According to occupiers’ statements, in mid-April, the aggressor’s punitive forces detained Alim Chaniev, the so-called “general director of the joint-stock company” “Melitopol Meat-Processing Plant”, on charges of “large-scale fraud.”
It should be noted that this enterprise was already known to supply products to occupied Crimea before the full-scale aggression, and since 2023, the plant located in occupied Melitopol has expanded this practice to the maximum.
Until 2022, the plant was controlled, through nine different companies, by Zaporizhzhia “authority figure” Yuriy Golovin, whose involvement in criminal showdowns surrounding the meat-processing plant and the “Nash Bank” structure was actively reported in the local press twenty years ago. Moreover, two clones of the plant are listed in the occupation “registers”: the aforementioned “joint-stock company,” as well as a “limited liability company,” with “founders” through the “Alfa-DON-Resource” shell company, Yuriy Pereguda and Yaroslav Gorbunov from Donetsk, and “CEO” Maksim Ivanov.
However, Chaniev’s “sentence to the basement” may have less to do with the meat-packing plant, which is closely linked to the occupation authorities, and more to other notable aspects of his activities.
In addition to a number of “companies” associated with Melitopol and the environs of Henichesk, where his accomplices include Alexander Mnatsakanyan and Rzgan Rzgoyan, Chaniev is a “co-founder” of the “Kherson-Birligi,” so-called “public organization for the preservation of the unity of the peoples of the Kherson region”.
In this structure, essentially a clone of “Krym-Birligi,” Chaniev is involved with other Crimean Tatar collaborators, namely Elzara Beshekci, Zure Kurtbitdinova, Ruslan Ablaev, Server Islyamov, and Rustem Oksuz.
Moreover, Islyamov, who had previously been involved in the “teachers’ union” in Dzhankoy, and Oksuz, who is associated with the “Chongar” trading house and the Muslim religious organization “Iman,” are listed as “assistants to Kherson regional duma deputy” Rustem Nimetullaev, the son of the notorious collaborator Seitumer Nimetullaev.
Thus, it is extremely likely that Chaniev is also a henchman of the Nimetullaev clan, and his arrest marks another “redistribution” of the remaining businesses in Melitopol and Henichesk under the “sensitive guidance” of Russian intelligence services.
