The empire of overthrown President Viktor Yanukovych extended far beyond his billion-dollar Mezhyhirya estate.
He also kept residences in the
Carpathians and Crimea as well as hunting estates. He had an
impressive car collection and made his travel fast and comfortable
with personal helicopters and a plane. He held lavish receptions with
expensive champagne and other pricey treats.
All these luxuries were courtesy of
Ukraine’s long-suffering taxpayers – specifically through the
state Asset Management Department, known in Ukrainian as DUSya.
During Yanukovych’s four-year presidency, the department was
managed by Andriy Kravets, a reclusive operative nicknamed
“Yanukovych’s caretaker.”
But documents left behind by Yanukvoych
at Mezhyhirya after he fled on Feb. 21 show that Kravets
had a much greater role than mere caretaker. He was, in fact, a key
person in running the ex-president’s empire, a confidante with the
abilities and powers to appoint the right people to the right places.
Now, like the president and many other
wanted and disgraced top officials of the former administration, he
is gone.
Where Kravets comes from
“I would also like
to know where he is,” his mother Lyudmyla Bytsiuk said over the
phone. In February, after the ex-president escaped to Russia, Kravets
disappeared along with his wife Maryna Pelykh.
Kravets did not respond to requests for
comments for this story, either directly or through intermediaries.
A native of Komsomolsk in Poltava
Oblast, the 41-year-old Kravets started his career as assistant of an
electrician in the early 1990s. But later he started and headed a
number of firms in Kremenchuk and Cherkasy, engaging in a range of
activities from fuel to the financial sector.
“He had a network
of fueling stations,” said Yuriy Pelykh, secretary of the
management board of the state building company UkrBud and a former
father-in-law to Kravets’ wife. “I
would not say that his business was not going well. But he sold it
there and they moved and rented an apartment in Kyiv. I helped him
get employment at a Brovary house building company Merkuriy.”
The Merkuriy company, while Kravets’
first step in Kyiv, lasted only for a year. In 2004, he landed two
jobs, as head of Zoryany cinema and head of Ukrbudinvest company. By
then, Zoryany was the site of congresses and meetings for the
Yanukovych-led former ruling Party of Regions. Ukrbudinvest,
meanwhile, started to get involved in the construction of Mezhyhirya
near Novi Petrivtsi, some 15 kilometers outside of Kyiv.
The home was officially labeled as a
culture and health center, but soon transformed from a modest state
dacha into a sprawling presidential manor over 140 hectares. A
charity foundation, Renaissance of Ukraine, commissioned some of the
work and became the proxy owner of part of the land where the
residence stands.
The new level
In 2007, when Kravets got elected to
parliament on the Party of Regions list, his political career
advanced to a higher level – and so did his connections to
Yanukovych. It was then that another Yanukovych scam took place –
the takeover of a hunting estate in Sukholuchya, near Mezhyhirya.
At the time, Yanukovych was prime
minister. The government led by him approved a decision to transfer
the Dnipro-Teteriv forestry to a state committee on forestry, which
then transferred 17.5 hectares of it to TOV Dom Lesnyka, a shell
company linked to Yanukovych.
This company has geographical ties with
Kravets. Its official address in the Kyiv suburb of Brovary is 90
Kirova St, office 16. It was built by the Merkuriy construction
company and the office belonged to Maryna Pelykh, Kravets’ wife.
Besides the assembling of Mezhyhirya,
work was being done at a Crimean property that would eventually
become Yanukovych’s residence at the picturesque Aya Cape.
In the summer of
2007, the property that used to belong to a state company was
purchased by Arktur-Krym, a firm that was founded by UkrKyivResurs,
registered in the same Brovary office. Arktur-Krym also received 3.5
hectares of land by the sea in
Crimea. http://pravoscope.com/act-postanova-15572-2007a-lucyak-m-i-19-11-2007-ne-viznacheno-s
Along with these projects, Ukrbudinvest
also continued to thrive under a manager close to Kravets. In 2007,
the company built Akula office center in Donetsk, which later hosted
several companies of Yanukovych’s elder son Oleksandr. But this was
just one of many links that formed between Oleksandr Yanukovych and
Kravets.
A confidante
About this time, Kravets started
becoming a confidante of the former president and his family. He was
certainly trusted with money. One of the most telling pieces of
evidence are payment orders that show Kravets receiving $5,000 per
month from Yanukovych’s main company Tantalit for hospitality-related
expenses. The money was spent on birthday presents to officials.
One of the document shows that Anatoliy
Chub, the then-head of the Main Department of Communal Property of
Kyiv, and Irena Kilchytska, a deputy Kyiv mayor, received presents.
The list of recipients is heavy on officials from the mayor’s office
and the Kyiv City Council.
It looks like the generosity paid off.
In October 2009, the Kyiv City Council
voted to transfer a land plot on the prestigious 33 Obolonska
Embankment to Kyivbudzhytlo for a cottage. This is where a house was
built for Oleksandr Yanukovych, according to Mezhyhirya documents.
Kyivbudzhytlo has one founder — Don Lesnyka, a famous Yanukovych
company also housed on 90 Kirova St. in Brovary – the office
belonging to Kravets’ wife.
One of the documents found in
Mezhyhirya records a 2006 financial transaction cryptically as “land.
Obolon” — Hr 100,000 for the paperwork for a land plot in Obolon.
Expensive whims at taxpayer’s cost
The year 2010 became a watershed
success for Yanukovych and Kravets. Yanukovych finally got elected
president, after the 2004 Orange Revolution denied him the post
because of massive election fraud.
Kravets took the job as head of the
state Asset Management Department, or DUSya. From that moment on,
Kravets took care of the president’s whims – at taxpayers’ cost.
The people and schemes were tried and tested in previous years.
The taxpayers sponsored many
presidential luxuries, whether 75 sets of tableware for Crimean
presidential dachas that cost Hr 400,000 or a Hr 331 million upgrade
of a National Center for Radio Surgery at Feofaniya, the clinic that
only treats top government officials.
The Feofaniya medical center was one of
the few times that Kravets talked publicly about his job. “In
Feofaniya clinic, a radiological center will start working. It will
work for the whole country, not just officials, and it needs serious
financing,” Kravets told Segodnya newspaper in December 2010.
Under Kravets, in April 2011, one of
DUSya’s daughter companies also rented an Augusta 139 helicopter at a
cost of Hr 7.5 million. A year later, it turned out not to be enough,
and in May 2012 another helicopter was commissioned, costing Hr 6.5
million. Moreover, a Falcon 900 airplane was added at the cost of Hr
1.6 million.
The founder of
lessee company, Centeravia, was Ukrkyivresurs — the company that
founded TOV Arktur-Krym that acquired land on behalf of Yanukovych.
Effectively, it means that budget money to rent helicopters for the
president went into his private pocket.
Good for Yanukovych, good for
friends
Companies tied to Kravets and
Yanukovych generally did well from contracts with DUSya. For example,
in Dececember 2012 one of DUSya’s daughter companies, Chaika,
commissioned construction of a dairy farm in Chernihiv Oblast. Almost
Hr 91 million was paid to Ukrbudinvest, which was once headed by
Kravets and then passed on to his ex-partner to manage.
His first employer’s company UkrBud got
a contract in autumn 2010 to reconstruct a publicly-owned building in
the prestigious Kyiv suburb Koncha-Zaspa, and paid more than Hr 14
million for it. Yuriy Pelykh, the head of UkrBud, says everything was
honest, but “not without it.”
Business wife
Kravets’ wife Maryna Pelykh was also
very active in the family and had her own value for Yanukovych. Her
personal phone number featured in at least one notebook of
Yanukovych’s guard in Mezhyhirya.
Her company’s cars could freely enter
the territory of the president’s private residence.
Her company in Brovary was the base
that officially housed companies related to Mezhyhirya. Her own firms
were also registered there.
The companies that belonged to Pelykh
in the past three years have received a handful of land plots and
properties in elite parts of Kyiv: a site for a trade center on
Poshtova Ploshcha (which was recently reversed by court), an historic
mansion on Kruglouniversytetska, a site for a construction project
close to Pivdenny railway station, and other sites on Mayakovskiy
Street and in Svyatoshino district, a land plot on Peremohy Prospect,
another one close to Klovska metro station, one on Khreshchatyk
Street and another one along the main street’s Passage area. All
these were approved by either Kyiv City Council decisions, or
Yanukovych’s handpicked city administrator Oleksandr Popov.
Pelykh’s companies almost
instantaneously moved into buildings received from the city
government. New restaurants and sports centers mushroomed on the land
plots.
This business empire continues to exist
to this day, but few want to talk about Pelykh.
“I spoke to her
last time on Feb. 22. Marina Arkadievna called and asked to come
to Zoryany (cinema) and watch the people who organized a takeover. I
could not hear her well, there was background noise. It seems she was
in a plane,” one of the Zoryany workers recalls.
On June 18, Ukrainian journalist Serhiy
Leshchenko wrote on his Facebook page that Kravets was back in
Ukraine. But YanukovychLeaks could not get an independent
verification of this information and has not been able to locate him.
Maksym Opanasenko
is a Ukrainian journalist with the YanukovychLeaks project, an effort
to document alleged corruption in the administration of President
Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown on Feb. 22 by the
EuroMaidan Revolution.
