A Ukrainian businessman, Volodymyr Verbonol, is behind the company that owned the chemicals that exploded in Beirut in August 2020, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
More than 217 people, including one Ukrainian citizen, were killed and 7,000 were injured when 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a combustible material used to make fertilizers and bombs, exploded in Beirut’s port. The blast displaced 300,000 people and left large sections of the Lebanese capital in ruins.
After the blast, reporters found out that the chemicals were owned by a dormant, London-registered company called Savaro Ltd.
It had chartered the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate in 2013, with the intention to ship it from Georgia to an explosives factory in Mozambique. Instead, the vessel carrying it, the Rhosus, arrived in Beirut in November but never left, becoming tangled in a legal dispute over unpaid port fees and ship defects.
Verbonol, who also owned a company called Savaro in Dnipro, attracted scrutiny but denied that he had any connection to the shipment.
However, the OCCRP reported that Verbonol, along with a network of businesspeople including his father-in-law, nationally prominent construction magnate Mykola Aliseyenko, were indeed behind Savaro. The company itself was part of a larger business network that traded in technical-grade ammonium nitrate of the sort used to make explosives, the report found.
The network hid its operations behind at least half a dozen trade names and shell companies. It sold fertilizers and chemicals to African countries since at least the 2000s. The OCCRP also found that the network sent at least three other shipments of ammonium nitrate to the Rhosus’ intended destination, Mozambique, in 2013.
Reached by phone, Verbonol declined to comment.
The vessel was chartered and its cargo was purchased by two companies from the Savaro network: the London-registered Savaro Ltd, and another called Agroblend Exports (BVI) Ltd in the British Virgin Islands. Neither company had an obvious tie to Ukraine — Savaro’s true ownership was obscured by nominee services provided by Interstatus, the Cyprus-based corporate services provider. Interstatus provided nominee services for at least four companies of the same Savaro name.
Savaro’s connection with Agroblend Exports (BVI) Ltd is revealed in a series of emails sent by a company representative after Rhosus was detained in Beirut.
An Agroblend representative calling himself Curtis Igleheart contacted a Lebanese businessman to help him retrieve the ship’s cargo, which he identified as “dangerous.” Nearly a year later, he reached out again to the same businessman, but instead of representing Agroblend, his emails were sent from a savaro.com account.
Savaro.com shared an email server with the website of the Ukrainian branch of Savaro. It also shared an IP address with the Ukrainian branch of Savaro, as well as other sites linked to offshore companies in the network that advertised fertilizers and other chemicals in Latvia and the United States.
According to an investigation, Savaro sent over 17,000 metric tons of ammonium nitrate in three separate shipments to Beira, Mozambique the same year as Rhosus shipping.
The Rhosus had also been destined for Beira before being detained at Beirut’s port. Savaro’s sister company, Agroblend, also sent a third shipment of 6,500 tons of ammonium nitrate from Ukraine and Croatia to Beira, which arrived in August 2013.
