Sheriff Tiraspol’s football team, which defeated Real Madrid on the second day of the Champions League, is only a small part of a corporate empire built by two former KGB officials and which dominates the economy of the breakaway republic of Transnistria.
The 13-time European champion victory against Real Madrid at the end of September put the club on the map of great world football. And a run of ten earnings in Europe earned him more than € 21 million – a fortune for a relatively small fish in European football, but a negligible amount for the two investors behind the team.
Sheriff’s victory in the Champions League group stage at the famous Santiago Bernabeu stadium brought the two former KGB officials who built the club into the spotlight. But football is not their only interest.
Rapid expansion
Victor Gușan, 58, and Ilya Kazmaly, 59, have dominated the economy of Transnistria – the pro-Russian separatist region of Moldova where the Sheriff is based – since it emancipated itself from the Chișinău authority after months of fighting in 1992. following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And the Sheriff Tiraspol is just the showcase and influence tool of the Sheriff corporate empire, which has interests in industries such as caviar, automobiles, fuel, medicine, vodka, hotel services, telecommunications, banking, insurance, real estate, and the media. . Today the Sheriff is the largest private contributor to Transnistria’s budget, but its rise is littered with controversial aspects.
Transnistria is a strip of land about four hundred kilometers long and less than twenty kilometers wide. It is a self-proclaimed state but has no international recognition. Not even from Russia, which has deployed some troops on its territory. Transnistria was the flagship of the Moldovan economy. After the war Gușan and Kazmaly ended up controlling a good part of it.
It all started in June 1993, when the two men – both Moldovan, Ukrainian and Russian citizens – founded their first company, Sheriff. Four years later they took control of Agroprombank, the main bank in the rebel region, and in 1998 founded Interdnestrcom, the only telecommunications operator in Transnistria, which started its operations with a capital of 1.6 million dollars. .
In 2002, Sheriff got its hands on the Bender City Starch Factory. In 2005 on that of cereals and on the oven of Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria. Then it was the turn of the Tirotex textile factory, followed in 2006 by Kvint, the main producer of alcoholic beverages, mostly brandies and wines. Later the two partners managed to privatize the Tiraspol oil depot and the furnace. Sheriff continued to expand even after the 2008 global financial crisis, to own more than half of the companies registered in Transnistria. In March 2012 the company became wholly owned by Gușan, and Kazmaly was appointed managing director.
Allegations of espionage
In the early 2000s, Interdnestrcom entered the Ukrainian market under the name of Intertelecom, becoming one of the four main telecommunications operators in the country.
A Cypriot offshore company called Odinaco limited owns 49 percent of the shares while the remainder are shared among various Ukrainian investors. Odinaco limited also has four other offshore companies, in Cyprus, Panama and the British Virgin Islands, according to documents published by Rise, a Moldovan investigative journalism.
Intertelecom has become famous for bringing voice calls and internet services to rural areas of Ukraine. But in 2014, two months after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, the Transnistrian oligarchs again registered Intertelecom as a Russian company active in “Russian” Crimea.
The documents show that the owner of the new company is Vyacheslav Chernikevich, former director of Interdnestrcom in Tiraspol and close contact of Gușan, owner of a 650 square meter villa in Vilkovo, the so-called “Ukrainian Venice”, at the mouth of the Danube. Chernikevich also manages Sheriff’s cryptocurrency mining operations in Transnistria. In 2016, the Ukrainian secret services (Sbu) began investigating the Russian Intertelecom, suspecting it of espionage and interception of mobile phone calls in Ukraine on behalf of the Russian army.
Ties with Germany
When cryptocurrency mining took off in Transnistria, Sheriff was inevitably involved. Transnistria has benefited for years from a free supply of gas from Russia’s Gazprom, a low-cost source of energy to be sold in Moldova and used at home. And some of that energy is produced at Sheriff’s Tirotex-Energo power plant.
Unlike what happens in Moldova, under the leadership of the secessionist leader Vadím Krasnoselskij – who previously worked for Gușan at Sheriff – Tiraspol legalized the production of cryptocurrencies in January 2018. At the same time, Goweb international ltd, a company of Russian-owned and registered in the British Virgin Islands, it has signed a $ 8.7 million contract to deliver cryptocurrency mining tools to a Tiraspol-based company called Tirsteklo and owned by Sheriff.
German firm Tirastel, owned by Gușan, Kazmaly and a German citizen, also imported multi-million dollar cryptocurrency mining tools in 2017, which were delivered to Tirsteklo and Interdnestrcom.
The journalists of the Center for Investigative Journalism of Moldova have identified in Gușan and in the German Andrea Reich the owners of the company Kartina digital, founded in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 2008. La Kartina is responsible for the broadcasting of about 160 Russian channels thanks to iptv technology, in addition to the Tsv channel of Transnistria, owned by the Sheriff. The company was also accused by the German media of facilitating the airing of messages from the far-right Alternative for Germany (Afd) party through its broadcasting of Russian channels.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
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