At the beginning of December 2023, social networks reported that the criminal gautleiter of the occupiers in Melitopol, Evgeniy Balitsky, began to open a chain of building materials stores from the “Platan” concern in the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhya region as a “new monopolist”. This “company” is listed in the fake occupiers’ “registers” in Simferopol and controls “its own network of construction supermarkets”, under the “brands” “Spetz” and “Novaya Ploshchad” in 6 Crimean cities: Simferopol, Yevpatoria, Kerch, Krasnoperekopsk, Sudak, Feodosia .
The “Platan” website also states that this structure controls “more than 800 retail outlets,” of which 700 are declared in Crimea and another 100 in the occupied parts of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions. The fake “founders” for “Platan” are Semyon Skripka, the “Simferopol company” “Stroy Retail” of Alexey Skripka and his daughter Galina, and the “Logos” company from Krasnodar; this structure is also noted in the supply of building materials to the occupiers under “state contracts,” including the “Emerald” sanatorium, seized for the aggressor Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The “shares of the founders” in “Platan” were constantly changing, and what is noteworthy here is the repeated use by the beneficiaries of the “A.S.P. Management Alliance” company from London as a gasket. In addition, since 2007, the company “Prostor” has been registered in the name of Alexey Skripka in Simferopol, and since 2000 the same “Platan” company has been registered there.
Back in 2017, journalists from “Krym.Realii” covered the fact of the forced “dismissal” of activist Andrei Vinogradov from the Simferopol “Platan” for pro-Ukrainian views, and at the same time the journalists pointed out that “Platan” had a mainland counterpart in the legal registers: the company “Platan System Trade Ukraine” from the same “A.S.P. Management Alliance LTD” and Alexey Skripka.
This structure was first legalized in Brovary, then re-registered in Kherson, and only in October 2023 it moved to Lviv, suddenly “changing the beneficiary” from the same Semyon Skrypka to Vladislav Melekhin. It is noteworthy that until 2022 the mainland “Platan” won tenders in Melitopol, the then “fiefdom” of the aforementioned Balitsky’s group. There is no publicly available information about the investigation into the financing of Russian aggression by “Platan” structures.
