Romana Puiuleț 
The first Russian bomb that fell on Ukraine in 2022 also blew up grain exports from the neighboring state, for which the grain trade is the main source of foreign exchange income in times of war.
Quickly, hundreds of shell companies, with fictitious addresses and front men, infiltrated the grain trade. They avoided taxes, traded in cash and destabilized the market with low prices.
The losses were accounted for by farmers in Romania, Poland and Hungary, who took to the streets to protect their businesses from the invasion of black grains. But, in the end, the bill was covered by public money, as in from our own pockets.
Basically, the subsidies granted by the European Commission to compensate farmers covered up a massive fraud.
In line, the figures for black grains, put together by RISE Project reporters, are enormous in the first year of the war: over 9 million tons, with a cumulative value of 2.2 billion dollars.
Romania was both a transit country and the second final destination of black grains, after Turkey, with 1.8 million tons, worth of 432 million US dollars. Half of this volume was purchased directly by Romanian companies, which took advantage of the situation and recorded massive increases in turnover since the war began. These are companies connected to local politicians convicted of corruption, businessmen investigated for tax evasion, leaders of the traders’ association, companies belonging to former police officers and large international traders with branches in Romania.
The other half of the cargo was brought here through various intermediaries, from offshore companies, with hidden owners in Dubai or the Seychelles, to dissolved companies in Hungary, whose owners in the documents suddenly began to die.
We investigated these criminal networks in the region, together with colleagues from the Slidstvo center (Ukraine) and journalists from Direkt36 (Hungary), to find out who benefited from these mammoth businesses amid the largest armed conflict on the European continent since World War II.
Our analysis below covers the period February 2022, the date the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion began, and June 2023, the interval for which we obtained information.
THE BACKYARD OF HERCULES
Brăila City is the headquarter for the most companies in the top 40 Romanian importers of black grains from Ukraine.
The first Romanian company in this ranking is the family company of former PSD politician Gheorghe Bunea Stancu, convicted of corruption in the past.
Hercules Brăila, controlled by Bunea Stancu’s family, has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of black grains. Between April 2022 and September 2023, the company imported grain from Ukraine worth 40 million dollars, half of it through 12 shell companies.
Hercules, the largest operator in the port of Brăila, is controlled by the son of Gheorghe Bunea Stancu, the former head of the Brăila County Council.
The port was also modernized in 2022 by Hercules, which won, together with another company controlled by the local baron’s family, a public tender worth 17 million euros.
Trucks with Ukrainian license plates line up at the entrance to the port’s grain depot, but journalists can’t get too close.
Bunea Stancu has tightened security at the Port of Brăila, sources tell us in a whisper. “Once you enter the port, you are constantly led, you are not allowed to walk around, or get lost among the buildings.”
The politician was sentenced to three years in prison after being involved in the illegal financing of Mircea Geoană’s electoral campaign in 2009. Mircea Geoană is a former minister of Foreign Affairs and former Deputy Secretary General of NATO. Bunea Stancu served one year in prison and was later sentenced to another three years and eight months in a case of abuse of office and conflict of interest. He served less than two months of the entire sentence.
“He has no problems. Now he is no longer a politician and no strings. He is very powerful man, he has a lot of money and is a very influential man,” explains the farmers from Brăila, who prefered to remain anonymous.
FOTO: Mediafax Foto
We called Gheorghe Bunea Stancu to talk about the grain transactions in Ukraine: “I’m not interested, I don’t do politics, so I’m not interested. (…) Publish, who’s stopping you from publishing?”. So, the questions sent to Hercules Company remained unanswered.
An incident in 2022, when the company massively imported grain from Ukraine, caused a stir in the Hercules company’s yard. The European Tax System turned red on alerts, and inspectors requested details in Hungary, where apparently the transactions with Ukrainian grain were intermediated.
The official response from Hungary was that the intermediary companies that delivered to Hercules were fictitious, so they could only be used for money laundering. We asked the Romanian Tax Authority if the investigation continued, but we were told that the requested information represents a financial secret that cannot be presented to the media.
Officially, the company’s figures collapsed the following year. “We saw more construction materials in the port and less and less grain,” our sources told RISE reporters last summer, when they were in the area.
Grains worth $39 million arrived at Hercules in 2022, while in 2023 the company traded goods from Ukraine worth only $1 million. The bulk of the imports took place in 2022, when Hercules’ revenues also increased by 1189%, compared to the previous year and reached 800 million RON, and the company declared a profit of 14 million RON.
In 2023, revenues dropped sharply to 124 million RON, with a loss of 12 million RON. A court in Odessa registered a case in November 2023 with a grain shipment, brokered in Hungary, destined for Brăila.
It was an import of 554 tons of sunflowers carried out in May 2022 by a Hungarian company established in 2021, Cypolises KFT, which in turn brought the goods in Romania, to Hercules.
We discovered dozens of interconnected Hungarian companies that brokered $1.2 billion worth of grain from Ukraine in recent years, before going into liquidation. Some of them had former patients of a psychiatric clinic in Brno, Czech Republic, among their shareholders. (Details, HERE)
The Hercules case reveals both a modus operandi and the role that Hungarian companies played in these fraudulent schemes.
Ukrainian authorities fined the exporter for violating customs regulations because, according to the invoice and documents presented to customs, in May 2022 the company sold the sunflower seeds to the Hungarian company Cypolises KFT at a price of $400 per ton, but at customs in Romania, where the goods actually arrived, the declared price was $600 per ton.
This could mean that $200 per ton (or $110,000 for the 554-ton shipment) was money that as wired to different accounts by the Hungarian intermediary company.
The manager of Cypolises KFT, Gincsai Zsolt, a modest guy who does not seem to have been the real beneficiary, stated in court that the goods were transferred to Hercules Romania, which in turn sold the sunflower outside the EU, without specifying where. We tried to contact Zsolt, but we found out that he died in September 2023, at just 49 years old.
His relatives knew that he had put his name on a company’s gate, but they did not see him having any real activity and they say that Zsolt had had problems with the law in the past.
Cypolises KFT is still operating with its owner Zsolt, although he has been deceased for a year, and a court in Budapest has filed a lawsuit demanding that the company change its shareholder structure.
The company imported black grains worth $3.6 million from Ukraine. Cypolises KFT had joint suppliers of sunflower seeds and oil with trader Viterra Hungary, the agricultural division of the giant Glencore.
Hungarian customs officers contacted their colleagues in Odessa, who also found that the customs tariff paid in Ukraine was undervalued no less than three times.
According to the contract, the grains could not be resold outside the EU without a written notification to the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy for European Integration.
Because it benefited from a preferential tariff, claiming that the grains would remain in the EU, the Ukrainian company (run by a former seamstress) must refund the equivalent of 19,000 euros to customs. The woman was not present at the hearing, and her company has had its VAT certificate suspended since 2023, precisely because she did not file her tax returns. This is not the first time the exporter has committed this type of offense. She has also used other Hungarian shell companies in similar transactions.
In addition to Cypolises KFT, the Hungarian company also sold its goods to another Hungarian company dissolved in 2020, Erpatak biz Kft, but which continued to import grains from the tailor’s company in 2022, two years after its closure. When they checked a shipment that took place in 2022, Ukrainian customs officers asked their Hungarian colleagues about the status of Erpatak biz Kft and learned that it had already been liquidated for two years. An anomaly that RISE reporters have encountered in these businesses before. (DETAILS, HERE)
Erpatak biz Kft indicates who could be among those taking advantage of this evasion mechanism. Its owner was Ukrainian Alex Kamara, present in several companies in Ukraine, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Delaware and the Czech Republic, through which grains are fraudulently taken out of the country, but Kamara does not seem to be the real beneficiary either. We identified his Facebook account, where we also sent him questions, but he did not respond to our message.
One of the companies run by Kamara, along with two other companies dissolved in Hungary and Delaware (a US tax haven), after trading grain worth 600 million dollars, are involved in a huge corruption case, investigated by the Ukrainian Security Service, which is investigating two heads of Ukrainian customs.
In this case, the investigators are not following grain transactions.
The customs officers are accused of using the mechanism to launder money through several companies they controlled and which received various undervalued products from Hungarian companies, such as clothes, electronics, or construction materials.
Thus, Hungarian companies not only imported grain from Ukraine to extract foreign currency from the country, but also exported various products to Ukraine, which they then sold for cash, on the black market. The scheme would have caused major damage to the war-torn state and, according to investigators, the money obtained in this way would have financed terrorist groups in Donetsk and Luhansk.
According to our documents, Hercules not only used Cypolises KFT as an intermediary in Hungary, but also had transactions with another company, Salo Solutions KFT, established in 2019 and already dissolved.
The Hungarian court prohibited the Salo company, at the time of liquidation, from carrying out any further activity.
Salo Solutions also conducted transactions of 2 million RON in 2022 with a company in Bucharest, transferred in 2023 on the name of a woman based in Cyprus. A detail that fits with what our sources claim, namely that these companies in Hungary transfer the profits obtained from the intermediation of grain trade to Cypriot companies and other tax havens and then disappear without paying for the goods in Ukraine.
The same Salo Solutions KFT traded catalytic powder from Russia in 2022.
The owner of the company, a Ukrainian named Mykhaylo Andrukhovych, also has a company in Serbia through which he imported grain from Ukraine in 2022 and later transferred it to Romania. He is now a fugitive and wanted in his home country. His name is mentioned in a 16 million Euro war fraud case because, at the beginning of the invasion, he imported low-quality bulletproof vests from Turkey as part of a subcontract for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
Of the companies investigated in Ukraine, Hercules bought the most from Pretset, a company established in 2020 that exported $81 million worth of grain to Hungary, Romania, Poland and Turkey. After these transactions the company was abandoned.
In Romania, the company had transactions with sunflower oil producers like Expur, Prutul and Bunge, traders Viterra and Cofco and the company Patberg International, owned by the secretary general of the Romanian Association of Agricultural Traders.
Hercules purchased sunflower seeds from here worth $7.4 million in July, August and September 2022. For example, in July 2022 it paid $0.3 and $0.4 per kilogram of sunflower, compared to $0.6-0.7 per kilogram, the market price at that time.
Pretset from Ukraine also appears in at least two other criminal cases for allegedly exporting grain without paying taxes owed to the state, one of the exports being destined for Romania, through another company in Hungary that has already been dissolved.
At the time the transactions took place, Pretset was owned by a 25-year-old from the Donetsk region, who also had other agricultural companies in his name. In October 2023, the young man was fined for trying to illegally cross the border between Ukraine and Hungary. The company had changed its name, address and owner since March, being taken over by a citizen from the Sumy region of Ukraine, a modest young man with utility debts. A detail that the company was buried after running total transactions worth of 81 million US dollars.
Only one other company received more grain from Pretset than Hercules: Janda Technologies from Hungary. The company bought $40 million worth of wheat, corn, soybeans, and sunflower oil and then disappeared.
In total, Janda traded grain from several shell companies, worth $212 million, between June 2021 (when it was founded) and May 20, 2023 (when it was dissolved).
Barley, soybeans, rapeseed, and sunflower oil worth $25.5 million from Janda entered Romania, loaded onto barges at Chilia and Reni, but also by train.
RISE reporters were unable to identify who this cargo reached to, so who is, in this case, the real beneficiary of this illegal but extremely profitable mechanism. In cases where importers do not keep the cargo in the country of origin, because they are only intermediaries, the data aggregator only sees the country of destination of the grains, in this case Romania, and not the companies that benefited from the cargo.
The ongoing trials in Ukraine show that, in the Janda Tehnologies case, the scheme was designed specifically to not return home the money obtained in foreign currency. That is, the recipients of the cargo do not pay in Ukraine at all or partially pay the equivalent value of the grains they purchase. This is how several intermediaries from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the UAE or Delaware appeared. They resell the cargo, and the difference in money is withdrawn through companies with secret shareholders, after which they disappear or transfer the companies to some front men.
The precise description in the case file reads as follows:
“Unidentified persons from the territory of Odessa and the Odessa region, through controlled enterprises, organized and implemented a sustainable scheme for exporting agricultural products outside the territory of Ukraine, without paying taxes during the martial law. The goal was not to return to Ukraine the foreign currency earnings for exported agricultural products, using enterprises with “risk” signs registered at customs, so that in the future it would be impossible to hold those involved to administrative and criminal liability,” the criminal case in which Janda Technologies is involved states.
Janda Technologies was owned by three men: a Hungarian citizen whom RISE Reporters were unable to identify, a Ukrainian, who has several fines for driving under the influence of drugs, and a Lithuanian, who took over two more Hungarian companies from two psychiatric patients after transactions with Ukrainian grain worth 600 million euros.
In addition to Pretset, Hercules also bought grain from two companies mentioned in a criminal case for abuse of office. The case was opened in 2022, after prosecutors found that customs officials continued to let risky companies leave with grain, despite being repeatedly warned that they were problem companies (that do not pay taxes and do not officially recover the value of exported agricultural products).
“During the period of October 15-17, 2022, employees of the Odessa Customs Service, in agreement with the management of the State Customs Service of Ukraine, abusing their official position, acting contrary to the interests of the service, ignored a series of inspection orders, allowing the departure of ships with grain of dubious origin with a total volume of approximately 118 thousand tons of products,” according to the criminal case that x-rays corruption in the Odessa customs.
The cash issue
Hercules also purchased grain from Krauka, the company of another intermediary named Pavlo Znakharenko, who became a central figure in a criminal case led by the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) related to the embezzlement of substantial budget funds.
The amounts came from the export of grain to several companies, and the front man submitted an empty tax return to the authorities, claiming that he had no income. Patberg International Romania is, according to the file, one of the companies that paid cash for the grains taken from Krauka, along with two companies in the United Arab Emirates, one of which is already dissolved. Patberg, a grain trader in Bucharest, is owned by Victor Beznea, the secretary general of the Romanian Association of Agricultural Traders.
Znakharenko is 34 years old and lives in an apartment in a modest block of flats on the outskirts of Odessa, although he has handled transactions worth over $40 million. We tried to reach him, but the available phone number is not valid. In September 2023, Znakharenko transferred Krauka to another front man, the owner of dozens of companies, who was sentenced in 2016 to two years in prison for drug possession.
Before being transferred, however, Krauka received, according to a file we identified in a Kiev court, around $3 million in cash, in order not to declare the transactions and not to pay taxes.
Victor Beznea was also the head of the largest trader present in Romania, Nidera, bought by the Chinese from Cofco International Romania, who are among the top beneficiaries of black grains. Beznea is a well known expert in the cereal industry, even contributing to discussions and analyses on price changes caused by geopolitical tensions, such as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which led, in the first phase of the conflict, to an increase in cereal prices.
His partner in Patberg was Marin Andreev, owner of the sunflower oil company Prutul from Galați, also connected to the black grains network. Prutul purchased sunflower seeds worth 12.2 million dollars from these sources in 2022, at prices two or even three times lower than they were traded on international exchanges.
RISE Project asked Beznea how come he paid with cash in Ukraine, knowing from tax sources that such payments usually take place when the goods are purchased at a low price, and the difference is black money that is divided among partners, to dodge taxation.
Beznea reacted and said that he did not walk around with cash among the Ukrainians, even though the criminal case in Ukraine describes how representatives of the three companies went to Krauka’s office in Kiev in December 2022 and paid the equivalent value of the grains in cash. The Krauka representative was removed from criminal prosecution in early 2023, after paying the state the imputed taxes of almost 250.000 Euro.
“What do you mean by cash? We don’t do that. Never in my entire career, thirty-something years, have I paid cash. The information is false. Never, I insist, I have never paid cash for any import. Everything is through the bank, everything,” Beznea claims.
According to data from Import Genius, which only reflects declared transactions, his company, Patberg International, bought from Krauka, in November and December 2022, exactly the period when the meeting in Kiev would have taken place, 3680 tons of sunflower worth 925 thousand dollars, at 0.25 dollars/kilogram, while the price in the Port of Constanta was double, 0.55 dollars/kilogram. 1036 tons of these, worth 261 thousand dollars, were delivered by Patberg to Bulgaria. This shipment is also the one mentioned in the court documents, as being paid with cash down.
RISE Project reporters asked Beznea about this price difference, focusing on the complaints of local farmers who have invoked an unfair competition.
“Farmers want higher prices and they don’t sell, but that’s not the market. We have offers from multiple sources and there’s no question of the price being double.”
Beznea continues after I gave him the concrete figures:
“It’s definitely not like that, I’ll check. I definitely bought at the market price. It could be 5% lower, but I’ve never heard of it 2-3 times in my entire career. We bought at the market price, like everyone else did.”
In total, his company imported $5.3 million worth of grain from Ukraine between April 2022 and May 2023, of which $1.7 million worth of purchases were from the investigated companies, including Krauka and Pretset. So we asked the businessman how did he end up buying goods from shell companies, right after the Russians invaded Ukraine:
“I have to look into the files, but what I know is that international brokers, who generally broker grain deals, brought us the respective suppliers. But we don’t know them, they just sold us the goods and that’s it. We have no way of knowing how reliable the Ukrainian suppliers are.
RISE Project insisted that traceability must be verified, including to ensure that the goods are compliant, so I asked for the names of the brokers who would have brokered these transactions. However, RISE didn’t receive them.
The free trade agreement between Ukraine and the EU offers exporters a reduction in customs duties from 10% to 3.6%, but it also imposes several conditions. One of them is that the traceability of food products can be clearly established, so that EU citizens are safe and the origin of grains can be verified.
In contrast, Beznea knows that the Ukrainian authorities have tried to stop the phenomenon following these mammoth investigations.
We only check the suppliers in the country, if we had received non-compliant goods we would have sent them back. We strictly comply with our laws. What the Ukrainians do next, I have no idea and I will never know. I know that the Ukrainian government tried to stop the phenomenon by conditioning the VAT refund and other things on the receipt of these exports of theirs in Ukraine.
Victor Beznea
The farmers’ protests
In October 2023, 45% of Romanian farmers were unable to pay their debts for seeds, fertilizers, fuel and due installments.
European authorities and those of the states in the region have so far created aid schemes worth over 200 million euros to save local producers, from whom neither traders, nor animal farms or domestic mills were anymore supplied, in favor of the goods from Ukraine.
But the subsidies also largely reached the pockets of those who imported the black grains.
Before the invasion, farmers had a relationship of dependence with larger traders or farmers, who own warehouses, money and means of transport.
Traders or financially powerful farmers bought the farmers’ crops at the end of the harvest, often at a low price, but which, after covering production costs or bank loans, still left room for a small profit.
The prospect of a new collaboration makes small farmers hide when they speak, even though their small businesses is in danger by the Ukrainian competition.
Others, larger ones, like Laurențiu Baciu, a representative of farmers from the Moldova (Eatern part of Romania), have no fear of speaking the truth: “Non-conforming goods entered at ridiculous prices,” and the effect of the war was “a catastrophe and a bankruptcy of the Romanian farmer. The prices that were practiced on the Romanian input market were very, very high. The purchase prices of grains were very low. They created this imbalance. Additional to that are the natural factors, which also contributed heavily, led us to the situation where we could not recover our expenses. If you ask me personally, I recover them in a proportion of 60%.
The farmer also says that the years after the starting of the invasion in Ukraine left him in debt in banks and distributors:
“I received 8 euros per ton from the European Union. That means 40 RON per ton, and I lost 500 RON per ton of wheat. We did not receive compensation for the other crops. The second installment, EU told us that he would give us for every liter of diesel consumed, EU would give us an aid of 2 RON per liter. But only 50% of what we consumed, so practically 1 RON per liter, and only for 78 liters per hectare,” Baciu says.
However, the problems were aggravated by the state’s reaction, with “promises made on tv shows” and without real help. The solution they saw was to team up all romanian farmers just like the ones from the Netherlands. So on January 9th they took the streets in Bucharest and protested.
Among their demands were financial compensation for farmers affected by cheap grain imports from Ukraine (through subsidies, advantageous credit lines and an increase in the state aid ceiling). Other demands addressed problems at the European level, such as ensuring fair competition on the European common market and the derogation from the application of GAEC 7 and 8 for the year 2024. The response of Florian Ciolacu, director of the Romanian Farmers’ Club, was that “Some problems can be solved here, some cannot be solved here, but the can have a solution in Brussels. And “some problems cannot be solved either here in Bucharest, nor in Brussels. So the farmers must learn to adapt.“
You can read in detail the story of other companies in Brăila that benefited from black grains. The made profits while receiving state aid based on the European Commission’s decision to provide financial support both for facilitating the transit of grains from Ukraine and for regulating the grain market of EU member states.
THE BUSINESS MEN FROM BRĂILA
Being a port operator, Hercules also stores goods for other traders in the area, such as Ezean Grain, which is itself a beneficiary of black grain imports, with transactions of $7.5 million with the investigated companies. According to information extracted from the trade data aggregator Import Genius, Hercules also brought goods from Ukraine on behalf of Ezean Grain.
Ezean Grain received state guarantees in 2022 worth 3.2 million RON for obtaining subsidized loans.
From tainted sources, Ezean Grain purchased wheat at 0.16 USD kg in August 2022 (compared to 3.3-3.5 USD price in the Port of Constanta at that time), barley at 0.16 USD kg in July 2022 (compared to 0.28 USD, the price in the Port of Constanta), rapeseed at 0.23 USD kg in July 2022 (compared to 0.6 USD kg) and corn at 0.15 USD kg in June 2022 (compared to 0.3 USD kg) from several Ukrainian phantoms.
It imported most of the grain, worth 4.5 million dollars, from the company Yur Group, which is under investigation in Ukraine in several cases.
The owner of Yur Group was fined $78,000 for evading customs duties on several shipments of oilseeds worth 500.000 US dollars sent to Romania and Bulgaria in July-August 2022.
The free trade agreement between Ukraine and the EU offers exporters a reduction in customs duties from 10% to 3.6%, but it also imposes several conditions. One of them is that the traceability of food products can be clearly reconstructed, so that EU citizens are safe and the origin of the grains can be verified. The second condition is that the products benefiting from this tariff remain in the EU.
In this case, the owner of Yur Group presented forged documents at Odessa customs, on the basis of which he was issued transport documents with a preferential tariff, without being able to prove the origin of the sunflower seeds he was exporting.
Foreign buyers purchase the grains at low prices and sometimes resell them outside the EU for a higher profit. If a Hungarian company is also introduced into the circuit, which then disappears, the gain increases exponentially.
At the end of 2022, the Yur Group company was transferred to a Bulgarian citizen, Eugen Pashev. Therefore, this ghost company vanished, after organising exports worth of 25 million US dollars and, with it vanished also the damage to the state. In Romania, Yur Group had also transactions with many other companies scattered all around Romania: Alremca Agro and Sandomar Pan (ttwo companies from Brăila), to Damalio Ro (based in Iași), VP Cereale (from Buzău), Rin Trans Activ (from Constanța City) and to traders Ameropa Grain and Cofco International.
Thanks to these profitable transactions with the war-torn country, Ezean Grain’s turnover exploded in 2022, reaching 437 million RON (an estimated 87 million Euro). That is 67% more than the previous year, and then in 2023 decreased by 17 percent.
Valentin Nicolae Arghir, 43, the owner of the company, was investigated in 2014 for tax evasion, escaping charges five years later. At the center of the investigation was Ezean Grain itself, accused of fictitiously purchasing goods and services worth over 2 million RON from a Bucharest company, acting as a shell company. The latter was held in documents by a defendant for theft and robbery, who was later convicted. Arghir’s case was merged with others, in which several Moldovan citizens were involved.
Moroianu Florentin, the sales director of Ezean Grain, was also accused of tax evasion with grains. The case, still pending, is focused on an organized crime group that, operated in 2011-2015 through a network of shell companies, and allegedly caused damage to the state budget of over 21,3 million Euro.
Arghir is suing a company from Constanța, Metchim Trade Constanta, which also massively imports grains from Ukraine and had transactions worth 3.8 million USD with the shell companies. Metchim Trade is owned by the son of an influential Turkish citizen, Halil Ozdinc. The Brașov native claims that the Turk cheated him in a transaction of 4 million RON, because he used a shell company, managed by an intermediary, to purchase grains from Ezean Grain, and then failed to pay the invoices.
Metchim Trade benefited from three state aids, in the form of non-repayable funds and state guarantees for subsidized loans in 2020 and 2022. The total value of state aids was 8.7 million RON.
Arghir enjoys a good reputation among farmers. He respects his agreements made, they say, and is a fickle and modest man.
According to the company, East Grain aims to find new external collaborators. Currently, it works with companies from: Turkey, Greece, Qatar and has annual sales of 50-60 million Euro. The company has the capacity to supply at least 10-20 thousand tons of each product: wheat, corn, sunflower, barley, soybeans, etc.
He also had Ionel Sandu, the owner of Sandomar Pan SRL, as a partner in other companies, who had transactions of 800.000 US dollars with black grains from Ukraine, including with Yur Group, investigated in Ukraine in several cases and transferred, in order to lose track of him, to the name of a Bulgarian citizen.
In 2022, Sandomar Pan had a turnover of 280 million RON, up 66 percent compared to the previous year.
In 2023, the company benefited from state aid under the Rural Invest program, totaling 5.1 million RON, non-refundable funds and state guarantees for loans.
Ionel Sandu’s is known in the area under the nickname of “Sandokan” (a fictional late 19th-century pirate) . Sandu has a large warehouse on the outskirts of the city, drives expensive cars, flaunts his prosperity and is not as respected by the farmers he worked with.
Both Arghir and Sandu Ionel work with Bogdan Gurgu, a notary who is married to Ioana Gurgu, an anti-fraud inspector at the General Directorate for Fiscal Anti-Fraud – Fraud Combating Directorate in Brăila. In 2011, his wife worked as an assistant customs inspector at DJAOV in Brăila.
The same notary is also used by Alremca Agro, another Brăila company, which sold Ukrainian grains from dubious sources, worth over 1 million Euro, of which 340.000 Euro represent transactions with Yur Group.
Alremca Agro also purchased Ukrainian grains through the company Pitișlik-Agro in Gagauzia (an autonomous territorial unit of Republic of Moldova), according to another file processed in Ukraine. Pitișlik-Agro imported grains worth 15 million US dollars and then transferred them to the name of an unemployed Gagauzian.
The company from which he imported from Ukraine was established in October 2022 and, according to the file, was using forged documents of origin to purchase the oilseeds he exported. 115 tons of these arrived at Alremca Agro in Brăila. Then, in 2023, the company in Ukraine was also transferred to the name of a Ukrainian who deals with this, taking over companies involved in financial schemes.
The international context
Before the war, Ukraine shipped about 90% of its grain and oilseed exports through its Black Sea ports. After the war, exports were redirected to other routes, passing through Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. However, the lack of transit regulation brought about significant changes in the grain market and eroded the relationship between EU countries and the belligerent country. Grain prices fell and farmers were left with unsold goods and debts to cover their production costs. Last but not least, these grievances triggered political tensions between Ukraine and the countries affected by the export, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.
Below, we have created a timeline of events that helps us understand the international context behind the political tensions generated by the Ukrainian grain issue.
Through the investigation published in 2023 – Black Grains from Ukraine – RISE Project showed how grain exports from Ukraine are parasitized by shell companies and illegal financial practices. The phenomenon is present in both the exporting and importing countries, including Romania.
The country has facilitated the import and transit of 65% of agricultural products originating in Ukraine to the European Union. Through solidarity corridors with Ukraine, Romania allowed the transit of approximately 29 million tons of agricultural goods between March 2022 and September 2023. The European Commission has offered aid plans both to facilitate the transit of grain from Ukraine and to regulate the grain market of EU member states. It has suspended import duties and created a transit corridor for Ukrainian exports, and farmers in member countries have received compensation. However, tensions persist.
Authors: Romana Puiuleț (RISE Project), Oleksii Nabozhniak (Slidstvo.info),
Szoke Daniel (Direkt36)
Contributors: Miriam Țepeș Handaric, Izabelle Apostol, Nicoleta Denisa Crintea, Andrei Boloș, Ludmila Țurcanu, Bogdan Groșereanu, Ion Preașcă (RISE Moldova)
Fact-checking: Roxana Jipa
(This project was documented for a year, and five students who were interns in the RISE Project editorial team also contributed to its realization. )
Rise Project 
Andrei Ciurcanu 
