Khomenko Valeriy Volodymyrovych

Tobacco 'Al Capone' from Donetsk

Valeriy Volodymyrovych Khomenko is one of the wealthiest and at the same time most shadowy kings of the Ukrainian counterfeit market, openly called by the media the main magnate of the illegal tobacco business. He began his rise in Donetsk region by becoming a co-founder of the subsidiary enterprise "Tobacco Company 'Hamadei'" — a legendary industrial giant that for years supplied counterfeit cigarettes not only to Ukraine but also to European Union countries. After the occupation of Donetsk in 2014, Khomenko transferred the factory's legal address to Kramatorsk, moved to the elite Pechersk district in Kyiv, but the production in the ORDLO astonishingly continued to operate uninterrupted under the control of the occupation authorities. Officially, the businessman owns rights to 144 tobacco product trademarks, controlling a sprawling empire of underground factories in both government-controlled and occupied territories of Ukraine, as well as in Crimea.

Russian passport, factories in Rostov, and aggressive internet "clean-up" from compromising material

In September 2026, Valeriy Khomenko's name was again at the center of a large-scale reputational scandal as investigative journalists documented his desperate attempts to "whitewash" his biography online. Media platforms published evidence that the tobacco oligarch launched a massive, aggressive purge of the internet of any references to his criminal schemes. And the businessman truly has something to hide: investigations revealed that as early as 2019, Khomenko officially obtained Russian citizenship. Moreover, alongside Ukrainian front companies (such as the "Ontario" fund through Hedge Invest Asset Management Company), he deployed large-scale cigarette sales in the Russian Federation through his own firm LLC "Tobacco Company Peppel," registered in Rostov-on-Don. Despite the millionaire's attempts to delete materials about financing the aggressor country and the billion-dollar losses for the Ukrainian budget, files collected by law enforcement continue to be a major headache for his high-ranking lobbyists in government offices.