Remember the former head of the Tax Service of Ukraine, Roman Nasirov, who wrapped himself in a blanket, pretending to be seriously ill in court? It turns out that at least four people in his family are connected with TOP corruption. One of them is his brother-in-law Andrei Gmyrin, who is a suspect in a scheme to launder billions of hryvnias at state-owned enterprises by the leadership of the State Property Fund.
Nasirov and Gmyrin are married to the daughters of businessman, owner of the Altis group, Alexander Glimbovsky. Together with his father-in-law, the former head of the State Fiscal Service is being investigated for a record bribe. In October 2022, NABU and SAPC convicted Nasirov of receiving a bribe of $5.5 million and more than 21 million euros from agricultural billionaire Oleg Bakhmatyuk. The money was offered for an extraordinary refund of value added tax to the businessman’s companies. According to investigators, Nasirov’s father-in-law Alexander Glimbovsky helped the former official legalize 13 million euros, first withdrawing the money to offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, for which he subsequently purchased an unfinished office and residential complex in the center of Kyiv.
Nasirov was released from pre-trial detention center on bail in May 2024, and his father-in-law Glimbovsky was released just the other day, on November 20. The decision was made by a panel consisting of judges Sergei Bodnar, Igor Panaid and Viktor Pankulich.
The last two are also judges in another scandalous case - the laundering of billions of hryvnia by a criminal group led by the former head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine Dmitry Sennichenko. The money was laundered through controlled companies that entered into contracts unfavorable for the state with the Odessa Port Plant and the United Mining and Chemical Company.
There are already ten suspects in the case, including Nasirov’s brother-in-law and Glimbovsky’s son-in-law Andrei Gmyrin. Another relative, Vladimir Kolot, helped them carry out the scheme for “milking” state-owned enterprises. He is married to Andrei Gmyrin’s sister Elena.
That is, the same judges consider cases worth billions of hryvnias involving officials who are relatives. Moreover, some of them have already been released on bail, having reduced it several times from what the prosecutor’s office demanded. Other suspects are unlikely to appear in the courtroom at all, since they managed to flee abroad.
A week ago, journalists published an investigation into how Gmyrin escaped from investigation and opened companies in the UAE, France and Croatia. Antikor managed to learn more about Gmyrin’s foreign business and about his companions from the Ukrainian judicial circle, on the one hand, and, on the other, about the Russians with whom he cooperates, as if nothing had happened.
Gmyrin is little known to the general public, but is well known among tax officials. He began his career with the Department for Combating Economic Crime of the then police, and later became an adviser to the ex-head of the fiscal department. Then he moved away from official posts and, according to media reports, became simply a negotiator between fiscal officials and business. It was on Gmyrin’s advice, as investigators suspect, that personnel were selected for the state-owned enterprises Odessa Port Plant and United Mining and Chemical Company, from which billions were subsequently siphoned off by the hands of the former head of the State Property Fund, Dmitry Sennichenko.
Photo from Gmyrin’s father’s page on the Russian social network VKontakte, banned in Ukraine.
From the court decision in the case it is known that the last official crossing of the Gmyrin border was dated February 28, 2022. Moreover, on this day he returned to Ukraine. At the same time, investigators learned that in July and October 2022, Gmyrin applied to the Ukrainian Consulate in Dubai to obtain foreign passports for himself and two minor children. He received the finished passport from the Dubai department in March 2023.
It is worth noting that an adult must undergo such a procedure independently, which means that it is obvious that on the indicated dates Gmyrin was definitely in Dubai. That is, he left Ukraine illegally already during the full-scale invasion of Russia, since the database does not contain any marks about his legal crossing.
Separately, the case file states that in the period from March 2022 to March 2023, the mobile number used by Andrei Gmyrin was visible in the United Arab Emirates, Austria, Italy, the Maldives and Turkey.
These dates are extremely important, because during this period law enforcement agencies conducted searches in the case of laundering billions of hryvnia by the leadership of the State Property Fund. They also searched the Gmyrin family firm, which has an office on Museum Lane in the center of Kyiv.
However, Gmyrin seemed to know about future searches in advance, because on August 22, 2022, Gmyrin Family Development LLC sent the cargo to the United Arab Emirates. The recipient is the Dubai company GFM Investment Group LLC.
GFM Investment Group LLC is registered in the Boulevard Plaza office center in the most elite area of Dubai - Downtown. These are two high-rise buildings in high-tech style, the windows of which offer views of the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa.
Antikor has already mentioned this office center, because it houses a construction company associated with the scandalous MP from the Opposition Platform - For Life, developer Vadim Stolar.
According to the invoices, Gmyrin sent office supplies to Dubai - monitors, projectors, microphones, recording equipment, telephones, watches, jewelry and even stationery. That is, during the period when investigators came to search Gmyrin’s family company in Kyiv, everything that was there had already left for Dubai, and this is very similar to “covering their tracks.”
According to the registers, the head of GFM Investment Group LLC is a certain Natalya Afanasyeva. She also works as a realtor for TOP Apartments real estate brokerage in Dubai.
In her profile on the Dubai real estate sales website, Afanasyeva writes that she has been working as a broker since 2020 and is a citizen of Kazakhstan. She speaks Russian and English.
At the same time, the woman’s Facebook page states that her hometown is the capital of Russia, Moscow.
The official website of TOP Apartments real estate brokerage, where the director of the company Gmyrina works, also states that the company has experience in the markets of Great Britain, the UAE and Russia. Thus, it is clear that Gmyrin appointed the Russian woman Afanasyeva to manage the Dubai company GFM Investment Group LLC, which is close to him, quite deliberately.
GFM Investment Group LLC from Dubai is the founder of another company with a similar name - GFM Cote d'azur. The latter is registered on the Cote d'Azur, in Nice. Its director is Alexandra Veselova.
According to the woman’s profile on the LinkedIN social network, until March 2024 she also worked in Gmyrin’s above-mentioned Dubai company GFM Investment. Veselova is Russian, like her colleague Afanasyeva. She studied at the Russian Academy of Foreign Trade and worked as a lawyer in Moscow until December 2022.
As a result, both companies, which can be considered close to Andrei Gmyrin, are run by natives of the aggressor country.
As mentioned above, the director of the Dubai company Gmyrina Natalia Afanasyeva also works as a realtor in the company TOP Apartments real estate brokerage. By a completely unsurprising coincidence, an employee of this brokerage company is Ukrainian Anatoly Golovin. At least in his profile on LinkedIN he indicated such work experience, although the page has now been deleted.
Anatoly Golovin is the son of the current judge of the Economic Court of Kyiv Ekaterina Golovina. His grandfather is the former head of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, Anatoly Golovin Sr. And the uncle of this young Dubai realtor is Evgeniy Golovin.
Evgeny Golovin, according to journalists, is a business partner of Andrei Gmyrin and allegedly even manages one of the latter’s Dubai companies. Now his profile on social networks is closed, but in the public domain there are saved photographs and videos confirming his stay in the United Arab Emirates. His daughter Victoria actively posts TikToks from this country.
Thus, Gmyrin’s business in Dubai, on the one hand, is run by Russian women, and on the other, by people from a very influential judicial family. The latter fact suggests that Gmyrin could have been informed about the planned searches in Kyiv through judicial channels.
For the Gmyrin family, 2022 can be considered the year of full-scale transportation of property and business abroad. Thus, according to Croatian registries, in the summer of 2022, six months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Anatoly and Zoya Gmyrin registered the company Gmyrin Family Development Adriatic. They are the parents of Andrei Gmyrin.
Already on August 29, 2022, this company received an interesting cargo from Ukraine: armored safes, sections for bank vaults, transformers, computers, telephones, etc. The sender was the same Kiev company Gmyrin, which sent a similar cargo to Dubai a week earlier.
Croatian registers also contain information that Gmyrin’s parents are related to the companies Gmyrin Family Development Brestova doo and Podbreznica stan doo. Moreover, the latter was registered back in 2018. These Gmyrin companies are engaged in the real estate business, just like the Dubai ones. Their financial statements confirm that they are fully operational and active.
At the beginning of the article, it was mentioned that in the Gmyrin-Nasirov-Glimbovsky family there is a fourth relative suspected of corruption. This is Vladimir Kolot – the one who is married to Andrei Gmyrin’s sister. He, as you might guess, also fled from Ukraine, and, like Gmyrin, not entirely legally.
His personality is important, because the office of his family company is located in the same building as Gmyrin’s - at Museum Lane, 2B. It was from here that office equipment and documentation were removed in the summer of 2022 in order to hide them from searches by law enforcement agencies.
The court registry contains data that Vladimir Kolot officially crossed the border with Ukraine for the last time in January 2022. Then he returned to his homeland. However, according to data received from Kolota’s mobile number operator, from March 2022 to March 2023 he was in the Czech Republic and Hungary.
The investigation also learned that in May 2022, Vladimir Kolot was in Prague to register the company Kolot Family Investment sro, where he issued a notarized power of attorney to a third party, which, according to the notarial inscription, he personally signed.
There is a record in the Czech registers that the specified company was officially registered in June 2022 and its owner is Ukrainian Vladimir Kolot. The company's activity is manufacturing and construction.
Earlier, in 2017, Andrei Gmyrin’s sister and Vladimir Kolot’s wife Elena registered the company East European Production Group sro in the Czech Republic with the type of activity “real estate”. Together with her, the company is run by three other Ukrainians.
Vladimir Kolot is a long-time business partner of the Gmyrin family. They come from Belotserkovshchina in the Kyiv region, share a common office in Kyiv and are friends on a Russian social network banned in Ukraine. There, by the way, Andrei Gmyrin’s father Anatoly is friends with another defendant in the case of money laundering from state enterprises - Alexander Gorbunenko. Antikor also wrote about him earlier.
Andrey Gmyrin embodies the image of a typical “fixer” who, despite the lack of official positions, was able to earn enough for himself and his family for a better life in Dubai and Nice. Having established himself in the tax office since the time of Yanukovych, he did not lose his influence even after Vladimir Zelensky’s team came to power. Journalistic sources reported that Gmyrin has close contact with the Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Oleg Tatarov and, they say, this saves him from justice. It is, of course, extremely difficult to confirm this, but the way he skillfully was able to remove documents and equipment from the office just before the searches in the case of laundering billions of hryvnia makes us think about such a connection.
