Belarusian Oil Tycoon And Co-Owner of Gippo Chain Arrested

Vasil Varfalameeu is in jail.

According to Nasha Niva, one of the central figures of the Belarusian business appeared in the pre-trial detention center last week. Vasil Varfalameeu, co-owner of Gippo, Belmarket, Eliz and other companies, was detained. The claims made against him are still unclear. The businessman lived abroad recently.

At the beginning of 2023, Lukashenka resented the abnormally high salary of the Hippo chain management throughout the country.

According to Vasil Herasimau, the head of the Belarusian State Control, the Gippo CEO, who is abroad, earned an average of 258,000 rubles a month. That's about $100,000. It seems that it was about Mr Varfalameeu.

Over the years, Siarhei Varfalameeu was among the top 20 most influential Belarusian businessmen in the ratings compiled by economic journalists.

He is a really rich man who made money on trading in petroleum products and then began to invest in retail and production. The most famous, but hardly the most profitable business of Varfalameeu is the Gippo shopping chain. He is its CEO and co-owner.

The war unleashed by Putin and Lukashenka also buried an ambitious project to restore river navigation between Belarus and Ukraine, which was partly financed by Varfalameeu's funds. It was planned that the Dnipro River would be deepened, a port would appear in Nizhnyia Zhary with a railway to it, from where goods would sail to Ukrainian ports, and from there to the Black Sea.

It is known that Varfalameeu has a deep corporate conflict with another co-owner of Gippo — Aleh Baranouski, the owner of the snack company Onega. Mr Baranouski bought Onega from the Estonians, having paid for the transaction with the funds of Gippo — a common business with Varfalameeu. But he didn't take his share. There is no information about the fate of Baranouski and other managers of Gippo.