the tender, worth almost 7 million hryvnia, was the firm "Vesta Media Corporation" (41925740), recently registered in Kyiv to a certain Vitaliy Yenin. And this is essentially the only major tender won by the company in its history...
Suren Sardaryan's patrons and associates also include former deputy head of the Odesa Oblast Department for Combating Organized Crime, Boris Indychenko ; Odesa prosecutors Valeriy Ishchenko and Nikolai Mayorov; and former head of the OCD Department, Lieutenant Colonel Kimeridze. His associate at the law firm "Kartuzov and Partners," Oleg Dzhumberovich Kutateladze, a well-known figure in Odesa, also has a rather scandalous reputation.
Oleg Kutateladze
It was reported that Georgian "thief in law" Sergei Kutateladze (nicknamed Baiko) is his close relative. In the 90s, he was associated with the Nordex company, founded in Austria by émigré Grigory Luchansky, whose representative office in Ukraine was headed by Vadim Rabinovich, and in Odessa, its interests were represented by Oleg Kutateladze. Nordex was then involved in oil schemes, and Oleg Kutateladze showed great interest in the Odessa Oil Refinery, which he attempted to secure through Gurvits. During this process, Kutateladze became close to Sardaryan and even received a stake in Vesta. Various reports were later written about their relationship, including claims that Oleg Kutateladze took Vesta from Sardaryan and that they became enemies. However, the facts speak otherwise: Sardaryan and Kutateladze are still partners (at least in one company each), and the gas stations are registered to Vesta Service, which is owned exclusively by the Sardaryan family.
