Salt in a poke. Belaruskali products rebranded and sold to EU, bypassing sanctions

The investigation was carried out in collaboration with the Community of Railway Workers of Belarus and with the support of CyberPartisans.

“I am not an investigator like you or others. I don’t go around looking at who’s doing what. There’s a product, there’s a company. The company is not sanctioned, and the product is not sanctioned. I’m buying that product. That’s it... There is no such legislation that obliges me to go look for a production site or something”, said Yury Khrul, the owner of the Polish firm JP Company, when asked by a BIC journalist whether he knew the origin of the goods he bought in Belarus.

No law indeed requires buyers to check the origin of raw materials and production stages of goods. But because we are “detectives”, as a subject of our investigation put it, using data from just one document, we uncovered a scheme to evade European sanctions against a major Belarusian company.

A nonrandom metamorphosis

In September 2022, the technical specifications for a new product were approved in Belarus. The product is a de-icing agent for roads and pavements, known as Norta (also written as NORT_A or NORT A in various documents). They establish the standards and guidelines for producing a specific product, which the company then implements during the production planning stage. The first Norta producer listed in the state product catalogue is OOO Evropeyskoe Agrarnoe Agentstvo. By May 2024, two more appeared — Kompleksnye Udobreniya and Kompaniya Tekhniki I Servisa.

Belarusian goods attracted the interest of buyers from the European Union. Kompleksnye Udobreniya was due to deliver 66 tonnes of Norta to Poland’s JP Company in March 2024. This is stated in a quality certificate obtained by BIC from a source in the cargo shipping industry. We paid close attention to the product code specified in the document. While the product is labelled “de-icing material”, its coding corresponds to sodium chloride. The substance content share in Norta is 98.2%. This is the same composition as halite or industrial salt, which Belarus exported to the EU for years. [*]

In the same quality certificate, we noticed two details indicating a reason why industrial salt has become Norta de-icing agent.

Sanctions catalyst

The document gives the registration address of the Belarusian company Kompleksnye Udobreniya: Rechan agricultural town, Minsk region, 54 Sadovaya Street. OAO Rechen is also registered in the same building. It is part of the Belaruskali-Agro holding, which is managed by the “Belaruskali-Agro” — upravlyayushchaya kompaniya holdinga "Belaruskali-Agro" (Belaruskali-Agro Holding Managing Company). The beneficiary of the latter is the state-owned company Belaruskali. [*] [*] [*] [*]

OAO Belaruskali is the country’s largest producer and exporter of industrial salt to the EU, with Poland being the largest buyer of this product. In 2021, Belarus supplied the European Union with food-grade and non-food-grade salts worth more than €21 million. Approximately €18 million of this was accounted for by halite. In June 2022, Belaruskali fell under EU sanctions, and exports collapsed. Belarus sold just over €9.5 million worth of industrial salt during the year. In 2024, the revenue from sales was even more modest — around €6 million, with €5 million coming from halite sales. [*] [*]

The EU sanctions were designed to stop the export of Belaruskali products to its territory. However, the number of the wagon carrying Kompleksnye Udobreniya’s goods for the Polish firm JP Company indicated that the sanctioned company was directly involved in the production and supply of Norta. One can find out who it belongs to using this unique sequence of eight digits in a special database. According to the Community of Railway Workers of Belarus, the wagon is owned by Belaruskali. And it was most likely transporting the products of the Belarusian potash company under the guise of Kompleksye Udobreniya’s de-icing agent. [*]

“It’s the same mineral with a probability approaching 100%. Or, to be more precise, mineralogical raw material. It is the same in terms of the list of possible impurities and the indicators of the concentration levels of these impurities. There are essentially no valuable marker compounds apart from common salt — sodium chloride”, explained Siarhei Besarab, a chemist whom we asked to compare the chemical compositions of Norta and Belaruskali halite.

We seemed to have completely unravelled this sanctions evasion scheme, but new facts were revealed during a phone conversation with the owner of the Norta supply company.

Bound by one salt

Kompleksnye Udobreniya is owned by Dzmitry Shalamitski, former deputy chairman of the Republican Party of Labour and Justice (whose leader, Aliaksandr Khizhniak, was one of the candidates in the 2025 presidential election in Belarus). A BIC reporter posing as a potential Norta buyer contacted him by phone to ask where the firm sources halite from. Shalamitski replied that Kompleksnye Udobreniya is exclusively engaged in the fertiliser business:

“We are not involved in this [production of de-icing agent Norta — ed.]. So, we transferred the rights to another company”. [*]

Which one, our interlocutor would not say. However, we found close links between Kompleksnye Udobreniya and two other companies mentioned at the beginning of this article. Until February 2024, Dzmitry Shalamitski’s company was one of the founders of OOO Evropeyskoe Agrarnoe Agentstvo. A Belaruskali representative confirmed to a BIC journalist that the company buys sanctioned industrial salt from them:

“Yes. It [Evropeyskoe Agrarnoe Agentstvo — ed.] produces Norta from our halite and sells it independently”. [*] [*]

At the time of publication, Evropeyskoe Agrarnoe Agentstvo is owned by “Belaruskali Agro” — upravlyayushchaya kompaniya holdinga "Belaruskali-Agro" and the Estonian company European Agricultural Agency. A Belarusian businessman, Aliaksandr Bahachenka, has a stake in the Estonian company. [*]

Bahachanka’s business partner, Yury Khrul, is a co-founder of the Polish company JP Company, which is also listed as the recipient of Norta in the quality certificate we obtained. The owner of JP Company was unaware that Norta was a Belaruskali product banned from being imported into the EU. At least that’s what he claimed in a phone conversation with a BIC journalist: “I don’t buy any halite. I bought Norta de-icing agent". [*]

Here is how the dialogue between Yury Khrul and the journalist unfolded after she pointed out that the compositions of the sanctioned industrial salt and the de-icing agent are identical:

“Not true, not true, not true. Take the halite data and compare it to the Norta data. They differ”.

“That’s what we did”.

“They differ”.

“No”.

“They do differ…".

Khrul added that halite undergoes treatment to become Norta but did not specify the details of the process. This conversation ended with a promise to answer the questions we had put to JP Company in a formal request. No response had been received at the time of publication.

Odd-man-in

Belaruskali’s halite is supplied to Poland by Kompaniya Tekhniki i Servisa, another of the three companies that approved the technical specifications for Norta’s production. It was the only supplier of the mineral concentrate to JP Company in Poland in 2024. According to the Community of Railway Workers of Belarus, the company shipped 716 wagons of industrial salt last year, which is about 50,000 tonnes. Although the product is called industrial salt in the transport documents, the supplier calls it something else. [*]

“We don’t deal in halite. We deal in Norta de-icing agent”, a company representative said in a telephone conversation with a journalist posing as a buyer from Poland.

Pavel Bahachenka, the brother of Aliaksandr Bahachenka’s wife, is the co-founder of OOO Kompaniya Tekhniki i Servisa. Aliaksandr originally had the surname Baran but took his wife’s surname. Pavel has a joint business in Poland with the co-founder of JP Company, Yury Khrul — the JP PLUS company. [*] [*] [*]

We tried to contact Aliaksandr Bahachenka to ask him about Belaruskali’s deliveries of industrial salt to Poland, but he did not answer the phone. Belaruskali, Evropeyskoe Agrarnoe Agentstvo, Kompleksnye Udobreniya and Kompaniya Tekhniki i Servisa did not respond to our requests.