World Affairs Journal: Ukraine government duped by conman

 By now, everyone in the world knows about the Yanukovych regime’s embarrassing non-deal with Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa utility company. On November 26th, Vladyslav Kaskiv, the director of the Ukrainian state investment agency, and a man he believed to be Fenosa’s plenipotentiary, one Jordi Sarda Bonvehi, signed a document committing Fenosa to participate in a $1 billion project to build a liquefied natural gas plant near Odessa. The signing took place amid much fanfare and in the presence of a beaming Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and Energy Minister Yuri Boyko.

Almost immediately after the TV cameras stopped rolling, Fenosa denied that Sarda Bonvehi was empowered to sign anything on its behalf. In a word, the Yanukovych regime’s top policy makers had agreed to a deal with an imposter. The Ukrainian press had a field day [1]. Even the New York Times [2] and other international news outlets [3] got in on the act.

Much of the reporting has focused on the imposter, but he’s not the story. The real story is how the Yanukovych regime could not have known that it was conducting negotiations with a conman. “We never doubted he was authentic,” is how the hapless Kaskiv put it to the Times. He could just as well have said: “We were suckers.”

There are four possible explanations for the scandal.