OCCRP investigation: chemicals that exploded in Beirut belonged to Dnipro businessman's company
More than a year has passed since the massive explosion in Beirut.
The chemicals that exploded in Beirut a year ago may belong to Savaro Ltd, linked to Dnipro businessman Vladimir Vernobol. This is reported by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project OCCRP.
Right after the explosion in the Lebanese capital, reporters found that Savaro Ltd, registered in London, had chartered a shipment weighing 2,750 tons in 2013, planning to send it from Georgia to an explosives plant in Mozambique.
Instead, the cargo ship MV Rhosus was detained in Beirut due to unpaid debts and technical faults. The cargo was bought by two companies from the Savaro network: Savaro Ltd and another company, Agroblend Exports (BVI) Ltd, in the British Virgin Islands.
Determining who owns Savaro proved difficult, as the company's real shareholders hide behind offshore nominee directors and shareholders. An initial check focused on Ukrainian businessman Vladimir Vernobol, owner of a namesake company in Dnipro.
However, after he denied any connection to the Beirut shipment, he largely avoided further attention. The investigation found that businessman Vernobol does in fact stand behind Savaro. Journalists traced the documents and found that the company was part of a broader business network trading in technical-grade ammonium nitrate, which is used to produce explosives.
The company network, based in Dnipro, is owned and run by a network of businesspeople, including Vernobol himself and his father-in-law Nikolai Aliseenko. He disguised his operations under at least half a dozen trade names and various front persons and companies spanning England, Scotland, the Caribbean, Ukraine, the South Pacific and the United States. This network had been selling fertilizers and chemicals to African countries since at least the 2000s.
Journalists sent a statement in which three Ukrainian companies in the network deny involvement in the supplies of the Rhosus and place the blame for the Beirut explosion on Lebanese authorities: “Throughout, the field of activity of Atlantis Corporation, Savaro and Dniprosoft was IT: software development and internet marketing.”
Reporters linked Savaro Ltd and Agroblend Exports (BVI) Ltd to Vernobol's network based on evidence found in a series of emails sent by a company representative after the Rhosus was detained in Beirut. In December 2013, a representative of Agroblend, who introduced himself as Curtis Eaglehart, contacted a Lebanese businessman to help him recover the ship with its cargo, which he described as “dangerous.”
He complained that his company was stunned when the ship's operator, Teto Shipping, made stops in Greece and Beirut without warning, where the Rhosus was eventually arrested. Teto Shipping said it was too devastated to continue on to the port of Beira in Mozambique, although it had been paid the full delivery cost (nearly $375,000).
Eaglehart accused the operator of ruining his company to get more money: “Now the ship is still in Beirut, and the shipowners say they cannot load the cargo in Beirut and do not have money to transfer it to Beira. They started blackmailing us to pay an additional $180,000 (otherwise we will never see our cargo).”
Almost a year later, he again contacted the same businessman. This time, instead of representing Agroblend, his emails were sent from an account at savaro.com. Reporters found that this website shares a mail server with the website of the Ukrainian branch of Savaro.
In August 2021, lawyers sued Savaro in the United Kingdom on behalf of the Beirut Bar Association and victims of the explosion, arguing that the company bears significant responsibility for the disaster. OCCRP reports that Savaro's owners apparently tried to cover their tracks: on August 23, the company's ownership passed to Ukrainian lawyer Vladimir Glyadchenko.
He is apparently the nominal owner of at least a dozen local companies, in particular at least one at the address where the Ukrainian branch of Savaro is located.
To recall, on August 4, 2020, a powerful explosion occurred at the Beirut port, which later turned out to be one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. The explosion of 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate killed 135 people, injured 5,000, and left more than 300,000 people homeless.
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