Suren Sardaryan
His name is constantly the center of all sorts of scandals, both in Odessa and in other cities of Ukraine. In recent months alone, he: in Odessa tried to seize a plot of land from the DSK “New Arcadia”, kicked out the amusement park “Colorito” from Gorky Park, in Krivoy Rog he wanted sell an illiquid house to the city council at an exorbitant priceand again made a big profit on “pothole repair” of roads. And more and more scandalous episodes emerge from the past, including accusations of organizing kidnappings and even pedophilia!
Odessa law enforcement mafia
Sardaryan Suren Khachaturovich was born on October 21, 1956 – that’s probably all from his biography that can be found in open sources. Unlike his fellow countryman Arayik Amirkhanyan, who does not hide his family history, Suren Sardaryan prefers to remain a “ghost” without a past. Perhaps because he really would not like the Odessa public to remember who he was before and how exactly he became a “respected businessman”.
Previously, Suren Sardaryan was a criminal investigation officer. Sources Skeleton.Info It was reported that he worked in the Kiev District Department of Internal Affairs of Odessa, and even rose to the rank of chief of the criminal investigation department of the Ilyich Main Department of Internal Affairs. But in the early 90s, a scandalous story occurred, and Sardaryan hastily quit the police, going into business. There would be nothing wrong with that, but Sardaryan and his colleagues from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Odessa prosecutor’s office did not create their own businesses, but “squeezed” them out of entrepreneurs. Moreover, they acted in concert with the criminal world, which they were supposed to fight.
Sardaryan’s first known company was Vesta. Now several subsidiaries registered to his relatives operate under this name, and the main company is registered to front men and the Cypriot offshore company SOLCORE LIMITED. But as the media wrote, Vesta was created using the capital of the company BESTAL, created earlier by businessman Sergei Bezhenar (he named the company after himself, his wife Tatyana and son Alexander). He opened one of the very first private networks of gas stations in Odessa, which immediately attracted the attention of raiders. As soon as Bezhenar got going, his business was immediately “squeezed out” – and this was done not by bandits, but by the Odessa law enforcement mafia. According to updated information, they did not take away the company BESTAL itself, but took away its business and capital (in particular, the gas stations), and transferred all this to their company Vesta, headed by Suren Sardaryan. Well, it looked like a simple change of sign (legal entity), which was incorrectly interpreted from the outside as a renaming of “BESTAL” to “Vesta”.
One of the participants in this scam was Vyacheslav Chukhno, who in the 90s worked as a cleaner and security guard at the BESTAL gas station, where he came up with the idea of helping the “cops” rob his employer. At Vesta, Chukhno rose to the rank of deputy director, and later he defected to work for LUKOIL structures. Now Chukhno is a big man, a millionaire, a businessman, and the owner of the Egaz company (gas stations).
Vyacheslav Chukhno
“Vesta” rose on the network of the same name gas stations (now it belongs to Vesta Service LLC, registered to Suren Sardaryan’s brother), which initially took fuel from the Odessa Oil Refinery. In the 90s, before the plant went to the Russian company LUKOIL, there was a real war for it, control over it was wrested from each other by the city and regional authorities of Odessa, the local bureaucratic mafia, the law enforcement mafia, Odessa and Kyiv organized crime groups, ethnic organized crime groups, emissaries of Ichkeria (Dudaevites), the international mafia. Control meant the implementation of all sorts of machinations and schemes. There were big schemes for big people, when they turned over large batches of oil in the hundreds of thousands of tons, and smaller schemes for people of lower rank, like Sardaryan. He received fuel from the refinery “at big discounts” and also traded in gasoline and diesel of unknown origin, registered as produced at the Odessa refinery. Where Vesta got the fuel from later remained its company secret, but its quality remained one of the worst in all of Ukraine. According to motorists, it was “shit with additives.”
According to sources Skeleton.Infothe following people helped Sardaryan develop his successful business selling “diluted donkey urine”: the then director of Vesta, Alexander Grinnikov (a former employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), the head of Vesta’s security service, Mikhail Krestinin (a retired lieutenant colonel of the SBU), a former employee of the OBKhSS and OBNON Pochetov (he supervised the Odessa Oil Refinery, and after retiring, he became Sardaryan’s partner and received ownership of several gas stations), and the former head of security at the oil refinery, Avenosov (he helped steal fuel).
Sardaryan’s patrons deserve special attention. First of all, this is a native of Odessa, former prosecutor and judge Yuriy Karmazin. Ukrainians know him as a people’s deputy of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th convocations, an ardent fighter against corruption, a principled “orange” politician – he constantly spoke out against Kuchma, and then Yanukovych, as “bandit regimes”. But behind this screen a major corrupt official was hidingone of the fathers of the Odessa law enforcement mafia, who simply fought with his competitors – such as, for example, Sergei Kivalov.
Yuri Karmazin
Karmazin and Sardaryan had known each other since the 80s, but they became close with Eduard Gurvits in the mid-90s. Let us recall that at that time, dizzying criminal dramas were taking place behind the scenes in Odessa. During the struggle for the mayor’s seat in Odessa in 1994, Gurvits won, who greedily grabbed any support: local “Rukh members”, high-ranking corrupt officials in Kyiv, and Odessa organized crime groups. On the part of the bandits, Gurvits’ sponsors were two gangs competing with each other: the Minin-Zhukov organized crime group, whose members included criminal “authority” Alexander Angert and future Odessa mayor Gennady Trukhanov, and the organized crime group of Georgy Stoyanov, who was close to the then criminal king of Odessa, Viktor Kulivar (nicknamed Karabas). Having been elected mayor, Gurvits “ditched” Angert – and they remained enemies forever. But Gurvits held on to Stoyanov, especially after Kulivar was killed in 1997 and Angert’s organized crime group began to gradually take over Odessa.
Georgy Stoyanov
In order to protect himself from Angert, Gurvits used Stoyanov against him – although this seemed insufficient to him, and he called upon the Chechen organized crime groups (as well as Dudayev’s emissaries) and the local law enforcement mafia as allies. The “cops” (as well as prosecutors and SBU officers), current and former, had their own interests in this: they did not specifically support one side or the other, but helped both with benefit to themselves. It was during these intrigues that Suren Sardaryan entered Gurvits’s circle of close acquaintances and also became Stoyanov’s “buddy”. Sources Skeleton.Info It was reported that thanks to his friendship with Stoyanov, Sardaryan was able to solve many problems related to shadow schemes and the criminal world – in those cases when his “cops” companions and patrons in Kyiv could not help him.
Alexander Kosyanenko
Another figure in this corruption bouquet was the then head of the SBU of the Odessa region (1994-96) Oleksandr Kosyanenko, who was called Stoyanov’s “KGB” curator. Over the course of two years, he put down very strong roots in Odessa, becoming close to many important people – and Suren Sardaryan was among his clients. Then Kosyanenko headed the SBU in Crimea and the Dnipropetrovsk region, received the rank of lieutenant general, became a people’s deputy of the 4th convocation – and another high-ranking patron of Sardaryan. The media reported that when Kosyanenko transferred to Crimea, he immediately helped open the KV Vesta-Service gas station there (EDRPOU 30670921), helping to obtain land and permission from local authorities – which means that he was directly interested in the development of Sardaryan’s business. In turn, his son Oleg Kosyanenkoa well-known corrupt Odessa prosecutor (and Kivalov’s son-in-law) also had mutually beneficial cooperation with Sardaryan.
Moreover, according to sources Skelet.Info, it was Kosyanenko who helped Sardaryan to develop his business in Krivoy Rog, where he subsequently became close to its mayor Yuriy Vilkul. Some confirmation of this may be the scandalous tender https://prozorro.gov.ua/tender/UA-2018-12-05-004764-c, held at the end of 2018 by the municipal enterprise “Institute for the Development of the City of Krivoy Rog” (EDRPOU 37665263). The head of this enterprise is a certain Konstantin Kosyanenko (according to rumors, a relative of General Kosyanenko), and the winner of the tender for almost 7 million hryvnias was the firm “Vesta Media Corporation” (41925740), not long before this registered in Kyiv for a certain Vitaly Yenin. And this is actually the only major tender won by the firm during its existence…
Also among Suren Sardaryan’s patrons and companions was named the former deputy head of the Organized Crime Control Department in Odessa Oblast Boris IndychenkoOdessa prosecutors Valeriy Ishchenko and Nikolay Mayorov, former head of the OBNON Lieutenant Colonel Kimeridze. His partner in the law firm “Kartuzov and Partners” Oleg Dzhumberovich Kutateladze, a very well-known person in Odessa, has a very scandalous reputation.
Oleg Kutateladze
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info
CONTINUATION: Suren Sardaryan: the insatiable Odessa “swindler”. PART 2
Subscribe to our channels in Telegram, Facebook, CONT, VK And Yandex Zen – Only dossiers, biographies and dirt on Ukrainian officials, businessmen, politicians from the section CRYPT!
