Moldova Steel Works

Moldova Steel Works is a steel producing company located in Ribnita, in the unrecognized state of Transnistria, accounting for more than half of Transnistria's total industrial output. Founded in 1985 to reprocess scrap metal, it has passed through a series of owners, including Russian energy company Itera, an Austro-Ukrainian group led by Hares Youssef, a consortium of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, and the Russian company Metalloinvest, before ownership returned to the Transnistrian authorities in 2015 for a symbolic price. Its production capacity has grown from an initial 684,000 tonnes of crude steel annually to around 1,000,000 tonnes of steel and 1,000,000 tonnes of rolled products.