Who is Vadym Yermolayev, the oligarch targeted in the Monaco attack?

On the evening of 29 June, a powerful explosion occurred in the lobby of a residential building at 4 Rue du Reverend Père Louis Frolla in Monaco, near the French border. Three members of a Ukrainian family – the main target, his partner, and their teenage son – were seriously injured, along with two passersby.

Monaco authorities are treating the incident as a deliberate criminal act, with some media describing it as the first terrorist-style attack in the microstate’s modern history.

Local journalists claim the victim was Vadym Yermolayev, a low-profile entrepreneur from Dnipro. This information was also confirmed to Suspilne by the businessman’s official wife, Anna Yermolayeva, who was not injured in the explosion because she was not in Monaco at the time.

In addition to Yermolayev, a woman and a 13-year-old boy who were in the building with the businessman were injured in the explosion of a device left by an unknown man in the lobby, as well as two passersby.

The suspect is being actively sought.

From detergents to real estate

Vadym Yermolayev earned his fortune in the 1990s. After Ukraine gained independence, the culinary technical school graduate transported cigarettes, alcohol, washing powders, and shampoos from Bulgaria and Turkey to what was then Dnipropetrovsk. Later, he opened his own wholesale base. Legally, the trading business he owned with his third cousin Stanislav Vilensky was registered in 1995 as the Alef Corporation.

Two years later, Yermolayev and his partners privatized a workshop at the Khimprom plant in the settlement of Pervomaiske in the Kharkiv region and resumed production of Lotus washing powder. In 1999, he became a partner of Turkish businessman Mustafa Baser, whose holding company produced goods under the Gala brand.

The joint venture “Olvia Beta” (Baser and Ukrainian businessmen, with Yermolayev holding 25%) built a household chemicals plant in the Dnipro region. Five years later, the enterprise was sold to its main competitor, Procter & Gamble. Before the 2008 financial crisis, Yermolayev also managed to sell AgroBank to the Czech Home Credit Bank.

The money from the bank sale and his share in Baser’s plant was invested in commercial real estate. In the 2000s, he became one of the largest developers in Dnipro. Together with partners, he built the Bosfor trade and office center, the Cascade Plaza multifunctional center, the Most City Center shopping and entertainment complex, Enigma, and Pryzma.

In addition to real estate, Yermolayev invested in the construction of several plants for the production of gas concrete, window and door fittings, and plastic frames. He also invested in agriculture. In the 2010s, Forbes estimated the businessman’s wealth at between $110 million and $220 million.

At that time, developers in Dnipro did not feel safe. In 2012, a hitman shot dead the vice president of the Sparta financial and industrial group, Hennadiy Akselrod, in the city center. Two years earlier, unknown assailants had attempted to kill his business partner Hennadiy Korban. Vadym Yermolayev survived that period. Unlike many local businessmen, he did not go into politics.

From wine to sanctions

In the 1990s, Yermolayev’s Alef corporation imported not only consumer goods and detergents but also Bulgarian wines. Later, the businessman opened a winery in the Dnipro region and began producing cheap wines under the Zolota Amfora brand. In the early 2000s, Yermolayev bought three wineries with vineyards in Crimea.

Their wines were sold under the brands Tamyanka, Medvezha Krov, and Monastyrska Izba, as well as the brandies Klinkov and Jean-Jacques. Meanwhile, the plant in the Dnipro region was repurposed for the production of Green Day vodka. Yermolayev combined his Crimean winemaking assets into the company Alef-Vinal-Crimea, which in turn became part of Alef-Vinal.

After 2014, Yermolayev did not abandon his winemaking business in Crimea. A joint investigation by the “Crimean Archive” of the “Current Time” TV channel and the Russian anti-corruption project “Municipal Scanner,” published in December 2019, stated that after the Russian occupation of the peninsula, Yermolayev divided his alcohol business into Ukrainian and Russian parts and hid ownership through a network of Cypriot offshore companies.

It was precisely Yermolayev’s Crimean assets that became the reason for imposing personal sanctions on him in Ukraine, according to Forbes Ukraine, citing anonymous sources in law enforcement. At the proposal of the Security Service of Ukraine, the National Security and Defence Council approved them in December 2023, almost two years after the start of the full-scale invasion. By that time, Yermolayev was already living in Monaco. In August 2022, journalists from Ukrainska Pravda filmed the businessman near a casino in Monte Carlo, where he arrived in a Bentley with Dnipro registration plates.

Yermolayev called the sanctions against him “surreal” and claimed that after the Russian annexation of Crimea, he lost all assets on the peninsula. He also insisted that he suffered significant losses due to the Russian invasion, which destroyed his plane and stole agricultural machinery in the temporarily occupied territories of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. At the same time, he noted that since 2017 he had given up Ukrainian citizenship and has since held only a Cypriot passport.

To circumvent sanctions, Yermolayev began re-registering offshore companies owning his assets to relatives – in particular to his daughter Sofia, according to Hromadske journalists in September 2024. The businessman refused to comment on this information.

Sentence for the eldest son

In December 2025, Ukrainska Pravda reported that Yermolayev’s eldest son Artur was detained in Cyprus at the request of Interpol. At the time, journalists noted that the younger Yermolayev was suspected of organising a network of call centers and was awaiting extradition to Estonia.

Less than six months later, on April 30, 2026, the official portal of the Estonian judiciary reported that the Harju County Court (which includes the capital Tallinn) found Artur Yermolayev guilty of creating and leading a criminal organization specializing in telephone fraud. The organization operated from 2017, and between 2019 and 2022 it earned more than €100 million, of which €5.4 million came from defrauded Estonian citizens.

According to the Estonian court portal, Yermolayev Jr. admitted his guilt and entered into a plea deal with the investigation. He received five years conditionally but had to serve 4 months and 26 days in prison and pay €8.5 million into the deposit account of the local prosecutor’s office. After that, Artur Yermolayev was deported from Estonia and banned from entering the country for 10 years.

The article in Ukrainian by EUalive’s partner Suspilne can be found here.

Caption: Members of a bomb disposal team work near a residential building in Monaco, 30 June 2026, after a suspected parcel bomb explosion the previous evening wounded Ukrainian-born businessman Vadym Yermolaiev and two others. Police searched Monaco and nearby France for a suspect seen leaving a bag or package in the building’s lobby. EPA/SEBASTIEN NOGIER