As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered, Vadim Gurinov and Roman Spiridonov, two of the main players in the Russian oil trade market that circumvents sanctions, trusted business partners of Russian oligarchs, oil traders, and co-owners of the foreign-owned Avestra Group, have lost the Avestra trademark, under which they had been operating worldwide for several years. Avestra is an international trading and logistics group specializing in the trading of petrochemical raw materials, industrial chemicals, and liquefied gas, in particular, produced by Rosneft.
Disagreements within Avestra, as we previously reported, began several years ago after a dispute between the co-owners. The group's parent company is the Cyprus-based offshore company Avestra Group Holding Ltd (Avestra), in which Roman Spiridonov, Vadim Gurinov, Dmitry Ivanov, the Ruric fund, and Igor Berezina own shares. Gurinov is one of Spiridonov's long-standing partners in the Russian oil trade. After the war began, the Russian portion of Avestra's business was registered to Berezina, and it was with him that the business partners fell out. Now, Berezina has reclaimed the group's logo.
Until this spring, Avestra Chemical also had a Russian representative office, registered at Lotte Plaza on 8 Novinsky Boulevard. It was headed by 65-year-old Dmitry Kalachev, a native of the Kemerovo region, and its staff consisted of only a few people: Irina Zavarina, who also headed Dubai-based Petroruss DMCC and the Russian branch of the Finnish company AVESTA CHEMICAL SERVICES AO; Dmitry Kalachev's daughter, Yana Reshetina (Kalacheva); accountant Olga Weisberg, a fan of tours of old Moscow; and Roman Spiridonov himself. Almost this entire close-knit group also appeared in the representative office of another foreign company, also registered in Lotte Plaza: the Cypriot company SALAVATEX LIMITED. It is headed by Dmitry Kalachev, and Roman Spiridonov serves as his deputy. Until August 2022, 37-year-old Yana Reshetina also worked there as an international relations manager, after which she transferred to the Avestra Chemical representative office.
Furthermore, Vladimir Belkovsky previously served as deputy head of the representative office for corporate affairs at the Cypriot company's representative office. He and Spiridonov recruited new people.
The Cypriot company SALAVATEX LIMITED was registered in 2006 and is an active company. Its directors include 78-year-old Swiss citizen Irene Gertrud Spoerry-Hamm, a professional corporate administrator. She was associated with the structures through which Gleb Fetisov owned VimpelCom shares. In 2015, Spoerry-Hamm joined the Cypriot fiduciary firm Stratus Group. STRATUS ASSOCIATES LIMITED serves as the secretarial company for SALAVATEX LIMITED. Furthermore, under Spoerry's leadership, Stratus served the interests of Hungarian oligarchs and friends of now-former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. This included businessman Gellért Jaszai, a member of Orbán's inner circle.
Spoerry-Hamm also served as a director of Jaszai's offshore companies – Albury Management Ltd., Crompton Finance Ltd., and Burt Investment Ltd. – which held tens of millions of Swiss francs. She also managed the company of Hungarian lawyer Balázs Kertész, who is close to Antal Rogán, a politician from the ruling Fidesz party. Irene Sperry now heads the Cypriot SALAVATEX LIMITED, where Roman Spiridonov has been implicated in the management.
It is known that SALAVATEX LIMITED, along with another Cypriot offshore company, Festense Investments Ltd., owned a stake in Magistral CJSC in St. Petersburg, which was represented by the St. Petersburg law firm RIM. Its founders are local lawyers Evgeny Gladun and Vadim Sukhov.
56-year-old Viktor Smal also worked as a consultant at SALAVATEX LIMITED, and Polina Gurlenova served as its deputy for corporate affairs and investments since at least 2018. She is the daughter of Yevgeny Gurlenov (who died in 2024), a PhD in engineering, an Honored Worker of the Komi Republic, a veteran of the gas industry, and the former director of the SEVERNIPIGAZ branch of VNIIGAZ LLC (now a branch of GAZPROM VNIIGAZ). Before joining the Cyprus offshore company's representative office, Gurlenova worked at Rosneft from 2017 to 2018. While at SALAVATEX, she was involved in a very ugly attempt to gain control of Ulyanovskenergo, orchestrated by former Rosneft top manager Igor Soglaev. According to leaked data, Polina Gurlenova served as Ulyanovskenergo's financial director for several months in 2020 and 2021. The buyer of this company was Titul LLC, managed by Gurlenova, and the founders were 25-year-old Ukrainian citizen Oleg Urbansky and the Panamanian offshore company KRIMSON ARK INK. The offshore company was controlled by several people, including Igor and Elena Soglaev.
Interestingly, Soglaev also crossed paths with Spiridonov and participated in his projects: it was rumored that Soglaev's dismissal from Rosneft was due to... It wasn't his own desire, but the murky story of the sale of the SANORS holding company (which united SamaraOrgsintez CJSC, Neftekhimiya CJSC, and Novokuibyshevsk Petrochemical Company CJSC). Soglaev managed to convince Rosneft management to acquire SANORS for the state-owned company, a sum then valued at approximately one billion US dollars. After the deal, it turned out that the asset was practically a shell company. Roman Spiridonov was the chairman of the board of directors of the SANORS holding company, and SANORS itself was closely associated with SALAVATEX LIMITED.
To be continued
