Itar

History

2024: Plant sold for hundreds of millions of rubles

On April 11, 2024, information appeared that the complex of the Itar LLC alcohol plant in Kaliningrad was sold for more than 400 million rubles. The buyer was Isis JSC, associated with businessman and former mayor of Volgograd Yevgeny Ishchenko.

The Itar plant was part of the Vestalka group of the former Deputy Prime Minister of the Government of the Kaliningrad Region Konstantin Suslov. The company was engaged in the production of vodka "Legend of the Kremlin," as well as Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya (the last two - under a contract with FKP "Soyuzplodoimport"). Subsequently, difficulties arose with the business, and in 2021 Itar LLC was declared bankrupt. After that, the plant was put up for auction at an initial price of 362.3 million rubles.

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According to the Kommersant newspaper, the auction was won by Isis JSC, which offered 411.75 million rubles for the asset. This amount includes the rights to lease land plots, buildings, equipment, trademarks "Baltic Spray," "Steam Locomotive," etc.

Before being declared bankrupt, Itar worked primarily for export. But due to the current geopolitical situation, the American and European markets for Russian vodka are closed. At the same time, the secretary of the Alcopro guild, Andrei Moskovsky, notes that vodka from Kaliningrad is expensive for the Russian market due to high logistics costs. Vadim Drobiz, director of the Center for Research on Federal and Regional Alcohol Markets (CIFRRA), notes that taking into account the cost of delivery in Kaliningrad, it may be advisable to produce premium vodka. An alternative option is to reorient production to spilling whiskey or cognac. Hussein Pliev, general director of Smart Engineering Group, believes that Itar will remain a production site, since the demolition of buildings, for example, for building housing, is unlikely to be profitable due to the low cost of apartments in the area of ​ ​ the enterprise.^[1]

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