Svitlana Panaiotidi, a state commissioner at the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, has submitted her resignation in the wake of her public criticism of energy company DTEK, online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda reported on Feb. 28 referring to anonymous sources.
DTEK is owned by Ukraine’s richest man, the multi-billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov.
The website’s sources said Panaiotidi, rather than resigning of her own volition, was forced out of the committee because she was in conflict with its head, Yuriy Terentyev, over a decision involving DTEK: In December, the committee ruled that DTEK wasn’t a monopoly. Panaiotidi was the only one (of six people) to oppose the ruling.
Panaiotidi told the Kyiv Post she would not comment on this “complex situation,” because “my comments would be used against me.”
Antimonopoly Committee spokesperson Oleksiy Tkachuk denied there had been any pressure from Akhmetov over the ruling, or on Panaiotidi’s decision to resign. He confirmed that she had submitted her resignation, but did not know if it would be accepted.
According to the law, only Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko can dismiss her.
However, a Kyiv Post source — who asked to remain anonymous to avoid “a public quarrel” with Panaiotidi — said that there was an element of politics to the story.
“The story with DTEK was misinterpreted,” the source said. “Panaiotidi did not state any specific objections to the DTEK ruling, except that she was simply ‘against.’ She has political ambitions and most likely planned to quit, and just used the DTEK vote to form an image of the fighter and a victim of the system.”
“Sorry, but this is manipulation,” the source said, adding that Panaiotidi had wanted to leave since 2016.
Panaiotidi denied this, and said she doesn’t plan to become a politician: “That’s someone’s fable,” she told the Kyiv Post.
Akmetov’s DTEK on Feb. 28 also issued a statement denying any involvement in this case.
“The company works exclusively within the legal framework. Any statements about any relationship of the company to the decisions of state bodies or their representatives are not true,” the statement reads.
DTEK is a subsidiary of the Akhmetov-owned System Capital Management, a conglomerate with holdings in finance and various industries.
DTEK was founded back in 2005, and since then has become the biggest provider of energy in Ukraine — it controls 70 percent of Ukraine’s heat generation capacity, and around half of the country’s coal mining capacity.
In the first half of 2018, one of its branches alone, DTEK Energy, posted $200 million in net profit.
DTEK has been a target of criticism in recent years, however: In March 2017, activists blocked the company’s coal shipments from the occupied territories, forcing the government to stop the deliveries.
Before that, for two-and-a-half years, DTEK had been transporting coal from the Russian-occupied parts of the Donbas across the front line to its power and thermal plants on the Ukrainian-controlled side.
