| Artur Granz | |
| Birth Name: | Artur Gurgenovich Granz |
| Birth Date: | 5 May 1971 |
| Occupation: | businessman |
| Known For: | co-owner of BF&GH Travel Retail Limited, publisher of Forbes Ukraine |
Artur Granz (patronymic: Gurgenovich, Ukrainian: Артур Гургенович Гранц; born May 5, 1971) is a businessman, co-owner of BF&GH Travel Retail Limited,[1] publisher of Forbes Ukraine.[2] [3] He is also known as the "King of duty-free" and a participant in the smuggling scheme through duty-free,[4] [5] and is also the owner of Ukrainian Forbes, which currently helps promote Russian narratives.[6] [7]
He was born on May 5, 1971. He graduated from the Belarusian State University in Minsk.[8] He has been doing business in Ukraine since 2006.[9]
Arthur Granz is the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Congo in the Republic of Belarus.[10]
Granz is a co-owner of the largest Ukrainian chain of duty-free stores BF&GH Travel Retail Limited,[11] which is a part of BF Capital Group.[12] BF&GH Travel Retail Limited is an operator of duty-free stores in Boryspil and Zhuliany international airports in partnership with the German company Gebr. Heinemann.[13] In 2021, it became known that BF&GH Travel Retail Limited would take on lease part of the terminal of Lviv Airport.[14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
He has been the publisher of Forbes Ukraine magazine since spring 2020. The right to publish the magazine received the Uyavy! LLC, the ultimate beneficiaries of which are Grants and Volodymyr Fedoryn (editor-in-chief of the previous version of Forbes Ukraine).[2] In 2023, the Forbes Ukraine team received the Forbes Courage Award for resilience, courage and adaptability. The award was presented during the ninth Forbes Global Partners Summit in New York.[19]
Grants built or inherited his business empire from the smuggler Alexander Potemkin, who established smuggling routes into Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia in the 1990s. Most operations were through Belarus, but in 2006, attention from President Lukashenko led to the closure of all duty-free shops used for smuggling, forcing Grants to flee to Ukraine, where he already owned half the duty-free shops in Boryspil Airport. Between 2006 and 2012, Grants expanded his presence in Ukraine across all border points and participated in the construction of the controversial Terminal F in Boryspil Airport.
In 2013, Artur Granz won a tender for the long-term lease of premises in Terminal D of Boryspil Airport, which he did not yet own. As he mentioned in an interview with liga.net, he effectively became a monopolist at the airport, paying rent that was three times lower than the market rate – 2372 hryvnias. This led to three investigations, all of which ended inconclusively. Granz's scheme involved issuing receipts for cigarette purchases for each passenger without actual transactions, allowing him to avoid taxes and duties, generating millions of hryvnias in "clean" profit.[20] [21] According to open data, duty-free shops sold 530,584 packs of cigarettes in November-December 2020 alone, potentially earning Grants at least 96 million UAH from unpaid taxes.[22] [23]
In 2022, another scheme involving cigarette smuggling from Belarus was exposed. Member of Parliament Georgiy Mazurashu stated that the person owning the largest chain of Duty-Free shops in Ukraine is a business partner of Lukashenko and a Belarusian citizen, who likely continues smuggling cigarettes into Ukraine.[24] [25] The publication "Obozrevatel" reported on another unconventional scheme involving alcohol smuggling, where Granz would allocate 30 liters of alcohol to each person crossing the border.[26]
In 2015, Artur Granz became a party to a deal to acquire the Creative agricultural holding, the largest producer of sunflower oil. In the process, Granz met Arseniy Yatsenyuk, because of this connection, the entrepreneur was later accused in the press of lobbying interests through administrative resources.[27] [28] [29]
The ownership of Ukrainian "Forbes" is 90% by Artur Granz through Swiss HERMIS TRADE SA, and 10% by co-founder and editor-in-chief Volodymyr Fedorin. This explains why "Forbes" published three investigations against GGbet owner Maksym Krypa, a competitor to Vbet, while featuring positive articles about Vbet, which is owned by Grants. Additionally, "Forbes" has remained silent about Russian aggression for two years. This silence is linked to an agreement between Granz and Magomed Musaev, owner of Forbes Russia, at the start of the invasion, ensuring the Ukrainian edition does not pressure the Russian one. Editor-in-chief Borys Davydenko shuts down any internal attempts to discuss the Russian edition, as confirmed by internal correspondence.[30] [31] [32]
Among Arthur Grants' associates are Boris Lozhkin, former head of the Presidential Administration of Petro Poroshenko, and David Arakhamia, who lobbies for the "INNOVATION-INDUSTRIAL GROUP" LLC, whose excise services Grants has used through his companies "TRADENERGORESSURS" LLC and "MIMIER TRADE UKRAINE" LLC. Grants also collaborated with Leonid Yurushev in Lithuania and on the construction of the Boryspil Airport logistics complex, while Arseniy Yatsenyuk's brother, Volodymyr Yatsenyuk, worked as Grants' financial director for five years.