6.9. Alexej Beljajev

One of the figures we meet not only in Slovak corruption cases, but also in meetings of leading business figures and governments across the Visegrad region, is Alexey Belyaev. A mysterious figure who is considered an elite representative of the Slovak business sector during the turbulent changes in Slovakia decade after decade. This is mainly due to the fact that, although his name is mentioned in many criminal cases, he has never been prosecuted by the rule of law. And that is also why I have to label this part of the chapter as a narrative one – one that you need to read in order to understand the other events described in the book, in order to understand the related events. So we are not labeling Alexei Belyaev as guilty of corruption, but you can get the picture for yourself.  

He is a friend of Robert Fico, knows Vladimir Putin, started with Andrej Babiš and dominated the engineering industry in Slovakia. Alexei Belyaev’s grandfather was a tsarist officer who fled Russia from the Bolsheviks during the revolution. He eventually settled in the east of what was then Czechoslovakia. The emigrant’s son later found a Slovak wife there. Alexey Belyaev was born to her in 1956.

Today, one of the most important Slovak businessmen, with assets in the hundreds of millions of euros, is the link between Europe and the Russian Federation. He speaks perfect Russian and personally gets on well not only with people like Babiš and Fico, but also with Vladimir Putin.

But Belyaev’s position today is no accident. Looking back, it is clear that his business has been growing in Slovak and Czech business since the fall of the former regime. Better said, the origins of Beljajev’s business go back to the socialist regime.

As one of the managers of the state-owned company Petrimex, he had a great opportunity to develop his contacts, to the extent that after the fall of the regime it was not so difficult for him to establish himself in the confusing transforming business environment as a person without whom business with certain foreign destinations simply cannot be done.

An interesting fact from the late 1980s and early 1990s is Belyaev’s connection to Andrej Babiš. A group of ex-managers of Petrimex gradually transformed state companies into private businesses and built today’s empires with the help of mutual loans.

Belyaev was visible in the registers since the autumn of 1990, when the Slovak joint stock company Contix was founded and Belyaev was the chairman of the board of directors. After less than a year, however, Beljaev left the company’s management and was replaced by other former Petrimex managers. During these years, Petrimex management was divided according to sectors of influence. Belyaev set out to build an empire in Slovakia.

In 1992, Beljajev acquired the ZTS Sabinov machine works by privatisation and later added the foundry in Hronec. According to Wikileaks documents, ZTS traded with terrorist organisations such as Al-Qaeda in the 1990s. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated transgression of Czechoslovak armourers, but unlike in neighbouring countries, there was nothing to read or hear about the problem in Slovakia. Trading with terrorists and their regimes was defended by the governments of both Mečiar and Fico. Robert Fico, for example, traded with Libya without any problems and even boasted about it as a national achievement.  

In 2000, Alexey Belyaev was also on the board of the Austrian-Slovak joint stock company Express Slovakia – International Transport. The company prospered thanks to contracts from the state railways. The absolute highlight of Alexey Belyaev’s business career, however, is the takeover of the Tatravagónka railway and engineering company in Poprad. It was no easy feat. The company was controlled by figures associated with the underworld. The body of one of Tatravagónka’s former co-owners, Vladimir Bachleda, a powerful businessman and state official close to Vladimir Mečiar, was discovered years later in the mountain forests near the village of Bystrá in central Slovakia. It was supposed to have been taken care of by a group around another well-known figure from the History of Corruption, Mikulas Černák, on someone else’s orders.

Bachleda disappeared just before the ownership structure of Tatravagonka changed. The media linked this to the interest in his share in the railway company. The Slovak media also speculated a lot about the circumstances under which Alexej Beljajev acquired Tatravagonka.

The transfer of 100 percent of the company from its former owners to Beljajev’s company Optifin Invest was carried out by the Russian-born businessman together with another controversial figure in Slovak business, Michal Lazar. The latter is known for his business with the state, but also for the fact that one of the Wikileaks documents identifies him as a member of the underworld. Alexej Beljajev told Motejlek TV that the takeover of Tatravagonka was offered by the company’s creditors. The company refused to communicate on the subject of debts at a time when it owed a billion crowns. Optifin Invest’s initial investment was reportedly EUR 20 million.

Tatravagónka is a key player in the European railway business. It produces bogies not only for Slovak state companies – Railway Company Slovakia and Railway Company Cargo Slovakia – but also for large clients in the East. There is speculation about Alexey Belyaev’s acquaintance at the highest levels in Russia and with Vladimir Putin himself. And the truth is that Belyaev is not opposed to it.

That is why Tatravagónka has been a supplier to the Russian state railway company for more than ten years. Optifin Invest also participated in the construction of infrastructure for the Olympic Games in Sochi. During the Olympics, Belyaev also arranged the so-called Slovak House at his own expense, which was used to present the country during the Olympics.

While the state refused to pay the €2.4 million rent the Russians demanded, the businessman arranged for Slovakia to be presented directly at the Adler station in the city centre and paid the rent himself on behalf of the Slovaks.

Tatravagónka employs more than 2000 people. In 2010 it also absorbed the Serbian company Bratstvo and two years later half of the Russian plant Transmash. At the same time, Optifin invest took over Hungarian MMV, German ELH Eisenbahnlaufwerke Halle GmbH & Co. KG and Poland’s Fabryka Wagónow Gniewczyna. 

The company normally has sales of around CZK 60-100 billion a year. Around 2015, the company’s cooperation with the Czech armaments clan of the Strnad family also became public. They cooperated on acquisitions – for example, one group forced a supplier who owed money to look for a new owner, which became the other group. However, there was also speculation that the two arms and engineering groups would be linked. The long controversy, however, remained over joint acquisition projects. Tatravagónka also sold first a smaller part and then the rest of its stake in the railway brake manufacturer Dako-CZ to the Strnados. Belyaev’s company is particularly interesting because of its many forays into debt-laden companies with key positions in the engineering and defence sectors.

The Tatravagon is not the only thing that Alexey Belyaev’s empire is based on. From the former Minister of Economy Ľudovít Černák, Belyaev bought others – companies around Vagónka in Trebišov and also took over Railway Repair and Engineering Works in Zvolen. Optifin Invest took control of these with another alleged sponsor of the ruling Smer-SD party, Vladimir Poor.

Politics is notoriously associated with the name of Alexei Belyaev. Even in the early days of his business, he had no problem obtaining loans from banks controlled by the Mečiar government. In return, his Optifin Invest was one of the generous supporters of the HZDS. In 2007, Belyaev donated ten million crowns to Vladimir Mečiar’s party. Media speculated that Belyaev also sent money through other donors. A legendary episode is when an 80-year-old pensioner, Rudolf Trávníček, brought a donation of seven million crowns in a plastic bag to the HZDS headquarters. According to Slovak media, the money in the plastic bag came from Beljajev. However, this was only the beginning, and the amount is a rather obscure incident when one looks at the extent of Belyaev’s power later on.

In examining Belyaev and his relationship with HZDS, the case surrounding his IT company Columbex also resonates. The Bratislava-based company was investigated by the European Anti-Corruption Unit. In 2008, it was awarded a state contract through a suspicious “bulletin board tender”. At that time, it was the suspected manipulation of the contract that brought down the head of Agriculture Minister Zdenka Kramplová from HZDS-LS (formerly HZDS). Although the case was still under investigation at the time, in 2013 Columbex received another contract from Fico’s Agriculture Minister Ľubomír Jahnátek to manage the state’s IT systems.

This was one of the key signals indicating that after Mečiar’s end in politics, Belyaev switched to sponsoring the Smer-SD, which has largely absorbed the structures of the former HZDS.

Another problematic case was the situation around Railway Casted Components. The company built a plant in Prakovce in eastern Slovakia with a subsidy of EUR 9 million.

It was supposed to produce chassis for railway carriages of Russian railways. However, it went bankrupt after only a few months and owes people wages. Despite the bankruptcy and the failure to comply with the subsidy agreement, Belyaev did not return the subsidy and the state did not put any pressure on him.

The company Railway Repair and Engineering Works Zvolen repairs equipment, wagons and tracks of the state railways. Express Slovakia leases wagons to the state transport company Cargo and EBA disposes of hazardous waste from the Ministry of Defence or nuclear power plants. This also proves that Alexey Belyaev is one of the powerful people without whose cooperation the operation of strategic state projects in Slovakia could be jeopardised.