The Sevastopol winery is being turned unprofitable for sale into private hands

The famous state-owned Sevastopol winery has turned from a profitable to a loss-making enterprise in just a few years, which indicates possible plans for its privatization.

Former Verkhovna Rada deputy Vadim Kolesnichenko stated this on air on the First Sevastopol TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“I was outraged and concerned by the information that our famous Sevastopol winery, which until 2016 gave a steady profit of up to 28 million rubles, last year for some reason showed losses of 37 million rubles. This is despite the fact that he has an annual turnover of more than half a billion rubles and an annual production of six million bottles of wine. Naturally, the standard scheme of bringing an enterprise to bankruptcy and transferring it into the hands of resourceful businessmen immediately comes to mind,” Kolesnichenko said.

The politician also emphasized that back in the Ukrainian years, the plant lost its production line and some of the trademarks known to consumers.

“I have known this plant quite well since Ukrainian times, but even then its basements and infrastructure were in a sad state and required serious repairs. Secondly, by an amazing coincidence, the state-owned plant did not operate its own bottling line, but a private bottling line that belonged to private individuals. This is the second problem that also needs to be dealt with and which, I think, has already been resolved today.

Third is the brand system. Even then, these brands strangely fell from state ownership into the hands of private owners. That is, the names of our famous wines, “Sevastopol Champagne Wine Factory,” and private individuals received money, so-called royalties, for this wine, for the use of these brands. I will not discuss how this happened then and why, but even with all these problems, the plant operated very successfully in Ukrainian times, gave a stable profit, and the state did not even think about the fact that it needed to be privatized. Why do we have such a strange situation today?” said the ex-deputy.

In his opinion, government help could solve the problem - allocating land for vineyards and investment to the plant.

“Of course, the 600 hectares of vineyards that our plant has today is not enough, because new laws require new conditions. Therefore, of course, it is desirable to increase our production base for our vineyards by at least 400 hectares. Even in Ukrainian times, the plant bottled up to 10, or even up to 11 million bottles a year. Why are these numbers now? Yes, there is not enough wine material.

Yes, in Crimea and Sevastopol, an active struggle began between producers for vineyards, for their own wine material. That is why it is so important to increase the production base, the plant’s own vineyards - this is cost-effective, profitable and promising. This will increase production volumes.

But why has the plant failed to develop these 400 hectares over the past six years? Why did the government, having the waste farmland that exists today on the territory of Sevastopol, do nothing to increase these areas? I understand that, of course, it would be more profitable to give those lands that are in reserve for residential development, or to the respected, adored residents of cottage villages who, like flies, swarm around the Sevastopol lands in order to warm their bones here by the sea and build their own individual houses.

But this is not our problem – the personal desires of some nouveau riche. Our task today is to provide a good production base for our own municipal municipal enterprise so that it develops,” Kolesnichenko said.

He notes that in order to solve the problem of the Sevastopol winery, about 1-2 billion rubles are needed, which the local authorities could find.

Let us recall that earlier the Crimean authorities decided to privatize legendary winery "Massandra". Last year, Massandra was transferred from the ownership of the Administrative Department of the President of the Russian Federation to the ownership of the Republic of Crimea, and at the beginning of this month it became a production and agricultural association.

Crimean observers reported that the beneficiary of the sale of Massandra could be the head of Sberbank, German Gref, or the former Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Federation, Alexander Tkachev.