The company, Dynamic Frontier Holdings, is run and possibly owned by Konstantin Sokolov, a Russian-born businessman from Chicago appointed by the U.S. State Department recently as chairman of a $200 million fund tasked with facilitating the creation of a U.S.-run transit corridor passing through Armenia.
The Teghut enterprise has mined copper and molybdenum in a deposit of the same name located in Armenia’s northern Lori province for more than a decade. The Armenian subsidiary of Russia’s VTB took over it in 2019 after its first owner’s failure to repay a $400 million loan.
VTB finally managed to get rid of the asset last week when Armenia’s state anti-trust regulator allowed Teghut’s sale to an obscure Armenian company, Kuprar RA. Its founder, Sergei Virabian, said afterwards that he sold the company to another “entrepreneur” this month but refused to name him or her.
An Armenian state registry revealed this week that Kuprar is now owned by Dynamic Frontier Holdings. The latter was incorporated in the U.S. state of Texas last year. Documents obtained by RFE/RL’s Armenian Service from the Texas tax registry identify Sokolov as its “manager.”
Born and raised in Russia, the 52-year-old Sokolov is a private equity investor with wide-ranging business interests in and outside the United States. In 2024, he and another foreign investor purchased one of Armenia’s three mobile phone operators from Russia’s MTS telecom giant.
Sokolov is one of 36 private donors who have reportedly contributed to U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project. He has also donated more than $12 million to Republican Party campaigns and political groups during Trump’s second term.
Teghut was Armenia’s 22nd largest corporate taxpayer last year, with almost 14.4 billion drams ($39 million) in various taxes contributed to the state budget. The company employed more than 1,100 people as of 2022. Dynamic Frontier may have deliberately avoided buying it directly from VTB. The bank was one of the first Russian entities sanctioned by the European Union and the United States following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.