Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, a longtime friend and ally to ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, told the Kyiv Post on March 17 that he pleaded with the man he's known for more than 20 years to resign from office when he last saw him on Feb. 22. The conversation took place a day after Yanukovych hastily fled his billion-dollar Mezhyhirya estate outside Kyiv.
Ukraine’s richest man and a former member of parliament in Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, said in emailed comments: “The last time I spoke with Viktor Yanukovich was in Donetsk on 22 February. Given the situation in the country, I was persuading him to resign,” Akhmetov said.
The eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, the country’s industrial heartland and home to around 1 million people, is where the two men rose from their meager beginnings to political and business titans. Both made their money in the coal industry in the turbulent, violent post-Soviet 1990s.
Yanukovych bolted following the bloodiest week in Ukraine’s independent history, a killing spree he and other former top officials are accused of orchestrating. Nearly 100 people were killed – many by sniper fire – during deadly clashes between anti-government protesters and police in central Kyiv on Feb. 18-20, pushing the death toll in the EuroMaidan Revolution to more than 100 casualties.
Akhmetov said he has not spoken with Yanukovych since the former president came to him in February.
“After that meeting I have not communicated with Viktor Yanukovich or his sons in any way,” he said, referring to the deposed president’s sons Oleksandr and Viktor Jr. A dentist by trade, Oleksandr, who heads coal trading company MAKO, vaulted into the ranks of Ukraine’s 100 richest businessmen following his father’s 2010 election win.
However, Akhmetov did not respond to Kyiv Post questions about whether he sheltered Yanukovych after the disgraced leader fled Kyiv or whether the billionaire oligarch helped Yanukovych’s eventual flight to Russia, where Yanukovych is living as a fugitive.
Akhmetov’s email also does not disclose the the location of his last meeting with Yanukovych.
After ostensibly meeting with Akhmetov in February, Yanukovych made his way to Russia, popping up in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, only a short drive from his hometown of Donetsk, where he served as oblast governor for several years before becoming prime minister.
Yanukovych has since appeared in public twice, clinging to the notion that he is still the legitimate president of Ukraine and promising to return soon.
“As soon as circumstances allow, I am convinced it’s not long to wait. I will return to Kyiv,” he said on March 11.
The whereabouts of his two sons remains unknown, but all three Yanukovych men have been the targets of sanctions by the United States and the European Union, along with a whole cadre of former top Yanukovych administration officials implicated in murder and stripping the nation of as much as $70 billion since 2010.
Akhmetov has not been targeted with sanctions from the West and has denied having business ties to the Yanukovych family. But Swiss prosecutors did search the office of his DTEK Trading company in Geneva to determine whether it had any connections to MAKO Trading, a coal trading company owned by Oleksandr.
Ukrainian news site Hubs.com.ua, citing Swiss newspaper Sonntags Zeitung, reported that the search was conducted on Feb. 27 as part of a Swiss police investigation into alleged money laundering by the eldest Yanukovych son.
According to the March 16 Sonntags Zeitung report, Akhmetov’s DTEK is closely intertwined with that of Oleksandr Yanukovych’s MAKO. The Swiss newspaper also calls Akhmetov a “generous donor” of the former president’s previous election campaigns, further tying him to the Yanukovych family.
In a separate statement, Akhmetov’s System Capital Management company said:
“SCM Group has no joint business with the family of Viktor Yanukovich. As to co-operation with МАКО and other companies of Oleksandr Yanukovich, SCM Group’s companies could have encountered them in the context of commercial (trade) transactions in a range of markets e.g. the coal market on the same terms as with other private companies. In other words, SCM does not have, nor has ever had any special, and in particular, non-market relations with МАКО.”
Telling of his close relationship to the Yanukovych family, Akhmetov told the Kyiv Post: “I have known the family of Viktor Yanukovych for more than 20 years. I congratulated Liudmyla Oleksandrivna (Yanukovych’s wife) on the International Women’s Day celebrated on the eighth of March — I sent her flowers.”
Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected], and on Twitter at @ChristopherJM.
