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System Capital Management, the investment group of Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, has agreed to sell its stake in farming company HarvEast to the Parallel fuel group, ending the country's richest man's involvement in agriculture.
The buyer is Parallel Nafta Ltd., part of the group controlled by Oleksandr Dubinin, which runs the Parallel chain of filling stations. It will take control of UA Agrocom Ltd. and UAC Finance Ltd., the British Virgin Islands companies that hold HarvEast, SCM said in a statement on Nov. 5. Ukraine's Antimonopoly Committee has approved the deal, and closing is planned during 2027. The price was not disclosed.
SCM said the decision to sell was driven by wartime circumstances.
A business cut in half by war
HarvEast farms about 25,000 hectares in the Donetsk, Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions. The company was once one of the larger agricultural producers in eastern Ukraine, but much of its land in the Donetsk region has been close to the front line or under Russian occupation since 2022, and it lost its operations in Crimea after Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014.
The holding was originally jointly owned by Akhmetov and fellow businessman Vadym Novynskyi. When the two split their interests, SCM took 75% and Novynskyi's Smart-Holding kept 25%. SCM did not say whether it is selling its entire stake.
The purchase gives Dubinin a farming business alongside his fuel retail group. Parallel operates a chain of filling stations across Ukraine.
Akhmetov's shrinking empire
The sale is the latest change in an empire that the war has battered. Akhmetov's biggest businesses, the steel and mining group Metinvest and power company DTEK, lost major assets in the east, including the Azovstal and Illich steelworks in Mariupol, which Russia captured in 2022. He has filed a claim against Russia at the European Court of Human Rights over those losses.
Akhmetov, 60, built his fortune in Donetsk in the 1990s and 2000s in coal, steel and energy. He also owns the Shakhtar Donetsk football club, which has played its home games away from Donetsk since 2014.
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