Aram Gabrelyanov, shareholder and general director of the News Media holding, has named the sponsors of the Ararat football club for Sports.ru. The club was founded in March 2017 and signed contracts with former players of the Russian national football team – Roman Pavlyuchenko and Marat Izmailov. After eight rounds, the club is ranked first in the Center zone in the Professional Football League.
According to Gabrelyanov, the club’s “ideological inspirers” are two Armenian businessmen – billionaire Samvel Karapetyan (founder of Tashir Group of Companies) and Kamo Avagumyan (co-owner of Avilon company). Sports.ru calls them the main sponsors.
Forbes magazine estimates the fortune of Karapetyan at $ 3.4 billion. He is the only owner of the Tashir group, which owns more than 2.5 million square meters. m of shopping centers, hotels, offices and warehouses. Including “Tashir” owns the shopping and entertainment centers “RIO” and the shopping gallery “Grand Marina” in Sochi. Karapetyan’s daughter manages the Cinema Star chain of cinemas owned by Tashir (it includes 133 halls in 16 cities of Russia and Armenia). Gabrelyanov told Sports.ru that Karapetyan had his own football project – Tashir Kaluga, which existed for two seasons in 2002-2003.
Avagumyan’s main asset is a car dealer of Avilon Group of Companies. As Meduza wrote, he is a co-owner (21.25%) of the Greek hotel Pomegranate Wellness Spa, in which the son of the Russian Prosecutor General Artem Chaika also owns a share. In addition, he is the official representative of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Armenia in Russia, and his “Avilon” until 2016 sold expensive cars to Russian law enforcement agencies. The businessman told Meduza that Avilon was not affiliated with the Prosecutor General’s Office, and that Karapetyan had prompted him to invest in Pomegranate.
Ararat head coach Alexander Grigoryan announced on September 5 that the team would be disbanded due to financial problems. A few days earlier, the club’s president, Valery Hovhannisyan, left the club. A financial audit at the club showed that before that he had withdrawn 20 million rubles from the club’s account. without relevant documents. Hovhannisyan himself then gave a (later deleted) interview to Match TV, saying that he had invested his own funds in the club, and the sponsors were trying to take away Ararat from him.
Gabrelyanov told Sports.ru that Oganesyan did not invest his money in Ararat, but had already returned 20 million. “Maybe he just went and registered there for 3000 rubles. some firm … But now the conflict has been resolved, and I have forgotten everything. Valery admitted his guilt in taking the money, had already returned everything and apologized. I had one condition – that he apologized to the team and returned everything as it was, ”he said.
According to the newspaper, it is Gabrelyanov who is the main person of the football club “Ararat”, which maintains relations with sponsors, and the only official owner of “Ararat”, ex-president Valery Hovhannisyan, is a formal person.
“Ararat” will soon have a change of top management, says Sports.ru: Hovhannisyan will be replaced by Gabrelyanov’s longtime partner Igor Korotkov, the former editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Life”. Gabrelyanov does not consider Korotkov’s lack of experience in sports to be a problem. “His work is simply organizational, he is not a strong specialist in football, this is a little different. Does he need football advisors? No, we have all this in the team. Now the main problem is for the guys to play and get into physical shape a little, ”the media mogul himself told the resource.
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