Rafael Goroyan – an Armenian with a fake passport and a separatist trail, plundering Ukraine

According to Forbes last year, Rafael Goroyan ranks 78th in the top 100 richest Ukrainians. His fortune is estimated at 145 million dollars. The main source of this money is the Prometey grain trading company.

In 2020, Goroyan’s “Prometheus” increased the capacity of one-time grain storage to 1.6 million tons. In 2021, the businessman bought five more elevators, increasing capacity by 400,000–500,000 tons.

But Goroyan’s business empire is not limited to Prometheus – in total he is the beneficiary of at least 60 companies:

Most of them are connected with the production, storage and transshipment of grain products and are concentrated in the Mykolaiv region.

It is clear that a person of this magnitude is of interest. And the main curiosity raises a completely understandable question – how could a person earn such money and build such an impressive business empire?

If you read what Rafael Vahagni Goroyan says about himself, then you get a direct American dream, transferred by a simple Armenian boy to Ukrainian soil. Judge for yourself. According to his stories, he went into business at the age of 14, in 1990 – he begged his mother, who was engaged in the supply of fabrics and foam rubber to factories, for scraps. Then he took them to a neighbor – a jack of all trades. Together with him, young Rafael made a couch, which he then handed over to the nearest thrift store. A week later, a buyer was found for the couch, and the young entrepreneur earned enough for the next sofa and two armchairs.

Just like in that joke where the American millionaire tells how he earned his millions: “upon arrival in America, my wife and I had two cents. We bought two apples with them, washed them and sold them for four. Then they bought four apples, washed them and sold them for eight… And then my millionaire grandmother died.”

No one died at Goroyan’s. Simply sofas and armchairs are, of course, good. And, if everything was with this sofa exactly as Rafael Vahagni says, then this testifies to his business acumen. But what happened next was not exactly as he himself voices:

No, he does not lie in his story about the first steps in business. And the fact that the first serious money was brought to him by the trade in petroleum products is the absolute truth. Just do not think that everyone in our country was born yesterday and does not remember who controlled the trade in these oil products in the nineties. And what was the cost of obtaining the appropriate volumes at any refinery, and then selling them.

In any city that has a refinery, you will be happy to be shown in the cemeteries the alleys of heroes who died in battles for these same volumes. So Goroyan’s success is simple – the ethnic mafia, which stood behind him during the years of that very trade in oil products and which, in a changed format, of course, is the 2020s, after all! – stands behind him even now, in the years of the grain trade.

The same people and methods helped develop a grain empire. According to Goroyan himself, he bought the first elevator with money from the oil products trade. It happened in 2001 and after that he switched to agribusiness, actively buying elevators.

Everything is so, only some details are missed again. Namely, the details of the purchase of elevators, with which their previous owners were by no means willing to part. And the question of money for their purchase is also important – no matter what Rafael Vahagni claims, he earned them by no means in an honest way.

His version of the “Swiss banker” who simply extended an unlimited line of credit is, of course, beautiful:

Only it wasn’t quite like that. Ukraine paid for everything. Not of his own free will, of course, but because Rafael Goroyan knew how to steal this money from her.

When Rafael Goroyan created the Prometheus grain holding, the main mechanism for its enrichment was the creation of a wide network of LLCs with fictitious owners. Sergei Olkhovsky, one of the directors of Prometheus, Goroyan’s accomplice (according to some sources, his godfather) found and selected for the scam the most unprepared and unprotected people from among the lonely old people. Then a group of black notaries entered their names in the founding documents, and the firms began to actively trade.

Through their accounts, millions of dollars in transactions for the purchase of grain, fertilizers and agricultural equipment were carried out with many violations, and the inspectors had to deal with unsuspecting fictitious owners.

The use of each such company allowed Goroyan and his syndicate to hide from the state from 5 to 20 million hryvnias (the dollar exchange rate at that time was by no means today’s 29 hryvnias, we recall), and there were about 100 companies.

A similar scheme was used by Rafael Goroyan and Sergey Olkhovsky to receive cash. In the name of ordinary citizens, for a meager fee, card accounts were opened in various banks, and then a huge amount of cash was pumped through these accounts. Goroyan needed them to pay for various kinds of illegal services and mutual settlements with accomplices.

Rafael Goroyan made criminal methods the norm in all his affairs. His company has been repeatedly accused of tax evasion, forgery, blackmail and smuggling. Numerous cases involve black bookkeeping, unrecorded cash, customs fraud and the use of goods of unknown origin. For a number of episodes, raids, searches and seizures of documentation were carried out in his office.

Here is such a “credit history”. You can read more about it here: Did Rafael Goroyan and his syndicate steal tens of millions of hryvnias from the budget of Ukraine every year?

As for searches and round-ups, Rafael Goroyan and his group of companies “Prometheus” are constant heroes of the “crime” column on the pages of the media. And law enforcement officers are regular guests in the company’s offices.

And, no matter how much the ordered materials and image interviews whiten Goroyan’s reputation, the press regularly reminds of the very unflattering pages of his biography. And it is so rich in these pages that it is even difficult to focus on any of them. And the most shameful thing, in our opinion, is not that Goroyan is fraudulently stealing from the state – which of the current millionaires has not gone through this path? And even the fact that a millionaire from the Forbes list continues to do this, by and large, is not scary.

Ugly and disgusting is his behavior in our country, whose passport he bought. On this occasion, in 2008 they even initiated a criminal case, and Goroyan’s passport was confiscated.

But magically the scandal subsided. But back to what we call ugly. Goroyan, a hefty and strong man, does not hesitate to use his strength on weak women. And he surrounded himself with the same “heroes”.

In 2011, a native of Armenia, Rafael Goroyan, in the presence of witnesses, humiliated and severely beat Ukrainian citizen Victoria Koshevenko-Pisareva. On the way to the hospital, the woman lost consciousness several times.

On April 11, 2018, Vilhelm Mirzoyan, Goroyan’s deputy, attacked a female investigator who was announcing a search warrant and broke her finger.

In one of the branches of the “Novaya Pochta” of Nikolaev, a man of Caucasian appearance severely beat a man and a woman standing in line with a tire iron (as it turned out, a married couple). The bandit threatened the citizens who wished to intervene with a pistol. The investigation found out the identity of the attacker, he turned out to be the head of the security service of the Prometheus concern, Musa Hasan oglu Musazadeh.

That’s what’s disgusting. Even more disgusting and disgusting is the behavior of Ukrainian law enforcement officers, with whom Goroyan always manages to “resolve issues.”

True, clouds have been gathering over him lately. Key employees of Prometheus – lawyer Roman Vakhtangovich, manager Daria Trofimenko, Goryan’s sister Naira, godfather and longtime accomplice Sergei Olkhovsky, Aslan Muradyan and dummy director Nikolai Mitsik became defendants in the investigation conducted by the Prosecutor General’s Office and the SBU.

Rafael Goroyan himself is also among those under investigation, but he relies on his ability to “solve issues” and on connections in the highest echelons of power, among which they name the prominent “servant” David Arakhamia. How far it will be possible to use this connection is unknown, especially against the background of the fact that one of Goryan’s main companies – PROMETEY SWISS SA, registered in Switzerland – was included in the NSDC sanctions list in connection with smuggling charges.

And the head of the parliamentary committee on tax policy (and, by the way, also a “servant”) Getmantsev said that regarding the investigation into the activities of Goroyan’s firms, “relevant requests have already been sent to the European Prosecutor’s Office and the Prosecutor’s Organization, which is investigating at the level of the European Union, and as soon as answers will be received, I think we will learn a lot of interesting things about the progress of the investigation of this case.

So something is wrong with the declared roof in the face of Arakhamia – either Goroyan is lying about this and wishful thinking, or Arakhamia himself decided that it’s better not to mess with such a “toxic” businessman, who is also suspected of financing the separatists .

As for the “separatist trace”, this is a certain Konstantin Tistol, co-founder of the Nabat website, which in 2014 published calls from speakers of pro-Russian rallies in Nikolaev, advocating the separation of the Nikolaev region to create a new federal entity on the territory of Ukraine.

The site was registered at the same address as Goroyan’s Prometheus. The co-owner of Nabat was the businessman’s top manager Sergei Olkhovsky. Since March 2014, Tistol has been wanted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs under the article “blocking of transport communications.”

But that’s not all – Goroyan’s mother, Mirzoyan Vardush Vilhelmovna, an Armenian citizen, likes to be photographed with Russian propagandist Solovyov:

One could say that the son is not responsible for the mother, but her clearly pro-Russian views and support for the war against Ukraine do not prevent Ukrainian citizen Rafael Goroyan from doing business with her in Ukraine – Vardush Mirzoyan is a co-owner of a number of her son’s companies. For example, Pomoshchyansky Elevator PJSC and GRV-AGRO LTD, registered in London.

Here is such a “American dream” of a native of Armenia, embodied in Ukraine, comes out. By the way, it contains the answer to the age-old Ukrainian question – why are we poor? Because we allow people like this to push us around, that’s why.