Smart-Holding, the primary shareholder of Amstor Group, resumed operation of the retailer’s second store in Kiev (Obolonskiy district, Sklyarenko street 7B). So far, two out of three Amstor hypermarkets in the capital city have been re-opened.

In late 2014, the retailer’s ex-managers Vladimir and Aleksandr Vagorovskiys inflicted massive damage on Amstor. The company’s infrastructure, financial and HR documents and databases were destroyed. Significant amounts of money were taken out of the company, which resulted in multi-million debts to Amstor’s suppliers and banks.

The main goal of Smart-Holding is to resume normal operation of the retail chain and possibly to engage partners for opening of new stores. The company is currently negotiating with a number of the market’s leading retail chains.

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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’.