Mintimer Mingazov

I saw my father's anxieties. I saw how some acquaintances' attitude to the family changed. Was it painful? Yes. But at the same time an enormous desire grew to help my father and to prove to myself: I can. It was at that moment that the passion ignited — to step onto the same path.

A name with a past #

Mingazov chairs the board of GK Vamin (ГК «Вамин»), a dairy group in Tatarstan, and has done so since 2016. Since December 2019 he has also been general director of OOO Archa (ООО «Арча»), the group’s operating company, which owns its two dairies, in Arsk and in Baltasi. As chairman he sits at the head of the group; as general director he runs the company that owns its plants. He holds half of Archa. His sister, Farida Fazlieva, holds the other half and takes no part in the business, by his account.

In 2024 the group was third in Russia in hard and semi-hard cheese. The plants that put it there once belonged to his father’s holding, which went bankrupt in 2012–13, and the name on the group’s cheese is the name that holding carried. Both plants are older than the holding itself: the Arsk dairy opened in 1932 and the Baltasi plant in 1961.

His languages trace the ground he comes from. Tatar was his first language, the language of his early childhood; Russian came with school in Kazan. He describes his English as average: he learned it at School No. 18 in Kazan and on courses in England, Switzerland and Scotland, and he uses it in negotiations with the suppliers of the plants’ equipment.

He did not inherit the business. He started a company of his own in 2014, under a name that had just failed, and the plants came back into the family three years later, bought by the company he owns with his sister. Between those two dates lie the years that shaped how he runs it.

His father’s holding #

The holding was his father’s work. In 1994 a holding company was formed under Vagiz Mingazov; renamed VAMIN Tatarstan, it grew to 28 dairies and 26 agrofirms. By 2012 it was the largest agricultural enterprise in Tatarstan, and the dairies at Arsk and Baltasi were among its plants.

In September 2012 VTB filed to bankrupt it. In 2013 a receivership opened, and the holding’s assets passed out of the family’s hands to Prosto Moloko (Просто Молоко), the manager its creditors appointed. From that point the plants his father had gathered over nearly two decades were run on behalf of the people the holding owed.

The family’s part in the collapse did not end with the company’s. His father had guaranteed the holding’s loans, and in March 2016 a court in Tatarstan declared him personally bankrupt on a claim VTB brought against him as guarantor. In July 2017 the court closed that bankruptcy, and the claims left unpaid were written off.

The holding’s bankruptcy ended the family’s ownership of the plants; it did not end the family’s work in them. For the son, the collapse ran across four years: the holding’s bankruptcy first, his father’s own after it. He lived through both while building a company of his own, and he did it under the same name.

Three years under the name #

He has described what the collapse did to the family in a few sentences, in an interview with Business Online (БИЗНЕС Online) in March 2025. He saw his father’s anxiety, and he saw some acquaintances change how they treated the family; he has said it hurt. In the same breath he described what grew out of it: a wish to help his father, to prove to himself that he could, and to follow the path his father had taken.

He chose to do it under the family name. In 2014 he registered OOO Vamin Tatarstan, under the Vamin name his father’s bankrupt holding had carried, and started it with a team of two. The new company leased the Arsk and Baltasi plants from Prosto Moloko, the creditors’ manager. It was a small company set against the size of the one it was named after: a team of two at the start, where the holding had run 28 dairies.

The lease set the terms he worked to. By his own account, while the plants were leased the company invested nothing in the business, because the plants were not its own; it accumulated cash, and the modernisation was to come only once the plants had been bought. For three years he ran two dairies he did not own, under a name he could not separate from his father’s collapse.

The years did not get easier as they went. In March 2016 his father was declared personally bankrupt. The same year he became chairman of the board of GK Vamin, a post he has held since. That year the estate also went to auction, and the two plants his company leased passed to the state leasing company Tatagroleasing (Татагролизинг). The plants were still not his.

In June 2017 that changed. Tatagroleasing sold the Arsk and Baltasi plants to OOO Archa, the company he owns with his sister.

By September the two plants he had leased since 2014 led Tatarstan’s milk processing.

A family purchase #

The sale was a family matter in a literal sense. Tatagroleasing sold the two plants to Vagiz Mingazov’s children, through the company the brother and sister own in equal halves, and Deputy Prime Minister Marat Akhmetov confirmed the sale on 30 June 2017. The price was not made public.

The buyer was not the company he had registered in 2014. Vamin Tatarstan had held the lease; Archa, the company the brother and sister own, bought the plants. The ownership has stayed in that shape. Mingazov holds half of Archa and his sister the other half; she takes no part in running the business, by his account, and he runs it. In December 2019 he added the post of Archa’s general director to the chairmanship of the group’s board that he had held since 2016.

The purchase came three years after he first leased the plants and a year after they had passed at auction to the state lessor. What the purchase changed was the position he worked from. As a tenant he had kept the business running and kept the cash; as an owner he could spend on the plants.

What he runs #

The group he chairs runs the chain from the farm to the shop. It has its own farms, with 13,000 cattle on 25,000 hectares, its two processing plants and its own sales arm, which supplies Russia’s federal retail chains. Its cheese and butter are sold under the Vamin name, the name he chose in 2014, alongside the Archeese, Moy Milok and Aldo Elite lines.

About 1,500 people work across the group, by his own count for 2025. Archa itself, the company he has run day to day since December 2019, grew from 216 employees in 2020 to 615 in 2025, according to registry data. Most of what it makes is sold in Russia: by his January 2026 figure, the group exports about 2,500 tonnes of cheese a year.

The company where he started, OOO Vamin Tatarstan, opened in Kazan in 2014 and left the group a decade later. The business he runs today is the one built on Archa’s plants in Arsk and Baltasi, the two dairies he once leased.

After the buy-back #

Ownership changed what he could do with the plants. In November 2017 he took on an idle dairy in Aksubaevo, his first plant beyond the two he had bought back, and restarted it in February 2018. That plant has been idle since 2022 and is offered for sale; the two plants he had leased remain the core of the business.

The next year brought a setback. In 2018, as volumes fell, his plants lost the lead in Tatarstan to ZMK (ЗМК), the Zelenodolsk dairy. The first place reached three months after the buy-back had lasted a single season.

The rebuild came only once the business owned the buildings, as he had resolved while leasing. Reconstruction of the Arsk plant began in February 2021, and on 28 February 2022 the rebuilt plant made its first cheese, on Fibosa lines built to take 420 tonnes of milk a day. The rebuild took a year, and the plant’s first cheese came nearly five years after the purchase. The order he had described, lease, accumulate, buy and only then modernise, ran its full course at the plant where it started.

The company he had registered with a team of two in 2014 went a different way. In May 2024 it completed, through Vamin R, the purchase of Danone’s Russian business; by December it had been renamed Unimilk and had passed to Ruslan Alisultanov as sole owner, and it left the group.

The plants stayed with Archa, and so did the business he had built on them. In 2024, ten years after he started with a team of two, the group he chairs was Russia’s third-largest maker of hard and semi-hard cheese.

Stability #

He describes the work now in terms of steadiness rather than growth. “For a cheesemaker the most important thing is stability,” he told Business Online in January 2026. “Through our own milk we are trying to achieve that stability. We reconsidered our development vector and chose a path — to go as far as possible into our own raw material.” He said it in a review of 2025, explaining why falling raw-milk prices weigh on a cheesemaker whose cash turns over in about 90 days.

That path has a first milestone. In December 2025 the first section of the group’s megafarm in Arsk district began milking, with 1,500 head of a planned 5,200 cows, the start of the move to its own milk that he describes as the way to stability. The megafarm sits in the same district as the Arsk plant, the first of the two dairies he leased in 2014. The group’s own farms supplied about 17% of the milk its plants took in during 2025, roughly 120 tonnes a day of about 700, by his account, and he has set the goal of raising that share to half or more. It is a goal he has stated, not a result the group has reached.

The two decisions that frame his story point the same way. In 2014 he would not invest in plants that were not his own; a decade later he is moving the group towards milk from its own herd. In both, the work goes into what the business owns.

The plants he once leased under his father’s failed name now belong to the company he and his sister own, and the cheese made in them carries that name again.

Last updated: October 22, 2026

Researched 31 sources in Russian.