The company behind a breakaway state

Sheriff dominates the economy of the unrecognised republic of Transnistria and its pro-Russian government, but the war in Ukraine has thrown its future and business model into doubt.

By Polina Ivanova · 11 Sept 2025

Cognac. A major football team. Supermarkets. Petrol stations. Banks. A textile factory. A TV station. A hotel. A mobile network. A casino. A caviar and sturgeon farm. A reported string of crypto mining sites.

The sprawling empire of the Sheriff holding company would probably make it one of the biggest and wealthiest on Europe’s fringe — if only anyone could work out how much the secretive business is actually worth.

Born out of the collapse of the Soviet Union in Transnistria, an unrecognised breakaway republic wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, Sheriff has grown from a murky import-export business on the fringes of the legal economy into a company so vast and all encompassing that residents of the region simply refer to it as “The Firm”.

Sheriff dominates both the economy and the government of Transnistria, a territory of some 300,000 people that is legally part of Moldova, to such an extent that some describe Sheriff as the only company that controls a country.

But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shaken the foundations of Sheriff’s business and plunged the tiny separatist territory, long propped up by Moscow and the Russian troops it stations there, into an economic crisis so deep that its very viability is now in doubt.

As a result of the war, Transnistria has been cut off from its key trading lifeline, the ports of southern Ukraine, and its businesses have lost the bottomless supply of free Russian gas on which they had come to rely.

“Transnistria is currently suffering the most severe economic crisis since its founding,” says Anatoliy Dirun, a political consultant who once managed campaigns for a Sheriff-backed party, before being forced to flee after running against its candidate. “The war has turned everything upside down.”

A political storm is brewing too. Moldova is preparing for a parliamentary election this month that could lock in its route to joining the EU, forcing a reckoning for the unrecognised authoritarian statelet on its eastern edge — and the opaque oligarchy it sustains.

“Transnistria is not a real country, not only de jure but also de facto, as it does not function like a country,” says Alexandru Flenchea, a former Moldovan chief negotiator with the separatist enclave.

“It is basically a big business corporation owned and run by two local oligarchs who’ve made their fortunes on free supplies of Russian gas and in exchange, they’ve tolerated and accepted to maintain the Russian military presence.”

Valeriy Litskai’s home in the Transnistrian capital of Tiraspol is filled with the relics of a turbulent political career in the breakaway republic. Litskai, Transnistria’s first foreign minister, watched both his new statelet and Sheriff evolve out of the violent, lawless years that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union.

When the bloc collapsed, Transnistria refused to join the new state of Moldova, and fought a brief separatist war in 1992, securing its de facto independence with Russian military support. Moscow’s troops never left, winning it a strategic foothold on Europe’s edge.

Transnistria retained some of the trappings of a Soviet state — monuments to Lenin and the hammer and sickle on the flag — but not the command economy. The industrial heartland quickly became a battleground as local crime bosses and Russian gangsters fought to seize its valuable factories, such as steel works, cement plants and textile producers.

“All the Moscow crooks descended on us in droves,” Litskai recalls. The nascent statelet fought back. “People were dealt with swiftly. At night — bang-bang, liquidation, and that was it. No one investigates.”

“We used to joke: we’re opening a swimming school in the Dniester river”, as the waterway became a dumping ground for bodies, he says.

At first, the new separatist republic — its existence on Moldovan sovereign soil protected by a shaky ceasefire — had no formal army of its own. Instead, each factory had its own private militia.

But for maintaining order it came to rely most on its police chiefs, Litskai recalls. Among them was Viktor Gușan, then a senior officer in the Tiraspol police. “When the transfer of power to the cops began, Gușan was right where he needed to be,” Litskai says.

A “police firm” was born. Together with business partner Ilya Kazmaly, Gușan began to hoover up lucrative business opportunities — initially, in the alcohol and cigarettes trade, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper would later report. In a nod to their roots, they called the company Sheriff.

Their rise to power was fraught with risk. “It wasn’t easy,” Dirun says. Gușan survived a car bombing; but three other men in the vehicle were killed, according to Kommersant.

Gușan, who now controls the company alone, keeps a low profile. He does not give interviews and rarely appears in public; only two pictures of him are known to exist online. The FT was unable to reach him for comment. Sheriff did not reply to questions sent by email.

He is reported to own a large estate in the Transnistrian village of Novotiraspolsky, but the grounds are obscured from view by a tall camouflage net. From space, however, satellites capture one tell-tale detail: a garden fountain, in the unmistakable shape of the company’s logo — a US sheriff’s badge.

Gușan and Kazmaly built their empire carefully, people in Tiraspol and Moldova’s capital Chișinău recall, working symbiotically with the separatist government. “They didn’t rush to grab everything,” Litskai says.

But soon Sheriff’s business began to boom, exporting everything from floral print bedsheets to the historic brandy Kvint, and running a massive fish farm, where albino belugas produce rare white caviar at $20,000 a kilogramme.

As its power spread, would-be challengers often met with heavy-handed reprisals, some local businesspeople say.

One of them is Sergei — his name changed for security reasons — who has settled into a new life in Chișinău. He had built a successful business in Transnistria in recent years, but when his company began to operate on a bigger scale things swiftly turned sour, he says. There were tax inspections, searches, equipment seizures. Shortly after his first interrogation by the police, Sergei grabbed a bag and fled.

Now living in exile, Sergei wonders if he should have seen it coming. “Most big entrepreneurs [in Transnistria] live in fear,” he says. “Situations like the one that happened to me occur at least once every six months or a year.”

From its founding, Transnistria used its ambiguous legal status to build a vast trading operation that bridged the European market and the new free trade zone of the post-Soviet space.

Goods entered Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa, less than 100km from Tiraspol, and were logged as transiting via Transnistria in smuggling schemes that profited from the customs and tax loopholes of a territorial greyzone.

Even more advantageous was the free gas from Russia’s Gazprom, in exchange for loyalty to Moscow. Tiraspol sold that gas for rock-bottom prices to local corporations, such as Sheriff, which then produced goods for export to Europe at enviable margins.

Those margins were big enough for Sheriff to reinvest in the region, building a large football stadium and launching Sheriff FC, which has played in the Champions League and has Sheriff founder Gușan as its president.

Jobs at Sheriff’s various companies were so prestigious that to become even a truck driver “you’d need to tap all the contacts you had”, Sergei says.

But then in 2022 came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As its troops stormed the country from north, east and south, Kyiv swiftly sealed its border with Transnistria to prevent a possible fourth front in the west.

Overnight, Transnistria lost its allimportant access to Ukraine’s Odesa port. It forced all trade through Moldova — and under its customs rules. Costs for Transnistria’s companies shot up.

“For the first time in history, Chișinău has complete control over all Transnistria’s exports and imports,” says Dirun. “They literally see everything.”

“The dynamics of 30 years have been flipped upside down,” one western diplomat says. “It’s a game-changer.”

Then, in January, Ukraine shut off gas transit from Russia over its soil. For some 40 winter days, Transnistria’s residents struggled with blackouts.

In a stop-gap deal Russia agreed to pay weekly for smaller volumes, piped to Transnistria via Romania. But this has pushed up household gas prices in Transnistria and left some factories without power. Some have had to lay off workers or cut pay, according to officials. A “state of economic emergency” has been declared.

With industrial output halved in the first five months of this year, exports down a third, and the budget in deepening deficit, Tiraspol has been forced to divert funds to cover pensions and basic public sector salaries.

“Traditional measures that previously kept the economy afloat are no longer enough. The reserves are exhausted,” Transnistria’s President Vadim Krasnoselsky said in June.

The deal has also raised energy prices in Moldova, complicating life for its pro-EU government. This is Russia’s key goal, a Chișinău official says, but the pressure also weakens Sheriff “to make it more compliant and subservient”.

With Moscow now paying for gas weekly, “it’s a far shorter leash than before”, a western diplomat in Chișinău notes, adding that the Kremlin probably wants Sheriff to pay up a bit more after years of accruing vast wealth and power off the back of free Russian energy.

The person adds: “Now the drug dealer wants to be paid back, and you’re surprised?”

With Transnistria’s economy under strain, Sheriff’s elusive founder has personally intervened. In June, Gușan donated about $2mn to its capital city’s treasury, according to local media. Sheriff is already the largest taxpayer and a regular donor. But, notably, according to some analysts, it was the first time such support was made explicitly in Gușan’s name. Some of them believe that the businessman wanted to send a message to Moscow that he is stepping up.

But such measures are insufficient to restore stability in the region, the western diplomat says. “The whole economy is a mystery,” the official says. “There are no statistics. It is impossible to judge the net worth of Sheriff.”

He adds: “Transnistria needs to reform and understand what the market economy is — or crash.”

There are signs that attitudes among Transnistria’s residents are changing too. In Varnița, a Moldovan village dotted with cherry orchards, a medical clinic bustles with patients from nearby Transnistria. Treatment there is better and medicines are cheaper, four elderly women say, complaining of economic hardship back home. “And what do the Sheriff people do? Just steal everything, that’s what they’re good at,” one says.

Others are more generous about the company’s legacy. “What Sheriff built in Transnistria is worthy of respect,” says Dirun, the political consultant and a former Supreme Soviet deputy in the territory. After fleeing, he now lives in Chișinău on a wanted list, but not in hiding. From infrastructure investments to jobs, “they have done a lot for the republic”, he adds.

Over the years, Sheriff has cultivated a solid trade relationship with the EU. About 80 per cent of Transnistria’s trade is with the bloc, higher than that of Moldova itself.

Kvint, a brandy produced by Sheriff, is exported as “Made in Moldova”, despite being produced in the unrecognised republic. Aquatir, the Sheriff fish farm, has good ties with Brussels on fisheries, says a person with knowledge of the relationship.

An opportunity for change is nearing. On September 28, Moldova is set to vote in a parliamentary election that President Maia Sandu has cast as a decisive moment in the country’s modern history: a choice between a European future or a return to the Russian fold.

Brussels has pledged almost €2bn to support Moldova’s accession bid, and EU leaders have become regular visitors to Chișinău.

But Moldova’s plan to join the EU by 2030 appears hard to reconcile with the authoritarian enclave in its east and the Russian troops it hosts.

“Without resolving the conflict? I don’t believe that,” says Vasiliy Șova, once Moldova’s top negotiator in the three-decade-long peace negotiation process between Chișinău and Tiraspol.

With Transnistria’s leadership under pressure, cheap Russian gas in much shorter supply and Moscow drained by the war in Ukraine, people involved in the peace process argue the moment is ripe for change, and needs to be seized, including by Sandu’s government.

For Șova, the conflict has long been sustained by political and outside interests, rather than ordinary people. Many residents of the enclave now carry Moldovan passports, receive pension payments from Chișinău, commute for work across the Dniester and travel freely to the EU, a gradual integration that many in Moldova see as a hopeful sign that frosty relations could thaw.

But any chance of a real settlement rests on the many wider geopolitical interests at play — and on Sheriff. Can the company imagine a future inside the bloc? Either way, after elections, “it’s crunch time,” a western official says.

“Everyone understands that we will not return to the way things were,” says former Transnistrian deputy Dirun.

What happens next will be a critical test for the enclave and its oligarchic rule. “There is no system like it anywhere else in the post-Soviet space,” he says. “They are the last dinosaurs. They need to be studied.”