Menu Group Founder Discusses Spayka

Menu Group founder and director Vahan Kerebeyan has shared insights on Spayka on his Facebook page.

About Spayka

On November 24, 2015, when a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian SU-24 bomber, David Ghazaryan and his colleagues saw an opportunity. The Russians imposed a ban on Turkish goods and services, including tomatoes, leaving the Russian retail market without tomatoes. Meeting that demand with tomatoes grown in other countries was not an easy task, as Turkish tomatoes were unmatched in this market both in price and quality. An idea was born: sell the same Turkish tomatoes to the Russians while presenting them as Armenian.

The scheme worked as follows: Turkish tomatoes were officially labeled as exported to Georgia, since Turkey has an export ban against Armenia. In Georgia, the tomatoes were temporarily cleared and were shipped to Armenia without the payment of any taxes. They are not deeply imported into Armenia, only about 500 meters, because they are immediately exported to Russia. If those tomatoes were imported and exported under “temporary import” status, Spayka would pay 0 AMD in taxes, but they had to present the true origin of the tomatoes to the Russians as Turkish. To bypass this, they imported them supposedly for final consumption and then presented the same tomatoes as locally grown in Armenia, arranging for export.

Formally, the State Revenue Committee (SRC) is completely correct, and in essence, David Ghazaryan is also correct. In the case of temporary import and export of the same tomatoes, they would not have paid any taxes at all. The only reason to formalize the final import was to change the origin of the product.

Of course, there are also claims that a small portion of the imported Turkish tomatoes were sold in our local market, essentially without customs clearance. As a result of this operation, Spayka became a major supplier in Russia. By establishing such serious connections in the Russian retail sector, Spayka began monopolizing the export of Armenian agricultural products to the Russian market while also embarking on creating its own production capacities, with the ultimate goal of utilizing the given political situation and replacing Turkish tomatoes in Russian supermarkets with Armenian ones. They received large plots of land in Yerevan as gifts from the previous government, as well as numerous tax privileges, legislative changes, reduced gas tariffs, opportunities to access international financial resources, and many other benefits.

Could other Armenian companies have made similar deals? Certainly not. This was only possible by being closely linked to the corrupt former system. I know David quite well—he is a very resourceful businessman with endless energy and hard work—but I am inclined to believe he is not alone, not alone, not alone.

What to do? It is clear that these taxes were not stolen from the state, as it was essentially a temporary import, not counting what was sold in the Armenian market, which, they say, was negligible. Essentially looking at the issue, these taxes should not be collected. I also believe that considering the Armenian government's investment in replacing Turkish tomatoes with Armenian ones in the Russian market through Spayka, this noise should be quickly ended, the privileges given to Spayka should be converted into shares, and the process should be expedited so that financial resources come in and turn into tomatoes, increasing the 500 jobs to 1500.

In general, regardless of the fact that personally, I and many other businessmen have suffered from unfair competition, I believe that former unfair competitors should not be removed from the market; instead, they paid the corresponding officials instead of taxes. And I cannot say anything good about those officials sitting in those offices :)

Disclaimer: I personally do not have control over the facts, I am merely correlating statements from different parties and what I have heard, so I ask all readers to treat this accordingly.