Sytco AG

The head office of Sytco AG is located in Lugano (Switzerland) at 5 Calloni Street. The company is owned by Italians, presumably the Todaro family from Milan (Italy). The main role in the family business is played by Silvano Giorgio Romano Todaro, who heads the company's headquarters in Lugano, and according to unconfirmed reports is the main owner of the company.

According to official information, the company began cooperation with the USSR in 1968 in the sector of buying and selling steel, as well as bilateral exchange of machine tools and equipment. Silvano Todaro was an Italian business pioneer who started working with the USSR from Switzerland. The reasons for choosing a location for the company's headquarters were the developed banking system of Switzerland and the fact that emigrants from the USSR began to arrive in Lugano in the 1970s (mainly Jews and Ger-mans received permission to leave). Subsequently, a number of large companies working with Russian metallurgical enterprises will be registered in Lugano, in particular, the Italian-Swiss company Duferco, which will play an important role in the metallurgy of the Sverdlovsk region, taking over from the Sytco company in the mid-1990s.

Since the beginning of Rebuilding, Sytco has been supplying equipment for the production of consumer goods at the expense of paying for metal in agreement with the USSR Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy. For example, under a contract with the Sytco company, a plant for the production of Stinol refrigerators was built.

As of 1989, the main owner of Sytco, Silvano Todaro, was the consul of the Republic of San Marino in Switzerland. The Republic of San Marino is a dwarf state in Italy. The positions of the Communist Party were strong in the republic, which led to close ties between the Republic of San Marino and the USSR.

In the late 1980s, Sytco began to establish links directly with large metallurgical enterprises on the territory of the USSR. In 1989 the company organized a joint venture with TSO Sreduralstroy (JV InterUral) to supply metal from the Nizhny Tagil metallurgical plant and a joint venture TSK STIL in Kazakhstan to supply metal from the Karaganda metallurgical plant. At that time, the Karaganda Metallurgical Plant was headed by Oleg Soskovets, who would later become the Minister of Metallurgy of the USSR, and even later the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian government.

Information was published on the Internet that the Deputy Minister of Ferrous Metallurgy of the USSR Rudolf Yakovlevich Gugnyak gave his daughter in marriage to a representative of Sytco AG, which provided the most favored conditions for the said company and, accordingly, the JV InterUral for the supply of metal from the Lipetsk Metallurgical Plant to the address of Sytco AG and Festdevelopment in exchange for the supply of lines for the production of video equipment and components. Gugnyak died in a car accident in 1991 (according to other sources in 1992). Some publications accused Gugniak of having ties to the Italian mafia, pointing to his close ties to Italian businessmen and the suspiciously high death toll that accompanied the business relationship.

In 1990, according to the official information of the company, the turnover of trade with the USSR amounted to $ 1 billion, of which $ 550 million was trade in metals.

Since 1996, the company's trade with Russia has begun to decline, which the company's representatives explain by market conditions. At the same time, Oleg Soskovets is losing his position in Russia as a result of a conflict with Anatoly Chubais's group. It is possible that the weakening of Soskovets, who apparently lobbied the interests of the company in the first half of the 1990s, was the reason for the decline in the company's trade with Russia.

By the end of the 2000s, Sytco's trade turnover with Russia was, according to the company itself, about $ 160 million. In 2012, the company cooperated with the Novoli-petsk Metallurgical Plant for the supply of metallurgical equipment. The owner of NLMK is Vladimir Lisin, who was Oleg Soskovets' deputy at the Karaganda Metallurgical Plant. Since 2002, Vladimir Lisin has been the Honorary Consul of the Republic of San Marino in Russia. It was mentioned above that the owner of the Sytco company Silvano Todaro was the consul of the same republic in Switzerland.

Date of information update: 2017.