A family of Krasnodar businessmen advertises the war, but lives in London

Propaganda is not only television, internet and radio. This includes war symbols on the streets of our cities - “Z”, “V”, “We do not abandon our own” and outdoor advertising, which is replete with calls to go to war. Here, for example, is an article about how a doctor from Tatarstan saw an advertisement for recruitment for contract service and signed up as a volunteer. Here is a resident of Bashkortostan talking about how he saw an advertisement for volunteers under the age of 60, went to the front and now brags about how he captured a “British mercenary.” But a Stavropol Cossack tells how he ended up at the front: “Born, married, children... worked on the land, as an agronomist. One day I was driving through the beautiful city of Pyatigorsk and saw a banner that volunteers were being recruited for the Terek Cossack battalion. When I saw this, I immediately had a great desire to get here . ”

Billboards are typically owned or leased by advertising companies. “Protocol” found out that one of these “advertising magnates” in the south of Russia actively advertises the war, but prefers to live in London.

Journey to the Border of Conscience

Roman Gubenko was born in the village of Poltava. At the age of 18 he became an individual entrepreneur. In 1998, “ he was involved in the development of wholesale supplies of plumbing fixtures and rose from manager to commercial director . ” From 1999 to 2009 he studied at educational institutions in Krasnodar and Moscow to become an economist. Over the entire period, Gubenko was the founder of a dozen legal entities. In 2006, he founded his first company, the Mediatron advertising agency, which later became one of the largest outdoor advertising operators in Krasnodar. "Mediatron" is registered in Slavyansk-on-Kuban. The owners of the company are Roman and Anna Gubenko. Anna is the wife of the hero of our publication.

In January 2021, Protocol released the investigation “24 Billboards on the Border of Conscience.” Then it turned out that Roman Gubenko received permission to install advertising structures by resorting to corruption schemes. Gubenko’s scheme, among other things, was based on the fact that the Krasnodar administration appealed illegal court decisions, deliberately violating deadlines. This dispute should not even have been considered by courts of general jurisdiction - economic disputes are resolved by an arbitration court, where an individual entrepreneur should have been sued.

In the summer of 2024, the arbitration court refused to legalize Gubenko’s controversial advertising structures. One of the interim decisions in the case contains the actual and cadastral addresses of 24 screens, some of which Gubenko had already built and tried to legitimize. In order to see what kind of advertising the entrepreneur places on these structures, we needed the help of Russian agents of the Protocol. We asked them to go around and take pictures of what was being advertised there.

Journey beyond the borders of conscience

The published solution contains addresses of 24 screens. All of them are in Krasnodar. At the time of publication, we received videos and photographs of all 24 advertising structures from the court decision. At least five of them have advertisements for military service .

On most LED screens, in addition to advertising, they show a short video indicating who owns the screen - “Advertising on this screen” and the logo of the Affix-Group company.

The website , which positions itself as “the #1 resource for selecting an advertising agency,” states that “Mediatron is part of the Affix Group, and the team includes more than 50 employees. The creative agency creates strategies and original ideas, and the media buying division launches advertising campaigns in all types of media, including on its own surfaces . ” The rights to the Affix-Group trademark belong to the M Group company, which Roman Gubenko registered in 2019. He was the sole owner of the company until the end of 2020. Then Roman Aleksandrovich Sologub became a co-owner of the company. Now he owns this company entirely. Despite the formal withdrawal from the ownership stake in the business, until recently Roman Gubenko continued to defend his right to advertising structures in arbitration court.

On a structure on Chekistov Avenue we found a sign mentioning the individual entrepreneur Margarita Anatolyevna Gubenko. This is the 64-year-old mother of Roman Gubenko. The leaked databases contain a phone number that was used by both Margarita Anatolyevna and Roman himself, and the businessman’s mother lived at the same addresses as the brother of our media tycoon, Andrei Gubenko. According to leaks, we established that Margarita Gubenko was an employee of the RAG Media-Tron company already in 2008. She was employed there in 2010 and, apparently, still works.

He went to live in London

Roman's wife, Anna Gubenko, continues to own a joint business with Roman. She regularly posts photos from London on her Instagram page. That's where she lives. This led us to a hypothesis about where else we should look for traces of the Gubenko family. The novel from 2020 is related to two companies in the UK at once. At ADDCOM AGENCY LTD he has been the General Director since December 1, 2020. The company's activities include investment funds, advertising agencies and other types of services. The second London legal entity of Roman Gubenko is the British branch of the Russian company LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY “MEDIATRON BUYING”. In the documents section, we discovered that Roman Gubenko registered this legal entity in the UK in March 2020. On September 18, 2023, Anna Gubenko was appointed as the person authorized to represent the British company . Both have the same residential address - 60 Holland Street, Flat 1205 Block B, London, SE1 9JF, United Kingdom. Then, on the same day, her title was changed to "person authorized to accept services for the company." And again, on the same day, changes were made and Roman Gubenko became this person. However, in 2023, Anna was withdrawing money to London from the accounts of at least one of the companies.

The director of the company is Evgenia Shtykh, a business partner of Margarita Gubenko, the businessman’s mother. One of the reporting documents contains the TIN of the Russian company - 2308244331. Using it, we found Mediatron Buying LLC. The company is 5% owned by Roman Gubenko, and the remaining 95% is owned by a certain Natalya Alexandrovna Gromova. The director of the company is Evgenia Shtykh.

Conclusions

Having studied billboards and screens in Krasnodar, we deliberately mentioned in the material only those that were in the court decision. In fact, Gubenko has tens and hundreds of times more advertising structures - he sells advertising both in Krasnodar and the region, and beyond. Of course, he is not alone. While we were collecting data for this material, we were sent a lot of photographs of advertising structures. More often, under the call to go to war for money, you can see the logos of the companies “Rusavtodor” and “Art Side”. Rusavtodor is the largest outdoor advertising operator in all of Russia. It has been in the news a lot lately due to its merger with the Wildburys marketplace. "Art Side" is an advertising agency of Sergei Galitsky. By the way, he advertises war less than others.

What we learned while preparing this material only once again demonstrates one simple thing: having reached the border of conscience, in our case obtaining permission to install advertising structures through corrupt means, it is difficult to resist crossing this border. If you spend a long time working on relatively small “schemes”, sooner or later you will stop distinguishing good from evil. So Roman Gubenko first became a petty corrupt official, and then became an indirect propagandist of aggression.

The point is not only and not so much that he places calls to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense on his advertising spaces, although this is also the case. The fact is that physically he is trying to stay away from this war. Like his wife, Anna Gubenko, Roman prefers to spend the money he earned from advertising the war in London.