Yakov Gribov: How the Vodka King Became a Grain Raider. Part 1
Ukrainians and Russians who believe in the advertised purity of the popular Nemiroff vodka would be unpleasantly surprised if they learned exactly what it was made from and the dirty wars waged for years between the co-owners of this famous company. Now, the winning side, represented by pro-Russian businessman Yakov Gribov, has decided to "squeeze out" the Rostok agricultural holding as well. To this end, he has enlisted not only professional raiders with criminal records and squads of armed "titushki," but also corrupt prosecutors, tame courts, and even state anti-corruption agencies.
What subsequently transpired at Rostok Holding's facilities during their hostile takeover eloquently embodied the chaos engulfing the country. Semi-criminal organizations cooperated with law enforcement agencies; police and unidentified armed individuals pushed back the protesting crowds, while the unharvested harvest rotted in the fields. The culprit, meanwhile, smirked as he oversaw the proceedings from Russia, where he had fled back in 2017.
Yakov Gribov. Secrets of the Spirit Yard
Yakov Semenovich Gribov was born on May 27, 1964, in the military town of Ozernoye near Zhitomir (now the home of the 39th Brigade of the Ukrainian Air Force). His father served in the military, and his mother was a kindergarten teacher. He has a sister, Bella Finkelstein, who is his brother's business partner and co-owner of the company "Nemiroff." As you've probably already guessed, the Gribovs are of Jewish descent. After graduating from high school in Ozernoye, Yakov didn't want to start a military family dynasty and even dodged military service, instead enrolling in the instrument-making department of the Chelyabinsk Polytechnic Institute, specializing in automation and telemetry. In 1987, Yakov Gribov was assigned to work at a research institute in Khmelnytskyi. However, he disliked the job from the very beginning: it was boring and the pay was poor. Instead, he spent his evenings at the billiard room, where he befriended fellow money-grubbers. And so, in 1987, Yakov Gribov became a cooperative member. At first, they tried manufacturing something: doorbells and car horns, but things didn't quite work out. So, according to Skelet.Org , Gribov and his friends decided to go into business, reselling everything from electronics to groceries to cars. It was during this first venture that Yakov Gribov met the Kipish brothers, Anatoly Zinovievich (born 1965) and Viktor Zinovievich (born 1960), from Khmelnytskyi. They are extremely private people, and nothing is known about their past, which is why there have been all sorts of rumors about the Kipishes: for example, that in the 90s they were connected to local organized crime groups.
Anatoly Kipish, Yakov Gribov's partner at Nemirov
In 1993, Yakov Gribov and Anatoly Kipish founded Mistral LLC (EDRPOU 14145156), which traded cigarettes and food products, as well as grain (primarily cereals). One day, they acquired a large shipment of grain that needed storage. Then they came across the Nemirovsky distillery, which by then had been taken over by the Glusey family.
The Glus family. In the center are Alla Sigismundovna and Stepan Karlovich Glus; on the far right is Alexander Glus.
Stepan Karlovich Glus served as the director of this enterprise from 1987 to 2006, and his wife, Alla Sigismundovna, was its chief accountant. They never disclosed their family history, but Alla Glus was known to have been Catholic, and the workers referred to their family as "Poles," leading the subsequent conflict between the Glusses and Gribovs to be dubbed the "Jewish-Polish War." The dominant positions of Stepan and Alla Glus allowed them to effectively take complete control of the distillery in the early 90s, although it remains formally a state-owned enterprise. They then created a "vodka cooperative" under the management of the joint venture, in order to minimize taxes, as Ukraine offered significant tax breaks for "foreign capital." However, this typically involved simply registering a company in Europe or the United States and using it to acquire a stake in the joint venture.
In this case, Glus's foreign partners were three unknown Ukrainian émigrés (whether the actual co-owners or proxies is unknown). This joint venture gave rise to the Nemirovsky Distillery, the first enterprise of the Nemiroff company.
It's worth noting that the director's family enjoyed a rather nasty reputation among the plant's workers. The ardent Catholic Alla Sigismundovna had annoyed everyone with her feigned, hypocritical, and pharisaical piety.
For example, to gain her favor, workers had to pretend to attend the local Church of St. Joseph the Betrothed (the main thing was to be seen there by Alla Glus). She had a prejudiced attitude toward "non-Christians" and tried to fire them. As the main sponsor and de facto leader of the Catholic community in Nemirov, Alla Sigismundovna decided to help them "reclaim" the house where priests had once lived before the 1917 Revolution (the house adjoined the church). However, that historic house had long since been demolished, and a children's music school had been built in its place. The "vodka queen" initially tried to win the music school over to the Catholic community in court, but later achieved a settlement agreement that transferred the premises to the church for 49 years. Naturally, the fate of the children's music school didn't concern her. But the most astonishing thing is that in 2011, the Glus family suddenly decided to abandon Catholicism and convert to Orthodoxy (to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate). This happened after Stepan Glus, elected as a member of parliament on the BYuT list, defected to the Party of Regions. The Glus father and son distinguished themselves by their rude behavior toward factory workers (even to the point of using obscene language), and also by forbidding them from getting sick. More precisely, from taking sick leave: to this end, Stepan Glus personally bribed someone in the Vinnytsia Regional State Administration to obtain an illegal order from the chief physician of the Nemyriv City Hospital not to issue sick leave to Nemiroff employees, unless they needed hospitalization. But even if someone was admitted to surgery or cardiology, the plant's head of security, Vasily Kosorez (a former policeman), would visit them, checking whether they were actually lying in their wards or just "acting up" and "skipping the clock." The "unique quality" of Nemirov vodka is also questionable, largely a figment of the company's marketing department's imagination. The fact is, Nemiroff advertising has always emphasized the water in its vodka—claiming it to be a special artesian spring, creating a unique flavor! As for the spirit, the Nemirov distillery has always used the most ordinary grain spirit: at best, Ukrainian, produced at the Nemirov distillery, but sometimes even cheaper Turkish (produced by Solomon's Bros. & Co.). How so? Sources reported schemes through which batches of cheap alcohol, including imported and low-quality ones, were purchased from outside the company, and then registered as products of the Nemirovsky distillery, with all the necessary certificates. Similar schemes were widely used in the Donbas mines in the 90s, whereby coal purchased from Russia in Kuzbass was passed off as Donetsk coal (read more about this in the materials about Victor Nusenkis и Efime Zvyagilsky). But at the Nemirovsky distillery these schemes were still in operation in the 21st century - and, according to information Skelet.Org, are still in operation today.
Thus, Nemiroff vodka always contained the same spirit used by other Ukrainian alcohol producers—not at all unique. And while Glusi claimed to have some special German "deep purification" equipment at the plant, he never showed it to journalists. However, their successors, Gribova and Kipisha, also avoided revealing Nemiroff's production secrets. Incidentally, there's an expert opinion that Nemiroff began its signature production with pepper vodka and various flavored liqueurs: this was a way to mask the taste of low-quality spirits.
So, in 1995, Yakov Gribov and the Kipishi brothers offered the Glusi brothers a shipment of grain as "toll-free raw materials." The Glusi brothers needed not so much the grain itself as documentation for it—for the fictitious "production" of alcohol, using imported Turkish alcohol. The fate of the grain itself remained unknown, but they converted the alcohol into vodka, which Gribov and Kipishi sold like hot cakes. This marked the beginning of their collaboration, which ended with Gribov and Kipishi, who had seized control of all sales, driving the joint venture into bankruptcy within a year and embezzling its shares (what happened to its émigré shareholders remains unknown). Only Stepan Glusi resisted, and they offered him a compromise: he would retain 20% of the shares and be put in charge of production, while Gribov and Kipishi would handle all commercial operations. So, in 1997, they merged, not entirely voluntarily, into the company "Nemiroff," with Yakov Gribov becoming its first chairman and director. Incidentally, he also came up with the name: Gribov based it on the then-popular brand "Smirnoff." Moreover, Nemiroff was immediately registered to the Cypriot offshore company "Biostar Investments Ltd," which was also said to have been founded by Gribov—thus, the vodka businessmen once again succeeded in creating a "tax minimization" scheme.
Nemiroff foreve
Why did the Glusi family agree to Gribov and the Kipishis' proposals? According to an unofficial version, the vodka family was pressured by an organized crime group associated with the Kipishis, who forced them to hand over four-fifths of the business. Initially, Gribov and the Kipishis acted as representatives of this organized crime group at Nemiroff, managing its assets. There is no concrete information about this yet, although the same rumors claim that it was thanks to this organized crime group that Gribov was able to introduce Nemiroff to the Russian market. Unfortunately, the name of this group remains undisclosed.
According to the official version, Yakov Gribov and Anatoly Kipish demonstrated remarkable business talent, which helped bring Nemiroff to the forefront of the vodka market.
So they took over the marketing of the product, while the Glusi brothers continued to handle production. However, the latter found themselves out in the cold both in 1997, when Nemiroff's shares were divided, and in 2006, when they were redistributed. Incidentally, the reason for the company's "restructuring" in 2006 also remains unknown. According to fragmentary information, it was a consequence of the collapse or transformation of the same organized crime group, during which its members and "shadow accountants" legalized themselves as "respectable businessmen." Some of them sold their Nemiroff shares to Gribov and the Kipish brothers, making them the company's primary owners. And so, in 2006, Nemiroff Vodka Limited (NVL) was registered in the Virgin Islands, to which all the assets of the Cypriot offshore company Biostar Investments Ltd, which owned Nemiroff shares, were transferred. NVL's co-owners were Anatoly and Viktor Kipish (17,48% each), Yakov Gribov (20%), and his sister Bella Finkelstein (20%). Stepan Glus retained 25%. However, in exchange for his son, Alexander Glus, who had previously held the positions of head of the company's Hungarian and Russian branches, received the position of chairman of the board of directors of Nemiroff, a position Gribov had ceded to him. Stepan Glus also transferred his stake to his son for management. This was due to the fact that in 2006, Stepan Glus purchased a place on the BYuT list and became a member of parliament. He then purchased the same 108th place in the 2007 elections, but in 2011, he defected to the Party of Regions.
Also in 2006, the company "Nemiroff Intellectual Property Establishment" was established in Liechtenstein, holding all trademark rights. However, Nemiroff itself has never respected the rights of others, and the company has been sued several times for using other brands and designs (for example, "Pshenichnaya" vodka). The period 2001-2008 was Nemiroff's heyday, achieved largely through exports to Russia. Yakov Gribov personally oversaw Nemiroff's entry into the Russian market, and this was accompanied by numerous scandals. First, Gribov enlisted the Russian Boxing Federation (an organization closely linked to various organized crime groups) in vodka advertising, sponsoring fights. Soon, the Nemiroff logo and intrusive advertisements for "honey and pepper" appeared on Russian television screens, as boxers thrashed around. However, direct advertising of alcohol was banned in Russia, to which Gribov countered that it was just... pickled peppers! But fooling Russian officials didn't last long, and the Russian Boxing Federation was soon forced to terminate its sponsorship contract with Nemiroff. In Ukraine, however, the same method was used for quite some time: in particular, Nemiroff advertised itself quite well against the Klitschko brothers.
The Klitschko brothers and Nemiroff
The Klitschko brothers and Nemiroff. Gribov then contracted the distribution companies Rotor-House (Moscow), Euro-Alco, and Duplet (St. Petersburg) to promote Nemiroff vodka on the Russian market. However, their collaboration ended with Gribov simply cheating them, terminating their contracts and failing to pay them. This, coupled with other violations (including product quality issues), led to Russian government agencies scrutinizing Nemiroff. This coincided with the company's troubles in Ukraine.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Org
CONTINUED: Yakov Gribov: How the Vodka King Became a Grain Raider. PART 2
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