The family of former Party of Regions MP Yefremov is doing business in the occupied part of the Luhansk region

The family of Oleksandr Yefremov, the former head of the Party of Regions parliamentary faction, is running a business in the occupied part of the Luhansk region, Farvater.Skhid journalists have discovered. After fleeing Ukraine in 2022, Yefremov, along with his son and daughter-in-law, settled in Moscow. The companies owned by the Yefremovs in Luhansk have recently been included in the Russian Unified State Register of Legal Entities (EGRUL).

For example, Yefremov’s son Ihor is a co-owner of DS-8 LLC. His company in Luhansk with this name has been operating in Ukraine since 1998, and in 2023, it was included in the EGRUL. DS-8’s revenue in 2023 was 10 million rubles.

In 2023, several other companies associated with the Yefremovs were also included in the EGRUL: Indeksprom LLC, Slovyanoserbsk Processing Plant, Krasnolutsk Machine-Building Plant, and Stanytsia Dairy Plant. According to Farvater.Skhid, the official owners of all these “Russian” companies are people from the Yefremovs’ business circle.

The journalists also noted that the Russian business information search service Checko, in addition to a date of entry into the register, contains a date of registration of a company: 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2020. These are the dates of the Yefremovs companies’ registration with the occupation administration of the Luhansk “republic”. It shows that a company paid taxes in the occupied territory before the annexation of this territory by Russia. Oleksandr Yefremov was detained for part of this time as a suspect in the encroachment on the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

There are also companies in occupied Luhansk founded or co-founded by Natalia Yefremova, Oleksandr Yefremov’s daughter-in-law. One of them, MISK-Invest, was also included in the Russian Unified State Register in 2023 but was registered in occupied Luhansk in 2015.

It has also been registered in Ukraine since 2004 and was and presumably still is also associated with the minister of social policy in the government of Viktor Yanukovych and later an Opposition Bloc MP Natalia Korolevska. Korolevska currently holds Russian citizenship.

Oleksandr Yefremov was held in a pre-trial detention centre in Ukraine from 2016 to 2017, and from 2017 to 2019 he was under round-the-clock house arrest. In 2019, the court released him on his recognisance. After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Yefremov fled to Russia. In 2023, the European Court of Human Rights awarded Yefremov €1,800 in non-pecuniary damage for excessive detention.