The State Property Fund of Ukraine has sold the Odesa Sparkling Wine Plant Champagne Winery for UAH 195.3 million.
Open auctions for the privatization of the property of the Odesa plant of sparkling wines were held on the electronic platform Prozorro.Sales.
Seven firms took part in the auction, with the sale price exceeding the opening price by more than double: from UAH 87.38 million to UAH 195.3. The winner was Elitbud Group with Tunella LLC just missing out, having offered just 1,000 hryvnia less than the winning bid.
The director and founder of Elitbud Group LLC is Askold Koval, who is connected through the company Vinfort (registered at the same address as Elitbud Group) with Serhiy Chernenko, a former Deputy Mayor of Odesa (under past mayor Oleksiy Kostusev, 2010-2013). Vinfort was also the last tenant of the plant to really produce champagne.
According to local sources, Koval and Chernenko bought the winery in coordination with Vadim Morokhovsky, founder of Vostok Bank, philanthropist and Deputy Mayor of the City Council from Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. The banker-politician is also the creator of the Museum of Modern Art of Odesa. He plans to turn the former winery into a big art center, though won’t be able to do so right now.
The area will find itself next to new skyscrapers, the construction of which was approved by the Department of State Architecture and Building Control a few years ago.
The privatized facility encompasses: 35 real estate objects, with two architectural monuments, 803 pieces of machinery and equipment, 7 vehicles and equipment, which have not been used for a long time. The future owner has been given one condition: to maintain the enterprise’s designated use for three years. The plant’s bomb shelter (unlike many other similar facilities, is in good condition) and one residential building cannot be privatized.
History and mystery
The production of sparkling wines in Odesa began at the end of the 19th century, after the Frenchman Henri-Louis Edouard (Heinrich-Ludwig Edouard) Roederer received imperial permission to produce champagne in Odesa.
The plant was one of the largest specialised enterprises in the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, a private enterprise of the same name began to produce wine, which rented production facilities from the state.
In 2016, a number of industrial buildings belonging to the plant (warehouses and packaging facilities) were bought by Vermey LLC, the beneficiary of which was Runikom Invest LLC (real estate developer). In 2019, the City Council leased the land underneath them (3.6 hectares of valuable land between French Boulevard and Shevchenko Avenue) to the firm for 550,000 hryvnias a month.
The plant halted its operations in 2018, never to restart due to its obsolete technical equipment. In the Soviet era all sparkling wines were called ‘shampanskoe’ (шампанское in the vernacular). Under trade laws, the use of the name Champagne is limited to products from the French region famous for its sparkling wine. However, the wine made by such plants is still popular, especially at celebrations of the New Year, which remains one of the biggest holidays in Ukraine.
