A U.S. company has become the new owner of Armenia’s second largest mining enterprise, which belonged to a leading Russian bank until this month.
The company, Dynamic Frontier Holdings, is run and possibly owned by Konstantin Sokolov, a Russian-born businessman from Chicago, recently appointed by the U.S. State Department as chairman of a $200 million fund aimed at facilitating the establishment of a U.S.-run transit corridor through Armenia.
The Teghut enterprise has been mining copper and molybdenum at a deposit of the same name in Armenia’s northern Lori province for over a decade.
The Armenian subsidiary of Russia’s VTB took over it in 2019 after its first owner failed to repay a $400 million loan.
VTB finally managed to divest the asset last week when Armenia’s state anti-trust regulator approved the sale of Teghut to an obscure Armenian company, Kuprar RA.
An Armenian state registry revealed this week that Kuprar is now owned by Dynamic Frontier Holdings, which was incorporated in Texas last year.
Sokolov, 52, is a private equity investor with extensive business interests in and outside the United States.
Teghut was Armenia’s 22nd largest corporate taxpayer last year, contributing nearly 14.4 billion drams ($39 million) to the state budget.
