Despite his confusing speech and spelling mistakes, Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych manages to rack up millions of dollars in income on books that few people have seen or read.
His book copyright royalties exceeded Hr 15.5 million (about $1.9 million), most of his declared income in 2012. Yanukovych made Hr 20.388 million (about $2.5 million) last year, according to his tax declaration published on April 1 on the president’s website.
This sum was four times more than the joint income of U.S. President Barak Obama and his wife Michelle, who in 2012 earned $608,611, according to their tax declaration.
But Ukraine’s publishers, professional writers and political analysts doubt Yanukovych’s literary success.
In 2011, Yanukovych’s English-speaking “Opportunity Ukraine”, represented as a guide for investors, sparked a scandal, with accusations of plagiarism involving other politicians’ speeches and magazine articles. The book was published by Austrian Mandelbaum Verlag by order of Donetsk-based printing house Novyi Svit.
The same Donetsk printing house paid to Yanukovych the huge royalties in 2012, and also paid him Hr 16.4 million in 2011 for his previously written books as well as his future works.
The books mentioned by Presidential Administration include: “A Year in Opposition: There are no Final Victories or Defeats in Politics,” “… a Year in Office: From Crisis to Economic Growth,” “Way to Overcome” and “How Ukraine should to live on,” written and published in 2005-2010 by various publishing offices.
The Kyiv Post found some of these books in the National Parliament Library. Printed on high quality paper with numerous photos inside, they turned to be only a set of interviews, articles or speeches of Yanukovych that he delivered being an opposition politician and prime minister.
Some of his quotes look rather weird in view of current political situation in 2013. “Being in opposition I felt by my own experience how it is important to have access to information, truthful and balanced,” he said in “Year in Office,” printed in 2007. “We have to make friends of our political opponents, but not turn them into enemies,” Yanukovych said in “How Ukraine should to live on,” published in 2008, three years before his political rival Yulia Tymoshenko has been arrested.
But none of these books were published by Novyi Svit. The website of this printing house doesn’t mention book publishing. It says the company prints advertisements, cardboard packages, wraps, and also newspapers and magazines, including Shakhtar football club magazine, owned by the richest Ukrainian and Yanukovych’s longtime ally Rinat Akhmetov.
“I’ve never seen any books of this printing house on the market, although I head the association of publishers 18 years,” said Oleksandr Afonin, president of the Ukrainian Association of Publishers and Booksellers.
Novyi Svit refused to comment the issue.
Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko called these huge royalties declared by Yanukovych a “form of legalization of his revenues” and said it was done “in rather awkward way.” “But he already did so a year ago and it worked,” Fesenko said.
Such criticism doesn’t seem to bother Ukraine’s president.
Asked about his books during the March 1 press conference, Yanukovych claimed that he gave most of this money for charity, telling a TVi journalist that “you are a young person and have many years ahead to live.”
President’s spokeswoman Darka Chepak wasn’t reachable for comment.
Afonin, the publisher, said that Hr 32 million (about $4 million) paid to Yanukovych by the printing house in two years is an “immense amount of money” unseen by Ukrainian authors. Based on average royalties in Ukraine, the printing house has to publish around 4-4.5 million copies of president’s books to make a profit, Afonin counted. He said that only some school textbooks reached to 400,000 copies in Ukraine.
But unlike textbooks up to now Yanukovych’s works are hard to find in bookstores or libraries.
For the modern Ukrainian authors 15,000 of book copies in print is a huge success, the experts admit.
Ukrainian publishers Vitaliy and Dmytro Kapranovs said in an interview with TVi channel that the largest number of book copies published in Ukraine was a novel by Ukrainian classic writer Pavlo Zahrebelny, who published in 500,000 copies as far back as in Soviet times.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
