Smart-Holding, the majority shareholder of Amstor Group, has restored the disrupted infrastructure of the retail chain and re-opened the first of the capital city's supermarkets in the Polyarnyi mall (Obolonskiy district, Kiev).

Other stores will be re-opened shortly. The company may involve its partners for the re-launch and is currently negotiating with a number of the market's leading retail chains.

In late 2014, Amstor's ex-managers Vladimir and Aleksandr Vagorovskiys inflicted a massive damage on the retail chain. They destroyed the company's infrastructure, financial and HR documents and databases. They took out money resources from the company, which resulted in huge debts to its suppliers and banks. External experts enlisted by Amstor were sceptical that normal operations of the stores could be resumed.

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On 31 December 2014, armed men blocked the operations of a number of Amstor’s hypermarkets in Kiev, Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol and other cities. Today, the majority of Amstor chain’s stores are not operating.

The armed men who blocked the stores were acting on the orders of the retailer’s former manager and minority shareholder Vladimir Vagorovskiy. The ex-manager did not agree with the decision of the principal owners to dismiss him from the management of Amstor Group and is doing everything to destabilize the work of the shopping centres and hide the scale of his embezzlement. The results of the audit conducted by the main shareholder, revealed the Vagorovskiys’ attempts to misappropriate the company, as well as to steal funds for their personal enrichment.

The Vagorovskiys currently control the stores located in the territory of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and no proceeds from those stores are transferred to the Amstor Group accounts.

Gelabran Real Estate, the shareholder who was one of the founders of Amstor Group, supported the main shareholder of the group, Smart-Holding, in its efforts to stabilize the work of Amstor retail chain throughout Ukraine. The Company’s statement ran as follows: ‘We condemn the actions of the minority shareholder Vladimir Vagorovskiy and former management represented by Aleksandr Vagorovskiy that led to suspension of the stores’ operations.’