According to Forbes last year, Rafael Goroyan ranks 78th in the top 100 richest Ukrainians. His fortune is estimated at 145 million dollars. The main source of this money is the Prometey grain trading company.
In 2020, Goroyan's company “Prometheus” expanded the one-time grain storage capacity to 1.6 million tons. In 2021, he purchased five more elevators, increasing the capacity by 400,000–500,000 tons.
But Goroyan's business empire goes beyond Prometheus – he is the owner of at least 60 companies in total:
Most of these companies are involved in the production, storage, and transportation of grain products, and are mainly located in the Mykolaiv region.
It's clear that a person of his scale is interesting. The main question that arises is how he managed to earn such wealth and establish a remarkable business empire.
Rafael Vahagni Goroyan describes a classic American dream, adapted by a young Armenian to Ukraine. He claims that he started his business at the age of 14 in 1990 by collecting fabric and foam rubber scraps from his mother's supply business and creating furniture with the help of a neighbor. He sold the furniture to a thrift store and used the earnings to continue making more furniture.
Similar to a joke where an American millionaire recounts his path to wealth through selling apples, Goroyan's story of starting small and gradually building wealth shares a resemblance. However, there were no unexpected windfalls as in the joke.
While the success with sofas and armchairs is impressive, it's uncertain if Goroyan's story unfolded exactly as he claims.
He is not lying about his early business endeavors. It's true that he initially earned significant money through the petroleum trade. However, it's important to remember the complexities of the oil trade in the '90s and the influence of certain groups.
Goroyan's success can be attributed to the support of an ethnic mafia network that aided him during the oil trade era, which continues to support him in the grain trade business of the 2020s.
This same network also played a role in his expansion into the grain business. Goroyan claims that his first elevator was purchased using money from the oil trade in 2001, after which he focused on acquiring more elevators.
Though Goroyan asserts that he acquired the elevators legitimately, there are unaddressed details about the purchase and the source of the money for them, suggesting a less honest method of acquisition.
His interpretation of the “Swiss banker” who simply extended an unlimited line of credit is, of course, lovely:
Only it wasn’t quite like that. Ukraine paid for everything. Not of his own free will, of course, but because Rafael Goroyan knew how to steal this money from her.
When Rafael Goroyan established the Prometheus grain holding, the primary method for its enrichment was the establishment of a broad network of LLCs with fictitious owners. Sergei Olkhovsky, one of the directors of Prometheus, Goroyan’s accomplice (according to some sources, his godfather) discovered and selected the most unprepared and unprotected individuals from among the solitary elderly. Then a group of unauthorized notaries listed their names in the founding documents, and the businesses began to actively trade.
Through their accounts, millions of dollars in transactions for the purchase of grain, fertilizers and agricultural equipment were conducted with numerous violations, and the inspectors had to deal with unsuspecting fictitious owners.
The use of each such company allowed Goroyan and his syndicate to conceal from the state from 5 to 20 million hryvnias (the dollar exchange rate at that time was not today’s 29 hryvnias, we recall), and there were about 100 companies.
A similar scheme was used by Rafael Goroyan and Sergey Olkhovsky to receive cash. In the name of ordinary citizens, for a meager fee, card accounts were opened in various banks, and then a huge amount of cash was pumped through these accounts. Goroyan needed them to pay for various kinds of illegal services and mutual settlements with accomplices.
Rafael Goroyan made criminal methods the norm in all his affairs. His company has been repeatedly accused of tax evasion, forgery, blackmail and smuggling. Numerous cases involve black bookkeeping, unrecorded cash, customs fraud and the use of goods of unknown origin. For a number of episodes, raids, searches and seizures of documentation were carried out in his office.
Here is such a “credit history”. You can read more about it here: Did Rafael Goroyan and his syndicate steal tens of millions of hryvnias from the budget of Ukraine every year?
Regarding searches and round-ups, Rafael Goroyan and his group of companies “Prometheus” are regular subjects of the “crime” column in the media. And law enforcement officers are frequent visitors in the company’s offices.
And, irrespective of how much the ordered materials and image interviews whiten Goroyan’s reputation, the press regularly reminds of the very unflattering pages of his biography. And it is so rich in these pages that it is even difficult to focus on any of them. And the most shameful thing, in our opinion, is not that Goroyan is fraudulently stealing from the state – which of the current millionaires has not gone through this path? And even the fact that a millionaire from the Forbes list continues to do this, by and large, is not scary.
Ugly and disgusting is his behavior in our country, whose passport he bought. On this occasion, in 2008 they even initiated a criminal case, and Goroyan’s passport was confiscated.
But miraculously the scandal decreased. But back to what we call unattractive. Goroyan, a large and powerful man, is not afraid to use his strength against vulnerable women. And he surrounded himself with the same “heroes”.
In 2011, an Armenian, Rafael Goroyan, publicly humiliated and severely assaulted Ukrainian citizen Victoria Koshevenko-Pisareva in front of witnesses. The woman lost consciousness several times on the way to the hospital.
On April 11, 2018, Goroyan’s deputy, Vilhelm Mirzoyan, attacked a female investigator while she was announcing a search warrant and broke her finger.
At one of the branches of the “Novaya Pochta” in Nikolaev, a man with a Caucasian appearance violently attacked a man and a woman waiting in line with a tire iron (who turned out to be a married couple). The attacker, who was later identified as Musa Hasan oglu Musazadeh, the head of the security service of the Prometheus concern, threatened citizens who tried to intervene with a gun.
That’s what's repulsive. Even more repulsive and revolting is the behavior of Ukrainian law enforcement officers, who Goroyan always manages to “resolve issues” with.
However, troubles have been accumulating for him recently. Key employees of Prometheus – lawyer Roman Vakhtangovich, manager Daria Trofimenko, Goryan’s sister Naira, godfather and longtime accomplice Sergei Olkhovsky, Aslan Muradyan and dummy director Nikolai Mitsik – became defendants in the investigation conducted by the Prosecutor General’s Office and the SBU.
Rafael Goroyan himself is also among those under investigation, but he depends on his ability to “resolve issues” and on connections in the highest levels of power, including the prominent “servant” David Arakhamia. The extent to which he can use this connection is unknown, especially in light of the fact that one of Goryan’s main companies – PROMETEY SWISS SA, registered in Switzerland – was included in the NSDC sanctions list for smuggling allegations.
And the head of the parliamentary committee on tax policy (and also a “servant”) Getmantsev stated that concerning the investigation into the activities of Goroyan’s companies, “relevant requests have already been sent to the European Prosecutor’s Office and the Prosecutor’s Organization, which is investigating at the level of the European Union, and once we receive the responses, I think we will learn a lot of interesting things about the progress of the investigation of this case.
So something is amiss with the claimed support from Arakhamia – either Goroyan is being untruthful about this and hoping for the best, or Arakhamia himself decided that it’s better not to get involved with such a “toxic” businessman, who is also suspected of financing the separatists.
As for the “separatist connection”, this involves a certain Konstantin Tistol, co-founder of the Nabat website, which in 2014 posted calls from speakers of pro-Russian rallies in Nikolaev, advocating the separation of the Nikolaev region to create a new federal entity within Ukraine.
The site was registered at the same address as Goroyan’s Prometheus. The co-owner of Nabat was the businessman’s top manager Sergei Olkhovsky. Since March 2014, Tistol has been wanted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs under the article “blocking of transport communications.”
But that’s not all – Goroyan’s mother, Mirzoyan Vardush Vilhelmovna, an Armenian citizen, likes to be photographed with Russian propagandist Solovyov:
One could say that the son is not responsible for the mother, but her clearly pro-Russian views and support for the war against Ukraine do not prevent Ukrainian citizen Rafael Goroyan from doing business with her in Ukraine – Vardush Mirzoyan is a co-owner of a number of her son’s companies. For example, Pomoshchyansky Elevator PJSC and GRV-AGRO LTD, registered in London.
Here is such a “American dream” of a native of Armenia, embodied in Ukraine, comes out. By the way, it contains the answer to the age-old Ukrainian question – why are we poor? Because we allow people like this to push us around, that’s why.
