CCC SA is a nearly €2.5bn publicly traded shoe retailer controlled by a Polish billionaire who lives in an 18th-century Baroque palace. It is also one of Europe’s most crowded shorts.
The value of the Warsaw-listed company has made Dariusz Milek, its chief executive officer who retains a 33 per cent stake, one of the country’s richest men and one of its few billionaires.
As well as his palace, the success of CCC — which now has over 1,000 stores across central and eastern Europe — has afforded the former professional cyclist a sprawling real estate portfolio and, until recently, a Gulfstream G500 jet.
With Milek at its helm, CCC’s market cap climbed rapidly to a peak of PLN 12.8bn (€3.1bn) in 2017 with a share price of PLN 312, though by 2020 it had plummeted back to PLN 30. The share price has since rebounded to around PLN 133, giving CCC a market cap of around PLN 10.3bn (€2.43bn), on the back of growing sales and fresh investor confidence.
CCC even received the backing of SoftBank, when Masayoshi Son’s group invested PLN 500mn (€118mn) via a convertible bond issued in 2021.
It’s an odd company in several ways.
Despite pledging to suspend and then sell CCC’s Russian operations in 2022, that business appears to have been sold to a close family member of Milek’s life partner. And a few of its wholesale customers look like undisclosed related parties.
One of these customers has already been the subject of a short seller report, so let’s start with that.
Last month, a report by Ningi Research accused CCC of artificially inflating revenues by passing sales that should have been classed as related-party transactions off as being to a non-related business. Specifically it claimed that one of CCC’s large wholesale customers — an insolvent company called MKRI — “is secretly controlled by CCC insiders”.
It said that those sales have resulted in receivables due from MKRI, and that CCC’s planned acquisition of the company is part of an “accounting trick”, designed to make the uncollectable receivables, from what is really an insolvent company, disappear.
Ningi’s report initially caused CCC’s stock to tumble by as much as 15 per cent. The shares rebounded to a loss of just 5 per cent on the same day, after Milek told investors and analysts that the accusations in the report were “bull”.
CCC said that the Ningi report “was based on factual inaccuracies, misstatements and misleading allegations”, adding: “CCC strongly asserts, and has demonstrated to the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, that the Ningi report contained numerous inaccuracies and false information.”
Since that report, Alphaville has been having a look at CCC’s other unrelated-party transactions, some of which appear to involve parties that are associated with CCC and Milek. The 2022 sale of its Russian subsidiary is one of those.
A Russian exit
In 2022, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, CCC announced the suspension of its Russian operations and sold its subsidiary in the region, which at the time had 39 retail outlets. It booked a 47mn zloty (€11.1mn) impairment charge on the sale for just 500,000 roubles.
Upon the sale, to an unnamed buyer, CCC’s Russian subsidiary was renamed Obuv and has until late this year continued to operate under that name, selling many of the same products as CCC.
Although the sale was to an entity outside of the CCC group of companies, the Russian business’s new owner appears to have some strong family ties to Milek: Public filings and social media posts show that Milek sold the business to an Alexandra Andreevna Musina, his partner’s sister-in-law.
Alexandra Musina has been the owner and sole director of Obuv since it was acquired by CCC in 2022. She is married to Leonid Musin, a former professional footballer who also happens to be the brother of Milek’s life partner, Valeriya Musina. Valeriya is a Russian national, former professional basketball player, and the creative director of CCC.
When asked about these family ties, CCC said that “like many Western companies facing similar circumstances, CCC prioritised speed and deliverability over a typical sale process”.
It added that it “has had no oversight, involvement or economic interest in the Russian business since it was sold in 2022” and that the new owners have “continually scaled down the business in line with the sale of its inventory, with the final store operated by the business closed in September 2025”.
Not only did Milek’s apparent sale of CCC’s Russian operations result in the business being kept in the family (or at least in his partner’s family), CCC appears to have continued benefiting from its operations, through another entity classified as unrelated.
Giro Trading P.S.A
Customs records show that although Obuv is no longer owned by CCC, it continued to import CCC products as recently as last year, buying from a Polish wholesale customer of CCC called Giro Trading.
CCC told us that it “cannot comment on third parties that might sell our products in markets where CCC is not present.”
The company has clearly raised questions already. In its accounts, CCC has tried hard to assure investors that Giro is a real independent customer, not a related party.
Founded in 2022, Giro has only 3 employees according to its accounts, has no website, and appears to operate from CCC’s warehouse. It is also owned by an associate of Milek, Polish champion cyclist Piotr Michał Wadecki, who was part of and then ran CCC Polsat Polkowice, a cycling team that was sponsored by CCC.
Although Giro’s registered address is in northern Poland, the LinkedIn profile of one of its three employees lists their place of work as Polkowice, where CCC has its main warehouse:
Zooming in closer, a job advert posted two years ago from Giro lists that location as Strefowa 6, which is CCC’s Polkowice warehouse, branded with large CCC letters:
We don’t know if Giro is an undisclosed off-balance-sheet warehousing facility of CCC. But if it were, this is what it would look like.
CCC said that “Giro Trading is an independent entity, owned and run by an independent management team. Neither Giro Trading, nor its owner, have any economic involvement or corporate role in CCC Group”.
It added that “Giro Trading co-operates with CCC as a trade agent and leases part of a warehouse from CCC in Polkowice, Poland”.
Until January this year, CCC included the following statement — disclosed for reasons “rooted in the desire to transparency” — in its quarterly and annual accounts, confirming that after analysis, it could conclude that Giro does not constitute a related party:
It does say that this conclusion was reached despite the “substantial role a member of the group’s parent governing body played in the establishment of Giro”. Wadecki is not part of the governing body, so this must refer to someone else.
Adler International
Two entities, both called Adler International, have similarly close ties to CCC despite being classed as unrelated parties.
At least one of these entities has been doing business with CCC’s wholesale business since 2014, including running CCC franchise chains in Poland and Ukraine — which have been financed in part by loans from CCC — while a large part of Adler’s business now consists of buying products from CCC in Poland and selling to CCC in Ukraine.
Like Giro, although Adler’s entities are not disclosed as related parties, on LinkedIn employees don’t even distinguish between CCC and Adler, often referring to them as the same company.
A former employee lists themselves as the director of finance and accounting — a position of someone who would know quite a lot about the company’s structure — at “ADLER INTERNATIONAL/ CCC.EU”:
Another analyst worked at Adler International Sp.zo.o (CCC):
If investors’ reaction to Ningi’s MRKI report is anything to go by, they will be just fine with Adler and Giro remaining off-balance-sheet. Its Russian “exit” may be harder to stomach.
CCC told us: “Adler is an independent entity, owned and run independently from CCC Group and is not a related party to the Group” and that it “is a long-standing franchisee of CCC in a number of markets, with the right to use the CCC trademark”.
“Due to challenges in the Ukraine market, CCC acquired Adler’s operations in the country in 2022. Today, Adler holds a 25 per cent stake in CCC Ukraine, with CCC holding the remaining 75 per cent stake. Given this history, many Adler employees continue to work for the CCC business in Ukraine”.
