The business partner of presidential hopeful Gareth Sheridan runs a consultancy in Florida that has provided services to clients with links to Russia, including companies owned by the Russian energy giant Gazprom, its website shows.
The consultancy, Wolf Blitz Inc, was founded by Sheridan’s business partner, Serguei Melnik, in 2004, and promotes its services in both Russian and English on its website.
Sheridan has secured nominations from two local authorities as part of his effort to get his name on the ballot paper for the presidential election in October. His main claim is that he is a successful entrepreneur who set up a business called Nutriband, which has sourced millions of dollars in funding in recent years.
Serguei Melnik, who lives in Oviedo, Florida but is a native of Moldova, co-founded Nutriband in the US with Sheridan in 2016. He is currently the company’s chief executive and president, having taken over as interim chief executive in August.
Since 2021, Nutriband’s shares have been traded on the Nasdaq Capital Market, a lower-tier US market for early-stage companies with relatively low market capitalisations. Before that, the shares were traded over the counter (OTC), a system of share trading that is less regulated than trading on established stock markets but still involves dealings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Melnik is the founder of an Oviedo-based consultancy called Wolf Blitz Inc, the website of which gives contact numbers in Florida and Ukraine. Nutriband is among the portfolio of 13 clients cited on the consultancy’s website.
One of the clients named, UNR Holdings Inc, was founded in 2003 and is no longer in business. Its main asset was a controlling interest in Russian construction company 494 UNR, which still exists.
A UNR Holdings press statement in 2013 said that 494 is one of the “most established construction companies” in the greater Moscow area and “also assists the Russian government with infrastructure projects” for oil and gas corporations, such as Gazprom and Transneft.
Gazprom and Transneft are government-owned Russian energy conglomerates, both of which were sanctioned in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Another company cited on the Wolf Blitz website is Emerging Media Holdings Inc. In 2006 it acquired a Moldovan media business, the Analitic Media Group (AMG), by way of a share exchange, according to its SEC filings.
“Since 2006, AMG has been an exclusive operator in Moldova of Russian TV channels NTV federal television channel and NTV World,” the Florida-based company said.
In 2011, the company’s Moldovan media interests were sold to Chiril Luchinski, the son of former Moldovan president Petru Luchinski.
Following the sale, Emerging Media Holdings changed its name to Lifestyle Medical Network Inc. The new business targeted the erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation market, according to SEC filings.
Nutriband’s shares were registered with the SEC in November 2017 and traded on the OTC system. At the time, Nutriband had no revenue and two full-time employees (Sheridan and Melnik). The company had, since early 2016, been offering transdermal patches for sale, including a vitamin patch, a weight-loss patch and an energy patch, without the required authorisation from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to an SEC statement in December 2018. The statement disclosed that Sheridan and Melnik had each been fined $25,000 for making misleading statements to the markets about the requirement for FDA approval.
Since being listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market in 2021, Nutriband has been working on the development of a transdermal patch for the delivery of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. In an interview on YouTube in May, Melnik said it had been hoped in 2021 that FDA approval would be achieved within a year, but that progress had been slower than expected.
Nutriband’s latest (unaudited) accounts show that during the six months to the end of July it incurred a net operating loss of $3.4 million, leaving it with an accumulated deficit of more than $40 million.
Nutriband’s largest shareholder is a Moldovan businessman called Vitalie Botgros, who formerly worked for Wolf Blitz and has agreed a multimillion-dollar credit facility with Nutriband. According to a filing to the SEC in July, Botgros then owned 39 per cent of Nutriband’s shares. Ten directors and senior executives owned a further 54.3 per cent, with Sheridan owning 17.67 per cent, Melnik 9.39 per cent and Moldovan businessman Sergey Glinka 19.33 per cent.
At a press conference in August, Sheridan said his Nutriband shares were worth approximately $16 million and that, apart from the shares, he had savings of approximately $500,000. Before temporarily stepping down as chief executive, he was being paid an annual salary of $150,000 plus share options.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, both Glinka and Botgros, among other roles, worked for a now-sanctioned Russian conglomerate called Transmashholding. Both Transmashholding and Botgros were mentioned in the Moldovan media during a controversy in 2018 and 2019 over the privatisation of Air Moldova, which was acquired by a Romanian company called Civil Aviation Group. Melnik was a 25 per cent shareholder in Civil Aviation, which was established for the deal and was the only bidder.
The privatisation was investigated by the Moldovan parliament and strongly criticised. There is no suggestion that Sheridan was in any way linked to the transaction.
“The privatisation was controversial, declared illegal by the Moldovan parliament, based on suspicions of fraud and numerous violations during the process,” Igor Munteanu, a former Moldovan politician who chaired the parliamentary inquiry into the deal, told The Irish Times.
“The agreement was said to lack guarantees and the buyer, Civil Aviation Group, did not fulfil financial liabilities as expected. There are suspicions that the transaction benefited parties close to influential figures in Moldova.”
Air Moldova ceased operations in 2023 because of its financial difficulties.
Requests for comment to Melnik in relation to his links to Russia met with no response. Sheridan’s spokesman referred The Irish Times to the candidate’s website where Sheridan is quoted as saying questions about Civil Aviation Group and UNR Holdings were “disclosed” by Melnik in filings to the SEC.
The Irish Times has not been able to find any reference to Civil Aviation Group in Nutriband’s SEC filings and asked Sheridan’s spokesman for assistance. No response was received at the time of going to print. The only references found to UNR Holdings were that Melnik once acted as an adviser to it.