Investigation: how Poroshenko’s entourage received 2 billion from the “lithium fever”
A company associated with the people’s deputy from the BPP Igor Kononenko and the Minister of Energy Igor Nasalik, Petro-Conslating, received a special permit out of competition to develop 14 million tons of lithium ore, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
This is stated in the investigation of the Our Money program.
The Petro-Consulting company received a special permit to develop the Shevchenkovskoye field (Donetsk region) in 2018, avoiding a competition thanks to the “approbation” procedure. The company allegedly “overestimated” the documents for the field discovered back in 1982.
In response to a request from journalists, the State Geological Resources Agency refused to name the volume of ore reserves at the Shevchenkovskoye deposit, citing an order from the SBU, which classified the volume of lithium ore reserves in Ukraine.
At the same time, after the visit of journalists, the company released data on the reserves of the deposit it had acquired. They amount to 14 million tons of lithium ore. With a lithium content of about 1% in the ore, the value of the deposit’s reserves is more than $2,5 billion (the market value of the metal is $20 thousand per ton).
The formal owners of Petro-Consulting are a restaurateur from Lviv, Oleg Bolshakov, and a Kiev sculptor, Nikolai Esipenko.
The official phone number of the company, listed in the register of the Ministry of Justice, also belongs to the Magic Estate company. The founder of this company is Taras Ignashchenko. Later, the general director of Petro-Consulting will confirm to journalists that Taras Ignashchenko is one of the company’s managers.
Taras Ignashchenko is a young non-public businessman, the son of Vladimir Ignashchenko, an adviser to the Minister of Energy Igor Nasalik.
The minister's adviser himself never had his own business. During the time of Yanukovych, he was an adviser to the Minister of Ecology Eduard Stavitsky and deputy to Mykola Zlochevsky in the same position. After Maidan, the minister became involved in six criminal cases and ran away. And Ignashchenko began to advise the new minister.
Journalists several times recorded him under Nasalik’s reception on Infinity for 1,5 million UAH, registered in his son’s name. Journalists also noticed Ignashchenko near the office of coal businessman Vitaly Kropachev, on the day when NABU conducted searches of the businessman.
The Ignashchenko family is deeply integrated into the presidential circle. He is an adviser to Minister Nasalik, an assistant to the People's Deputy from the BPP Anatoly Matvienko, a neighbor of another People's Deputy and business partner of the President Igor Kononenko. In 2016, journalists from the Schemes program recorded Ignashchenko among those who met Kononenko at the airport.
The younger Ignashchenko does business with Igor Gladkovsky, the son of the first deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, formerly Poroshenko’s business partner in the Bogdan company.
Igor Gladkovsky and Taras Ignashchenko are co-founders of Kievbioenergo LLC.
In 2017, while heading Hyundai Motor Ukraine, Gladkovsky described the prospects for electric vehicles in Ukraine. His business partner received permission to mine 14 million tons of ore for the batteries of these cars, bypassing the competition and auction.
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