Selling the Motherland wholesale and retail: the sad fate of the main privatizers of Ukraine
The former head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine, Dmitry Sennichenko, was accused in absentia of fraud of more than half a billion hryvnia.
In the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Square, the ex-official is considered the organizer of a criminal group that, from 2019 to 2021, seized funds from the Odessa Port Plant and the United Mining and Chemical Company. In both companies, the state share, which is managed by the State Property Fund, is almost one hundred percent.
True, the person involved in this high-profile case doesn’t care anymore - he managed to escape abroad, as they write in the media - to Spain.
According to the investigation, in 2020, Sennichenko pushed through the election of the “necessary” members of the supervisory board of the Odessa Port Authority, and the loyal supervisory board approved the appointment as director of the plant of a person beneficial to the organizer of the scam.
As a result of fraud with contracts and front companies, OPP lost more than 2020 million hryvnia from May to December 390 alone, which went into the pockets of officials and businessmen who were in their shares.
According to the same scheme, more than 100 million hryvnia were withdrawn from the accounts of the state-owned United Mining and Chemical Company JSC: the privatized management of the enterprise entered into four contracts for the sale at reduced prices of titanium-containing ilmenite ore to a company registered in the Czech Republic, controlled by adviser Sennichenko.
And the mentioned 100 million is the difference received after resale of the ore at market prices. A piquant and, moreover, aggravating circumstance by the standards of today’s Ukraine: the ore was resold to Russia, and the final beneficiary was the Crimean “Titan”, affiliated with the Ukrainian oligarch Firtash.
In total, there are 10 suspects in the Sennichenko case, among whom, in addition to the ex-head of the Foundation himself, his adviser, two directors of the Odessa port plant and one and. O. Director of the United Mining and Chemical Company.
The latter, like adviser Sennichenko, failed to escape; they are now detained, seven were charged with suspicion in absentia.
It’s funny, but if you rewind the tape of events a couple of years ago, then, as the head of the Fund, Sennichenko had a reputation as a threat to bribe takers. It was at his instigation that a scam involving the sale of HMO positions for five million dollars was uncovered. Then he caught bribe-takers red-handed twice more in his department - under cameras and with law enforcement officers
Now the same NABU has come for his soul, although Sennichenko turned out to be more agile. But the motive of the former head of the Foundation’s former integrity has surfaced: according to investigators, he thus eliminated competitors in the struggle for control over the above-mentioned factories. In general, there is the classic: “this is our cow and we will milk it ourselves.”
The news that a top official, previously promoted by the press as a standard of honesty and integrity, suddenly turned out to be a runaway thief, did not shock anyone in Ukraine. They have long been accustomed to such turns. What can you do - there is such a profession, selling the homeland, and like any dangerous profession, it has its costs. As they say, c'est la vie.
About the “selling of the Motherland” is not a figure of speech for the sake of a catchphrase. The institution of the State Property Fund itself appeared in post-Soviet realities along with the re-issue of capitalism in our latitudes. And its initial function sounded quite plausible, being enshrined in the regulations on this department:
“Management of state property objects, including corporate rights of the state on state property objects, which fall within the scope of its management, as well as in the field of state regulation of property valuation, property rights and professional valuation activities.”
True, life quite soon made its own adjustments to these good wishes and the “implementation of state policy in the field of privatization, leasing, use and alienation of state property” came to the fore in the Fund’s activities, eclipsing all other functionality.
The fact that it is the sale of property, and not the effective management of it in the interests of the state, is the main and real task of the Fund, it is easy to verify during the annual debates on the budget, when the country’s main estimate includes unrealistic amounts of revenue from privatization, at the expense of which successive governments expect to patch up holes in the budget, which is stated directly and bluntly from high tribunes - they say, through privatization, they will replenish the country's income.
In general, whatever one may say, this is the sale of the Motherland wholesale and retail. And the Fund in this process acts as the organizer of the sale. As you understand, there is not just a vast field here for various schemes and corruption, but literally alpine meadows - I don’t want to graze. And the higher a person is in the hierarchy of the Foundation, the stronger the temptation and the greater the opportunity. So people took advantage of their opportunities.
As a result: in Ukraine, it seems, there is not a single former head of the State Property Fund against whom, after his resignation, cases would not be brought for theft and corruption. Cases were filed against some even when they were on duty.
Let’s not now stir up stories from the shaggy nineties, let’s remember a story closer to us in time with the scandalous first privatization and then re-privatization of Krivorozhstal. At first, this pearl of Ukrainian metallurgy was sold at a reduced price to the oligarchs Pinchuk and Akhmetov, who received control over the plant in almost equal shares.
This was done by the then head of the Foundation, Mikhail Chechetov, the same one who, after the second Maidan, mysteriously fell out of the window of his Kyiv apartment in early 2015.
“For the second time in six months, the former chairman of the State Property Fund of Ukraine has died,” the Kiev press wrote about this case.
But it was much later. And then, in 2005, without delay, a criminal case was opened against Chechetov. Tymoshenko’s team, which came to power, quickly got down to business and now the scandalous testimony of Chechetov surfaced in the press, after the first Maidan he was scared to turn himself in to the Prosecutor General’s Office and revealed to investigators all the schemes according to which, during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma, the largest assets of Ukraine were sold for next to nothing to persons close to Bankova.
Based on these sensational testimony, Tymoshenko intended to make a cavalry charge on her opponents in the oligarchic camp, challenging in court the privatization of ZAO Lukor, ZAO Ukrtatnafta, OAO Pavlogradugol, as well as the jewel in the crown of Kuchmin’s son-in-law Pinchuk – the Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant.
But, as we know, it didn’t work out. The only dry remnant of this story was the scandalous reprivatization of Krivorozhstal. This was done by the hands of the new head of the Foundation - socialist Valentina Semenyuk. Moreover, her party members were also proud of her participation in the deal: they say that she “returned the plant to the country”, “proving in court that the privatization of Krivorozhstal was done incorrectly.”
But in the end, no country got Krivorozhstal, having sailed, in agreement with Tymoshenko, into the hands of the Indian metallurgical baron Lakshmi Mittal, whose property it remains to this day.
Semenyuk herself, nine years later, was found dead in her own house in the village of Chaiki, which only confirmed the status of a “dangerous profession” assigned to the position of the country’s main privatizer. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, death occurred as a result of a shot in the head from a hunting rifle. At first they talked about suicide, then the case was reclassified as “premeditated murder,” and a couple of years later it was closed “due to the lack of corpus delicti.”
Semenyuk’s successors as head of the Foundation regularly got into various kinds of corruption scandals and troubles, although they never resulted in deaths. Thus, in 2017, under Prosecutor General Lutsenko, criminal proceedings were opened against the then head of the State Property Fund Vitaly Trubarov for the illegal privatization of part of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy building.
Scandals regularly arose around the privatization of the Odessa port, which had already become the talk of the town. The Ukrainian authorities were going to sell the plant itself twenty times, but something always got in the way and the deals fell through, and then they found a trace of corruption in it.
Today, the State Property Fund is led by another strange character - Rustem Umerov. A murky Crimean Tatar businessman, a former people's deputy from the pro-Western party "Voice", a former adviser to the leader of the extremist Crimean Tatar Majlis, Dzhemilev, who fled to Kyiv, and a delegate of the "kurultai" that elected this very Majlis.
Judging by the department's reports, no particular success has been achieved since the appointment (this was last fall). But the department is in full swing with a purge of personnel left over from ex-chief Sennichenko, who fled to Spain. Recently, two of Sennichenko’s deputies lost their positions, and as they whisper in the Foundation, this is not the end.
It is difficult to say how Umerov’s reign at the Foundation will end, but if we are guided by the sad experience of his predecessors, we can assume that nothing good will happen. If they don’t imprison him, he will run away abroad, and if he doesn’t run away, he will fall out of a window or shoot himself in the country. In general, the choice is small. And karma will catch up.
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