Arfush Walid: how a Lebanese thief rose on Ukrainian breasts. PART 2

CONTINUATION. BEGINNING: Walid Arfouch: how a Lebanese thief rose on Ukrainian breasts. PART 1

All the brothers could do was invite Alain Delon to Kyiv and take a photo with him. But then they contacted the scandalous owner of the Russian modeling agency “Red Stars” Vitaly Leiba. An Abkhaz Jew, a participant in the 1992-93 war (fought on the side of the separatists, was awarded the Order of Leon), Leiba moved to Moscow after the war, where he headed an ethnic organized crime group, engaged, among other things, in the supply of “human goods” abroad.

Girls for Gaddafi

As part of the partial legalization of this activity, Leiba “wronged” the Red Stars agency from Tatiana Koltsova (former fashion model), which produced beautiful girls – and, again, sold them: some as models, some as “young wives,” and some and for “escort services”. An atmosphere of fear formed around Leiba: he beat girls, beat up photographers and servants, in a bad mood stabbed a store clerk (and got out of the criminal case), and was accused of attempting to assassinate the editor of Playboy magazine Maxim Maslakov.

In general, Leiba is a person with whom few people could work together. The Arshuf brothers also did not last long, and yet they collaborated with Leyba for at least two years. And it was Leiba, after Miss Europe-97, who brought the brothers together with multimillionaire John Casablancas, the founder of Elite Model Management. The fact is that Leiba and Casablancas were, so to speak, partners. When Leiba took over Red Stars, he automatically took over the organization of the annual Elite Model Look competition for aspiring models in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), and then in the CIS. Leyba contacted the brothers, made them media producers and co-organizers of the Elite Model Look qualifying competitions in Ukraine, and brought them into the Casablancas circle.

Who would have thought that the brothers would try to cheat both Casablancas and even the experienced Leiba! Of course, in this story it remains unknown who was behind them – after all, it is unlikely that they themselves would have dared to challenge Leiba and arrange real blackmail for the famous world producer of models. And everything happened unexpectedly: in 1999, the BBC aired a documentary by Donald McIntyre about behind-the-scenes scandals in the world of the modeling business – and it was dedicated to “Elite Model Management”, the “Elite Model Look” and “Miss Europe” competitions. There was everything there: seduction of minors, trafficking in models, turning girls into concubines and mistresses, sexual harassment, etc. The most striking thing was that the Harfush brothers acted as witnesses for the prosecution in this film – that is, they spoke out against Casablancas. The screening of the film raised a wave of scandal on a European scale, Casablancas left his position as head of Elite Model Management, and even sold his stake (33%) to his deputy, the Swiss Christian Larpe. And he resold them… to the Arfush brothers! True, it is not clear what kind of “shisha” they bought them for? Perhaps the money was someone else’s, or maybe the transaction was fictitious.

Immediately after this, Omar Arfouch established the company SUPER NOVA GENEVA SA in Switzerland, which bought the rights to conduct the finals of the Elite Model Look competitions for a period of 5 years. But they were not co-owners of the world-famous modeling agency for long: Larpa soon protested the sale of shares through the court, returning them to himself, and also created the company “LOOK OF THE YEAR SA” and forced the brothers to transfer the holding of competitions to it. And again we see a strange scheme of selling a stake and then terminating the deal. Don’t you think this is some kind of proprietary scheme of the Arfush brothers? Well, at the end of this scandalous story, Vitaly Leiba arrived in Kyiv and began to regain his powers organizer of the Elite Model Look competitions in the CIS.

The brothers, thrown out of Elite Model, boasted for several years that they were its producers and co-owners – this, in particular, was the basis for all the posturing of Omar Arfush, who poses as a billionaire and a playmaker. But already in 2002, out of despair, they organized their own, alternative competition “Miss@Net World” in Kyiv (applicants were selected via the Internet). But two problems arose. Firstly, the Arfushs were explained that big problems awaited them, up to the disruption of the competition (possibly on the part of the vengeful Leiba). Secondly, even for a fictitious international competition (participants were invited from 23 countries) a more interesting venue was needed. And then the brothers decided to arrange the final in… Libya! Needless to say, Gaddafi, who grabbed every opportunity to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the world community, immediately accepted their offer! But perhaps the most important role in this was played by the dictator’s son Seif al-Islam, whose eyes immediately lit up and itched. So they got along with the Gaddafi family, which took on the expenses and organization of the competition, and the Arfush brothers only had to bring its participants to Libya.

They had to take girls to Libya many more times: and not only for Gaddafi’s son (and rumor has it, for his father, who even had women as bodyguards), but also for other influential, and most importantly wealthy, Libyans. They paid well for this product, and even more if the girls had the title of “Miss”. And then it dawned on Omar and Walid Arfush!

Many have probably already forgotten what incredibly warm relations there were between Ukraine and Libya during Yushchenko’s presidency. Viktor Andreevich even invited Muammar Gaddafi to Kyiv, where he presented him with the Order of Bohdan Khmelnitsky. And no one suspected that behind all this was the vigorous activity of the Arshuf brothers. Gaddafi liked their “girls” so much that he became keenly interested in Ukraine: in 2004 he donated money to the Maidan and even promised to put up his tent on it. Well, it was Hares Youssef, a Ukrainian businessman and adventurer of Syrian origin, who brought him directly into contact with Yushchenko. It was through him that the Arfush brothers lobbied for their Libyan interests at the highest level. However, they also “dumped” Youssef (more on that below).

So, the brothers’ brilliant innovation was the Miss Europe competitions: in 2006, they acquired the rights to three of them, and staged the first one in Kyiv. According to some information Skelet.Infoit was financed by Gaddafi’s dollars. The idea was this: the brothers had the opportunity to “employ” the finalists with their wealthy clients, including from Libya. But the project ended in failure: after 2006, the Miss Europe competition was not held for ten years, and the exact reason for this is unknown. The official said that the organizers were having financial difficulties – and there was even an assumption that the Arfush brothers had “cheated” Gaddafi himself. Their last project was the Miss CIS competition (2007), after which they abandoned organizing their own competitions and began participating in others. According to media reports, in this piquant business, Walid Arfush became close friends with Alexander Onishchenko, who at one time was the “foreman” in the Kisel organized crime group.

Theft and extortion

The biggest secret of the Arfush brothers is the true size of their fortune. The fact is that they themselves promote themselves as incredibly rich people, especially Omar, who in 2005 I ordered an article for myself in Faktywhich declared him a billionaire! However, his interview simply screamed cheap “poverty”: rich people do not collect five Bentleys in the garage and do not declare that their piano is “from the Habsburg family.” Another trick of Omar Arfouch is that he declares leading European politicians and actors to be his close friends. At the same time, he takes information about their lives from the press, and then retells it as if he himself was an eyewitness to all these events.

His brother Walid also engages in similar posturing. However, among his real acquaintances there are some very interesting people! For example, Vladimir Galanternik, one of the most influential people in Odessa, is known for carefully removing all his photographs from the Internet. However, a few still survive. In one of them, Galanternik with his wife Natalya Zinko in the company of Valid Arfush, and they are at a party in Miami. And in this case, the Arfush brothers seem to really be friends of the Galanternik family: for example, they were invited by him to his wedding anniversary with Natalya Zinko, which was celebrated in St. Tropez.

But here’s the question: why do the brothers, who declare themselves millionaires and even billionaires, “fool over little things”, like Shura Balaganov? Here, for example, is the history of the creation of their Paparazzi magazine, founded in 2002. They invited Hares Youssef as a partner investor, offering him 50% of the shares for lending them $300 thousand. When the time of reckoning came, the brothers began to “bust”. Youssef looked into details about them, and it turned out that they got a lot of money during their scams with “Elite Model”, and it seems that they have now decided to “dump” the Syrian in order to repay their debts. Then Youssef wrote a statement against them to the prosecutor’s office.

Interestingly, in October 2005, Komsomolskaya Pravda published an interview with the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Yuri Lutsenko, in which he mentioned that a case was opened against the brothers for an unpaid debt. Walid Arfush immediately filed a lawsuit against the newspaper “for libel” (Lutsenko refused his words), and only a personal interview Hares Youssefreleased two months later, resolved this conflict.

It is possible that this property dispute with Youssef was the cause of another scandal: when in 2005, Paparazzi magazine published material about the vacation of the presidential son Andrei Yushchenko on a yacht in the Mediterranean Sea. Youssef tried to prevent the material from being published, but it was released into circulation. The scandal had great political consequences, since the regionals took advantage of it – and this was shortly before the 2006 elections!

A few days after publication, someone set Walid Arfouch’s Bentley on fire. Unlike his brother’s virtual cars, he only had one Bentley – according to him, bought in 2004 in France for 250 thousand dollars. It’s curious, isn’t it: a person who owes 300 thousand does not pay off the debt, but buys an expensive car for 250 thousand, which is clearly beyond his income (richer oligarchs drive less expensive cars). It is not surprising that a version of Arfush’s old debts immediately surfaced – to the publication to which he reacted so nervously. It is also curious that immediately after this incident, the brothers still repaid the debt to Youssef.

However, the brothers immediately turned the expected anger of the presidential family to their advantage: they made noise in Europe about the infringement of freedom of speech in Ukraine. And then the noise died down, and a few months later the Miss Europe competition took place in Kyiv, and Viktor Yushchenko suddenly became interested in Libya. Sources on this matter Skelet.Info reported this version: the brothers paid Youssef with Libyan money received from the “sale of girls”, but at the same time agreed with him that relations between Ukraine and Libya would be “normalized” at the highest level – and Youssef went to influence Viktor Yushchenko.

However, the money could have been received from another source: a year before the events described, the Arfush brothers pulled off a scam, swindling the French company Mary-Lite out of $4.5 million! They received this amount under an agreement with the company, but did not fulfill it, and pocketed the money. By the way, it was then that Walid Arfush bought his Bentley in France – was it not from this money? About this scandal wrote “Ukraine is criminal”and the brothers also filed a lawsuit for this publication, demanding “compensation for damage caused” from the publication in the amount of $5 million. This seemed to them not enough, and they demanded from the media another 500 thousand dollars for each day that this publication was on the Internet – that is, they put journalists on the “counter”!

But these were scams for large sums, but why did Walid Arfush, this “giant of journalism” and “brother of a billionaire,” steal money and jewelry worth only $8,000 from his fellow countryman?! This scandal erupted in 2006, and it is unlikely that it had customers in Kyiv or in Europe, because Walid Arfouch was accused of theft he committed in his native Lebanon from a certain Samir Henry Fares, whose lawyer filed a corresponding statement with the Jabal Lubnan District Police Department . Later, a translation was made from it, since the Lebanese Ambassador to Ukraine was involved in the case. And, like the previous charges, Walid Arfush got away with them.

And other scandals

It is worth adding a few more to the collection of scandals that accompanied the Arfush brothers. Since 2007, Walid Arfush began to actively fit into Viktor Yanukovych’s team, and even decided to convert to Orthodoxy (Nestor Shufrich and Irina Bilyk became his godparents). There was, of course, nothing prejudiced in this “baptism of an infidel,” but the fact that Walid has worked as part of Yanukovych’s election campaign since the summer of 2007, being a member of his creative council and head of the foreign press department, is now being blamed on him. In addition, the name Arfush was found in the so-called. the book of the “black accounting” of the Party of Regions, which records the payment to him of 10 thousand dollars on September 17, 2009 for an article about Yanukovych, and the issuance of 9,530 dollars on October 25, 2009 for organizing the visit of the French delegate.

After the “Donetsk” came to power, the efforts of Walid Arfush were rewarded. First, he was appointed vice-president of the First National TV Channel – he held this position from April 2010 to June 2013. At the same time, Arfush and his boss Benkendorf disgraced themselves during the Eurovision 2011 contest when they ordered a re-vote – since the results of the first vote were not Yanukovych’s adviser Anna German liked it.

Then, in October 2010, Walid Arfush became president of the Coordination Council of the Ukrainian version of the Euronews news channel. A year later, in August 2011, Arfush launched the Ukrainian version of Euronews – not on his own, of course, but with the support of Deputy Prime Minister Boris Kolesnikov and Anna German. And at the expense of the state, which dried up, oh, the irony, immediately after the second Maidan, which Euronews regularly covered. The new head of NTKU, Zurab Alasania, directly stated that he sees no point in paying 5 million euros a year for its rebroadcast. And then Walid Arfush found a private sponsor for the Ukrainian version of Euronews, who turned out to be… oligarch Dmitry Firtash. This was accompanied by Fitrash’s own PR on Euronews: Walid Arfush organized a purely positive interview for him. Soon there was an uproar in Europe, the wave of which reached the European Parliament – where they declared that pro-Russian oligarchs were taking control of the European media (the result of all this was the closure of the Ukrainian version of Euronews). And literally at the same time, “political scientist” Omar Harfouch developed his vigorous activity in France, undertaking to build a political bridge between the Kremlin and the new President Macron.

Meanwhile, Walid Arfush seems to have decided to take up his old ways – that is, the modeling business. And in the same 2017, he bought the HD FASHION&LifeStyle TV channel. But is it for your own money or again on credit, and will another financial fraud scandal break out around this purchase?

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

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