Epicentr K

Epicentr is the largest retail and trade chain with 59 shopping centers of over 1 million sq.m. in total. There are almost 22,000 employees.

The largest company's shopping center is in Kyiv, Polyarna Street 20D, (105,000 sq.m.), the smallest one in Shepetivka, Khmelnytskyi region (3,500 sq.m.). In Epicentr stores, there are presented more than 350,000 items of goods from more than 3,500 suppliers.

Income for 2018 is UAH 41.5 billion, net profit — UAH 3 billion.

• On December 6, 2003, the first Epicentr hypermarket was opened in Kyiv on Bratyslavska street. Olexandr Gerega told reporters that he was inspired by the idea of opening a large supermarket in Poland after he had visited Auchan and Leroy Merlin there. The British chain Castorama became the prototype for the first store.
• In 2013, Epicentr K LLC acquired a controlling stake in Nova Linia construction supermarkets. The chain was opened in 2001 by businessmen Oleg and Igor Shandar.
• In 2015, Gerega family founded Agroholding 2012. Since 2016, they began to buy up agricultural enterprises.
• In 2019, Epicentr invested more than UAH 6 billion in agribusiness. The group also includes 20 livestock farms.
• In February 2019, they invested UAH 3 billion in the construction of a ceramic tile factory in Kalinovka village, Kyiv region. They launched the first stage for tile production in the summer of 2019.
• In December 2019, the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank (BSTDB) provided Epicentr with a loan of $70 million. The company used the seven-year loan for agricultural development.
• In 2020, the Epicentr added 40,000 hectares that belonged to Svarog West Group of Sergey and Alexander Buryakov in the Khmelnytskyi region.

This way, the land bank of Epicentr increased to 160,000 hectares and bypassed the HarvEast company of Rinat Akhmetov who had 127,000 hectares of land, Alexandr Petrov's IMC with his 123,900 hectares, and Oleksiy Poroshenko's Ukrprominvest-Agro (120,000 hectares).

Epicentr lands are located in Cherkasy, Khmelnytskyi, Kyiv, Ternopil, and Vinnytsia regions.

• In September 2011, the SBU officers raided two Epicenter stores in Kyiv with searches. The staff was put face down on the floor, their phones were taken away and their documents were seized.

According to the media, this happened as SBU discovered a smuggling channel of plumbing and building materials. The secretary of the Kyiv City Council Halyna Gerega stated that she did not know anything about it. She insisted she was no longer in business, and her husband didn't comment on the situation.

According to the Register of Court Decisions, plastic floors worth 800,000 euros were brought to Ukraine from Belgium. There was also a German line for wood processing for 220,000 euros that was delivered from Italy.

According to the accompanying documents, the cost of the goods was two times lower than the real one. The buyers were two firms in Kyiv, while Epicentr was only a carrier.

• In November 2011, the Rada changed the legislation and the article on smuggling on an especially large scale was excluded from the Criminal Code.

The SBU had to close the case, and the court fined the directors of the companies UAH 17,000. The plastic floor covering was confiscated, and the line for processing wood was given for safekeeping in Epicentr.

According to the Ministry of Justice, the founders of one of the firms are Vitaliy Bagriy and Sergey Birin, assistants to the people's deputy Olexandr Gerega in the Rada of the 7th convocation.

The director of the second company is Liudmyla Glinskaya. She also manages Cermet AGS LLC, a company founded in 1997 by Gerega spouses.

• In 2012, the Svyatoshinsky District Court of Kyiv sentenced six employees of Epicentr to suspended sentences: for almost three months, security guards and storekeepers were stealing bags of adhesive mixture for Ceresit tiles and selling them. It was estimated as damage to the hypermarket on an "especially large scale" — 162,000 UAH.
• In 2018, Schemes journalists showed Gerega's business in Crimea. The business is officially registered in Pushkino, Moscow district. According to Russian registers, Epicentr K, Trade House Tradeikom Inko, and Nova Linia PJSC founded Rusline KO LLC. This company and Russtroy K LLC own the Novacentr K hypermarkets in Crimea. They were opened on the site of Epicentr and Nova Linia stores.

One of the co-owners of Novacentr is Leonid Piiak from Sevastopol. A man with the same name is the father of Kostiantyn Piiak, a prosecutor in Kyiv, and an employee of the state fiscal service of the Solomensky district in Kyiv Dmitro Piiak. In 2004, the current co-owner of Novacentr Leonid Piiak appeared in the media as the deputy head of the tax police in Sevastopol.

• There are now four stores on the annexed peninsula: two in Sevastopol and two in Simferopol.

Today, Rusline KO belongs to Drome Ventures Limited, an offshore company registered in the Marshall Islands.

The main customers of Novacentr K are the 13th shipyard of the RF Ministry of Defense, the state-owned enterprise Krymkhleb, and the Northern Lights sanatorium in Saki.

At the same time, Gerega spouses deny that they are doing business in Russia or Crimea.

• In June 2020, it became known that the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, through the courts, was trying to demolish one of the Novacenter stores in Sevastopol and take the land on which the hypermarket was built. The store employees wrote letters to the self-proclaimed authorities asking them to keep all 5,000 employees.
• On April 29, 2020, Gerega wrote letters to the mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko and the people's deputies of Verkhovna Rada with a proposal to buy anti-epidemic medical goods from his company Epicenter K.

'The letter was printed on a deputy's letterhead. According to the law, the people's deputies cannot combine work in the Verkhovna Rada with business, since they receive wages from the state,' Ukrainska Pravda wrote and published Gerega's letter.

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The deputy's assistant told reporters that she sent the letter to the mayor of Kyiv by accident. She allegedly messed up the mail address.

• On April 23, 2020, a transport plane with medical cargo arrived in Ukraine. In the President's Office, they called the cargo a humanitarian one.

'Our Mriya brought 12 million masks for both hospitals and pharmacy chains, about 260,000 goggles for doctors and more than 100,000 protective suits of the 5th level of protection,' Volodymyr Zelensky said at the time after meeting the cargo.

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Later, Epicentr explained that they had paid for the flight and the cargo was commercial. And they did give a part of the cargo to the doctors but the main part of it was meant to be sold in their stores.

Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova promised reporters to "examine the question" with the cargo delivery and Epicentr.

• In May 2020, the Antimonopoly Committee announced it would check why Epicentr and Nova Linia were working during the quarantine. Other businesses were closed due to the quarantine restrictions and those who disobeyed and continued to work were fined.

'The work of Epicentr and Nova Linia during the quarantine leads to obtaining an undue advantage over competitors. The vast majority of non-food retail chains and individual stores complied with the instructions and suspended their activities,' explained the head of the Kyiv branch of the AMCU Oleksiy Khmelnitsky.

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• In June 2020, as part of the program of systemic assistance to health care institutions, Epicentr donated 22 artificial lung ventilation devices to hospitals in Ukraine.

They were distributed between hospitals in Kyiv (5 devices), Lviv (5), Khmelnytskyi (7) regions, and Kyiv city (5).

• The public organization Epicentr for Children, headed by Taras Gerega, helps social and sports schools of the Real Madrid Foundation in Ukraine.

Schools are to open in Ternopil, Irpen, Khmelnytskyi, and Kyiv. This is after-school education of children, mostly from socially unprotected families. The training and the organizers promise will be free.