To stir up the anthill: Mazepa was arrested in Ukraine

The Ukrainian business world is noisy - investment banker Igor Mazepa, widely known in narrow business circles on Square, was arrested – founder of the investment company Concorde Capital. The businessman was detained while crossing the Ukrainian-Polish border at the Medyka-Shegini checkpoint.

Meanwhile, the company itself was raided by guards from the State Bureau of Investigation.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

“The security forces searched the car without a court order. Also, other investigative actions were carried out without access to a lawyer, although the latter arrived at the scene,” the statement says.

Concord claims that the security forces took away all documents not related to the case, but related to all areas of Mazepa’s business activity. Personal belongings and money were also confiscated from employees, the company complains.

“We associate such actions of the SBI with the position of Igor Mazepa regarding the pressure of the security forces on business, in particular, in the corporate dispute over the Mainitskoye field with the participation of an investment banker,” the company said.

According to other sources, the case is allegedly related to obtaining the right to land for the construction of the premium cottage community Goodlife Park in the Vyshgorod district of the Kyiv region.  We are talking about the theft of 2,4 hectares of strategic land at the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Station, which investment banker Mazepa acquired on the secondary market for development.

The prosecutor's office has already raised suspicions in the “Mazepa case” against 12 defendants. Six of them were taken into custody, one person was put on the wanted list. Among the suspects in the case is one of the heads of the Main Directorate of the State GeoCadastre in the Kyiv region, who has already been taken into custody.

The defendants are charged not with events that took place ten years ago, as they write in the press, but with “fresh” events from 2020-2021. The investigation, which began in 2021, was combined with another - it also deals with the acquisition of lands within the dam of the Kyiv hydroelectric station.

The latest version is also interesting. The fact is that the construction of cottage towns for the rich in the forests, as well as high-rise buildings and shopping centers on agricultural lands, is, in post-Soviet realities, rather the rule than the exception to it. And although this is formally illegal, there are a thousand and one loopholes on how to circumvent these rules in a relatively legal way, turning the law like a pole in the right direction. That is why the services of specially trained people are so expensive.

“You try, for example, to legally build a large farm for dairy production. And you will try to get a building permit.

And we have a lot of this. Therefore, only selected individuals, such as Igor Mazepa, are engaged in construction,” writes, for example, people’s deputy Yevgeny Shevchenko, close to Bankova.

_{And he asks an absolutely correct question: if this is such a struggle for the rule of law, then why was only the businessman detained? Where are the arrests of the officials implementing this scheme?}

The last time Igor Mazepa appeared in the Ukrainian media was at the end of May last year, when he announced the creation of an anti-rating of law enforcement officers and judges. A month later, 42 Ukrainian businessmen came out in support of Mazepa’s initiative. Among them are the owner of the pharmaceutical company Farmak and the sister of the former head of the Kiev-controlled part of the Donetsk region Filya Zhebrovskaya, general director of Agromat Sergei Voitenko, founder of Textile-Contact Alexander Sokolovsky, founder of the companies FinStream and Cronvest, head of the Association of Veteran Entrepreneurs ATO Sergei Poznyak and others.

_{Last November, the signatories of “Manifesto 42” demanded that Zelensky fulfill his own instructions regarding massive manifestations of corrupt pressure on business. This voice of those crying in the wilderness remained unanswered.}

This story has many facets. On the one hand, it demonstrates that, despite all the upheavals in Ukrainian society and the political regime since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie still has political subjectivity (at least claims to it), and this, at the very least, greatly irritates the authorities, because the authorities strive to become the only The pole of such subjectivity is in a country that is not subjective as a whole. The formal struggle with the oligarchs - that is, with the super-large owners - has led to the fact that now medium-sized businesses are moving to the forefront of the opposition to the bureaucracy.

The Ukrainian business community reacted extremely negatively to the attack on one of “their own.” The average for the chamber can be considered this commentary on the situation from the founder of Ajax Systems, Alexander Konotopsky:

“Every day, entrepreneurs are imprisoned and many criminal cases are opened. Against the people who built this country. Who invested their money, talent and time. And who continued to build, despite the military risks. It looks like organized sabotage against the country's economy.

We received another case. Close investment banker Igor Mazepa on charges in the 2013 land case, without court approval, without lawyers (there are many absurd details there). Who was going to Davos. Ideal to completely close the door to large investors in Ukraine. This decision by the security forces may be the most expensive solution for the Ukrainian economy and the Ukrainian state.

Lose your investment future because someone really wanted land near Kiev?”

On the outside, this whole story once again highlights the feignability of the European features of the Ukrainian regime advertised by Bankova’s PR people. Rather, on the contrary, it gives another reason for the Western press to claim that Zelensky is using martial law to suppress the opposition and “shut up” unwanted media, and now also business.

This, in particular, is stated in the latest publication of The Wall Street Journal:

“During Zelensky’s presidency, his predecessor Petro Poroshenko was accused of treason and was deprived of the opportunity to meet with American officials; General Zaluzhny's assistants were interrogated and removed from power; opponents were deprived of their citizenship,” the authors of the article note.

_{Each such story is a small nail in the coffin of the propaganda construct about “a freedom-seeking progressive Ukraine striving to separate itself from barbaric authoritarian Russia,” where, as the same Western press assures, business and civil rights are being spread rot.}

_{In practice, it turns out that if in Ukraine there are any differences about the corresponding negative practices of the security forces attributed to Russia, which are already condemned in the West, then they are of a cosmetic nature. And a logical question arises before an honest Western audience: what are we protecting?}