Croatia’s 2010 plans to overhaul its fighter jet fleet involved the purchase of eight MiG-21 jets from Ukraine as a bidder.
The only problem is that those jets seem to have already been contracted to Yemen.
In December 2011 Croatia sent a delegation to Odesa to inspect the jets, which noticed basic Yemeni tags on them, but initially thought nothing of it. Since then, however, five of the 10 Croatian bid assessment committee members have been dismissed because of the scandal. Repercussions in Ukraine have yet to appear.
After the 2011 visit, and pursuant to negotiations, Ukraine wrote a letter obtained by the Kyiv Post that appears to contain false MiG ownership information. Dated Dec. 19, 2011, and addressed to the Croatian Ministry of Defense, Ukrspecexport – the state-owned military product and service trader – said those eight planes were on the balance sheet of Odesaviaremservis, a state-owned enterprise under Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.
The letter also stated: “Ukrspecexport confirms that once the contract is signed with and end-user certificates are received from the Defense Ministry of the Republic of Croatia, all necessary permits will be secured from the State Service of Export Control of Ukraine.”
Signed by Ukrspecexport General Director Dmytro Perehudov, the letter furthermore had an annex attached from Odesaviaremservis that stated the eight MiG-21 jets had been originally purchased from Swiss-registered Scimitar Systems SA and transported on Jan. 1, 2003 based on customs declarations.
The problem is that Scimitar was established on Aug. 21, 2003, eight months after the MiGs were allegedly procured, according to the company’s public deed and articles of incorporation, obtained by the Kyiv Post. Moreover, Scimitar isn’t registered for armament sales, only to sell civil aviation.
The deal came as a surprise to Yemen, which on May 6, 2005 contracted to purchase 28 MiG jets from Ukrinmash, a subsidiary of Ukrspecexport, and had received all but eight of them – those that had the same plane and engine manufacturing numbers and years as those offered to Croatia.
Yemen’s then-Air Force and Air Defense Commander Staff Major General Pilot Mohammed Saleh Al-Ahmer even wrote the Croats a letter obtained by the Kyiv Post, informing them of this on March 4, 2012.
“Recently we agreed with Ukrinmash on delivery of the remaining (8) eight Aircraft, and now we are in process of their delivery,” reads the Yemeni letter.
The letter included a list of the 28 MiG jets complete with plane and engine manufacturing numbers and years.
When the Kyiv Post called the number listed on the letterhead of the Yemeni correspondence on May 17, an air force officer who said he wasn’t allowed to speak to the press confirmed that Yemen is in “the negotiation phase of having the eight remaining MiGs delivered.”
He said Yemen ran into financial troubles in 2011, but confirmed the country was to receive the last eight MiGs of the order contracted with Ukrinmash.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign ministry acknowledged a contract for the sale of MiGs to Yemen, but claimed ownership was never transferred since Yemen didn’t fulfill its contractual obligations and the eight planes “never have been owned by the Yemeni Air Force and Air Defense and continue to be owned by the Odesa Aviation Plant.”
Ukrspecexport gave a similar response to the Kyiv Post.
The foreign ministry furthermore said Ukraine and Yemen on Oct. 15, 2012, signed documents that canceled the 2005 contract’s validity and decided to reconcile their financial transactions. But this was months after Ukrspecexport submitted a bid to the Croats, hosted a delegation to inspect the planes in Odesa, and sent them an allegedly false ownership document.
Meanwhile, according to the foreign ministry statement, the planes remained unsold and were offered to various countries, including Croatia. These offers, however, seem to have been made before the contract was canceled.
A Croatian defense ministry official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said Ukraine Ambassador to Croatia Oleksandr Levchenko on June 1, 2012, met with Croatian Army Commander Lieutenant General Drago Lovric to assure him the eight MiGs belong to Ukraine.
A picture of the meeting is posted on the Armed Forces of Croatia website.
Levchenko is seen accompanied by Ivica Josipovic, Ukrspecexport’s representative in Croatia, and by Colonel Petro Bobyr, Ukraine’s military attache in Croatia.
The Croatian defense ministry official also told the Kyiv Post that Levchenko “broke with protocol and offered some sort of statement that those (eight MiG-21) airplanes belong to Ukraine.”
Yet 20 days later on June 21, 2012, Ukrinmash sent a letter obtained by the Kyiv Post to the new Yemeni air force and air defense commander asking him for “additional guarantees…concerning the legitimacy of End User Certificates for delivery of (the remaining eight) MiG-21…aircraft with extension of their validity, as they were signed in 2005 by Mr. Mohammed Saleh Al-Ahmer, former Commander of the AF & Ad of the Republic of Yemen.”
To defend Ukraine’s bid to assist Croatia, Levchenko authored an explanation to the Croatian Zasita (Defense) magazine posted online on April 12.
Ukraine’s Ambassador Levchenko wrote that as the owner of the MiG jets, Odesaviaremservis “prepared them for export, (hence the Yemenese identifications).” Yet he failed to observe that Yemen had a sales contract with Ukrinmash not with Odesaviaremservis.
And when asked by the Croatian magazine, the Ukrainian ambassador also didn’t say what kind of document he presented to the Croatian army commander during their June 1, 2012 meeting.
The story gained momentum after Croatian paper Jutarni List (Morning Times) reported on March 7, 2012, that Ukrspecexport had provided Croatia with suspicious ownership papers for the eight jets, eventually leading to the dismissal of the defense ministry officials later in the year.
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych and staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected], respectively.
