Luding co-owner shot to death
Shocking news stroke Russian wine business several days ago – Ara Khachatrayan, the director of the Saint-Petersburg office of one of the major high volume — low level wines importer and distributor of Armenian cognacs – Luding – was shot in the center of Moscow on the 10th of December 2010. His body was found in his Infinity car. This is not the first time Luding is involved into criminal chronicles – in 2009 a daughter of another Luding CEO was almost kidnapped. Luding was founded in 1993 by two partners – Artur Varzhapenyan and Ara Khachatryan.
There’s no secret for those acting in emerging markets like the Russian one that most businesses are involved in bribery and corruption, there’s no other way to deal with the government bodies and rivals. Everybody does it. You can say that about huge multinational corporations (remember the recent scandal with Hewlett-Packard purchasing contracts and bribes) and of course about the Russian companies. Alcohol market is not less criminal than any other one. Wines and spirits are a good asset to make good money on, especially when people don’t really realize the real price for the product they buy. This gives the seller an advantage of putting any price he likes and still have the wines sold. Of course, the price will hugely depend on the ethical level of the seller – if this is an importing company, one might expect more fair prices. Still, we know lots of cases of unfair competition with the use of Russian tax police and inspectors, semi-legal raids to the rivals’ warehouses and offices of the Russian Administration for Economical FellonyResistance (УБЭП) and so on.
Still, there’s a strong competition between the major players of the market. Some companies specialize on the HoReCa segment with more quality portfolio, others would be more efficient in low-level cheap wines for supermarkets. There’s no doubt every CEO needs a couple of bodyguards nowadays to protect his life and business. Just during the last days of November two attempts of murder of two owners of automobile sales centers took place. In most cases the criminal dramas are connected with businessmen from the south of Russia or the bordering south CIS countries – Armenia and Azerbaijan.
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