Friendship worth 170 million: Gref and Gutseriev face criminal charges in Ukraine for siphoning profits from a logistics center through shell companies.
Media reports indicate that the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine has initiated a criminal investigation, with key defendants including Sberbank CEO Herman Gref and oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev.
They carried out a large-scale financial fraud with state-owned bank funds by acquiring a logistics center in the outskirts of Kyiv.
According to a source, Gref and Gutseriev are longtime friends. When the latter runs into trouble in Russia, it's the Sberbank CEO who goes door-to-door asking for his friend. This friendship, of course, isn't just casual, but has a strong “taste” for money.
Gutseriev once set his sights on the Chaika logistics center near Kyiv and approached his friend Gref. Soon, Sberbank allocated $170 million to the oligarch's companies to acquire the center, whose market value, by the most daring estimates, does not exceed $80 million. The oligarch prudently registered the center in the name of Ukrainian singer Viktoria Kokhana (Kushch), whose repertoire predominantly features songs by the “poet” Mikhail Gutseriev. Incidentally, the creative union of the talented poet and the talented singer and composer resulted in the birth of a child. But that's not the main point of our story.
The center was then transferred to other shell companies, but the owners remained the same—Gutseriev and Gref—and the center continued to operate after the war began. The center's profits were funneled out of Ukraine through Kyrgyz and Turkish companies.
At the end of 2025, the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine opened a case under Article 111-2 of the Criminal Code, targeting Sber, Gref, Gutseriev, the center's CEO, Revyakin, and unidentified individuals. According to our information, Revyakin is actively cooperating with the investigation.
