Vadim Ermolaev, injured Monday by the explosion of a parcel bomb in Monaco, is a wealthy businessman from Dnipro, Ukraine, today targeted by sanctions from Kyiv for his commercial activities in Crimea, annexed by Russia.
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The 58-year-old, who obtained Cypriot citizenship in the 2010s and has resided in Monaco since at least 2021, built his fortune in Dnipro, a large industrial and university city in east-central Ukraine, by successfully launching into the construction sector.
Today located around a hundred kilometers from the front line which crosses eastern and southern Ukraine, this regional capital plays a key role in the defense against the Russian invasion launched in February 2022.
Vadim Ermolaev is one of many businessmen in the post-Soviet space who managed to enrich themselves quickly, often through questionable means, by taking advantage of the chaos that followed the fall of the USSR in 1991.
He engaged in the construction of commercial and residential buildings, becoming one of the leading real estate developers in Dnipro.
Its consortium, Alef, also produces construction materials, particularly concrete, and has activities in the agri-food sector.
In 2021, the Ukrainian edition of the American magazine Forbes estimated his fortune at $220 million and ranked him 45th among the richest men in Ukraine.
The father of four, who is also one of the financial supporters of Dnipro’s large Jewish community, told Forbes Ukraine having renounced his Ukrainian passport in 2017. And this for the benefit of that of Cyprus, even if he had specified that he would continue his business in Ukraine and visit there regularly, including after 2022.
” For what ? I want to have international protection. Ukrainian justice is, to say the least, not ideal and taxation is not objective,” he declared to this media to explain his choice of a Cypriot passport.
“I love our Ukraine,” he nevertheless assured, adding: “after the war, I plan to develop my businesses in Ukraine.”
” Ambitious “
In the 2010s, obtaining Cypriot citizenship was a widespread practice among wealthy Russians and Ukrainians seeking to legalize their capital or transfer it to a country with a more secure legal system.
According to several media outlets, his personal plane was destroyed during a Russian bombing of Dnipro airport.
His son, Artur Ermolaev, was convicted of fraud in Estonia earlier this year. He pleaded guilty to having orchestrated, from Ukraine, a telephone scam involving false investments which made it possible to embezzle around 100 million euros, according to media reports.
In December 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky imposed sanctions against him for a period of ten years.
Kyiv accuses it of continuing wine and spirits trading activities on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, and of thus paying taxes to the Russian state in the midst of war against Ukraine.
In Dnipro, a businessman interviewed on condition of anonymity by AFP describes an “ambitious entrepreneur who started from nothing” and speaks in laudatory terms of a character who “changed the face of the city” thanks to numerous construction projects.
But this source also reported a sulphurous reputation. “He had a lot of enemies, to the point where over the years you could have had a queue of people ready to shoot him,” he said.
“I do not own or operate any businesses in Crimea. It is legally and conceptually impossible,” Vadim Ermolaev contested for his part in an interview in 2024 with a Ukrainian press agency.
He also claimed to have paid 83 million hryvnias (around 1.6 million euros) for the Ukrainian war effort.
In 2022, a few months after the start of the Russian invasion, Vadim Ermolaev was seen in Monaco, getting out of a Bentley, joining what the Ukrainian press had ironically nicknamed the “Monaco battalion”, this group of oligarchs and other businessmen having fled the fighting for the shores of the Mediterranean.
