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Ancelotti - Former Everton Manager

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ilikecheese said:
Sheriff have had a great run in the competition qualifying for the group stage from the 1st round going 6-2-0 along the way. Now 2-0-0 in the group. Pretty incredible stuff from the Moldovan minnows.
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I’ve just had an offer for some (allegedly) cracking Moldovan white wines, so I think I’ll go for it and celebrate this astonishing result
 

ilikecheese said:
Sheriff have had a great run in the competition qualifying for the group stage from the 1st round going 6-2-0 along the way. Now 2-0-0 in the group. Pretty incredible stuff from the Moldovan minnows.
Click to expand...

Sheriff players are excelling maybe because they fear a bullet at the base of the neck if they lose?

:oops:


www.france24.com

In separatist Transnistria, Sheriff calls the shots - France 24

In separatist Transnistria, Sheriff calls the shots
www.france24.com www.france24.com


Tiraspol, Moldova, Sept 27, 2021 (AFP) - This year's Champions League features an improbable upstart: FC Sheriff, a club run by an eponymous company built on murky money in a pro-Russian separatist enclave of Europe's poorest country, Moldova.

The would-be state, which harkens back to its Soviet past with a towering Lenin statue in the centre of its administrative hub, Tiraspol, broke away from Moldova in a short civil war in the early 1990s.

Thirty years later, the little-known Transnistria region with its own border police, army, currency and hammer-and-sickle-emblazoned flag has not been recognised internationally but is propped up by free Russian gas and some 1,500 troops.

The territory, however, is effectively run by the Sheriff holding company that sports a five-pointed sheriff's star as its logo.

Owned by a former Soviet police officer, Viktor Gushan, the conglomerate controls businesses ranging from a cognac distillery and caviar farm to supermarket and gas station chains -- and the football club making waves in Europe.

"Viktor Gushan is the person with the most influence here, both in politics and economics," said Anatoly Dirun, director of the Tiraspol School of Political Studies.....

Gushan founded Sheriff in 1993 with fellow police officer Ilya Kazmaly.

The two 59-year-olds spent the following years buying up former Soviet factories -- and fighting off competitors.

Helping lead Transnistria's so-called "privatisation" -- the selling off of Soviet-era state-owned businesses to private owners -- in the 1990s and early 2000s was Valery Litskay, the separatist state's former foreign minister and chief advisor to its first self-styled president.

"Sheriff won the competition," Litskay told AFP, explaining they offered "the best prices and guarantees" that the factories would "continue running".

But the former official said the company has a "very dark criminal history", recalling that they had a "tough fight" with competitors.

"If you go to our cemeteries, you will see whole alleys of bandits," he said.

Gushan, Sheriff's co-founder and president, declined AFP's interview request.

Litskay said the region's leadership "did not track who killed whom," conceding, "yes, it's not very pretty, but that's the reality of economic life."

It's "better to have a corporation of police", he added, than a "corporation of bandits."

As they rose to power, the police officers launched new businesses.
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