Lawmaker Oleksandr Hranovsky was known as a “gray cardinal” under former President Petro Poroshenko, one who had the reputation of being able to protect corrupt schemes for friends and harass enemies – using his connections to judges, prosecutors and the SBU Security Service of Ukraine.
Hranovsky has always denied influencing law enforcement, but he did not respond to multiple requests for comment by phone, email and Facebook.
With Poroshenko out of power, Hranovsky’s influence appears to have waned – but not disappeared entirely. He is running for parliament from a Kharkiv single-district seat in the July 21 snap election, with the help of the mayor of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Gennady Kernes.
Some have suggested that Kernes is repaying a favor for Hranovsky’s help in closing a criminal investigation against the mayor in 2018. Others said that Kernes and his allies may be trying to capitalize on Hranovsky’s remaining connections among the judiciary.
“Kernes is the one hope for Hranovsky to cling to power,” independent lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko told the Kyiv Post.
Activists, rivals and analysts also told the Kyiv Post that Hranovsky is trying to cozy up to billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who has admitted to advising Kernes’ party.
Kernes case
In 2015, the Prosecutor General’s Office indicted Kernes for alleged abduction, assault and threats of murder against Kharkiv activists. Kernes has stated that the allegations against him are false.
In August 2018, the case was dropped after prosecutors failed to appear in court multiple times.
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told journalists in August that members of parliament aided Kernes in the case. Multiple analysts and activists later said that Hranovsky used his influence to help Kernes escape prosecution.
“Hranovsky helped Kernes close the court case that was going against him in Poltava,” political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told the Kyiv Post. “Hranovsky may have played a key role. Through his ties with Poroshenko and Lutsenko, he was able to reach this scandalous closure.”
When questioned by journalists, Kernes was quoted as saying that if he had asked for Hranovsky’s legal advice, it was no one else’s business.
Kharkiv district
With the case against Kernes closed, Hranovsky registered as a candidate for parliament in Kharkiv’s District 169, endorsed by the mayor.
“Previously, Hranovsky was a confidant of Poroshenko,” Fesenko said. “Now he is becoming this kind of man for Kernes. Kernes, as a sign of gratitude, lobbied for Hranovsky’s election in Kharkiv.”
Hranovsky’s main competitors in the district were Oleksandr Kirsh, a lawmaker from the People’s Front, and Oleksandr Kunitsky, a blogger from the city of Zaporizhzhia backed by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. Kunitsky was banned from running by the Central Election Commission on July 11 due to his Israeli citizenship and alleged violations of residency requirements, although he may appeal the decision.
Dmytro Bulakh, head of the Kharkiv Anti-Corruption Action Center, cited a private poll according to which Kirsh was leading, Kunitsky was the runner-up, and Hranovsky ranked third. Bulakh said Hranovsky’s chances of winning are not great, despite Kernes’ support.
“The residents of any city don’t like people who are not linked to the city and who emerge out of nowhere half a year before the election campaign and pretend to love a specific district,” he told the Kyiv Post.
Other downsides for Hranovsky: His reputation and links to Poroshenko.
“He’s controversial and was close to Poroshenko and Poroshenko is not loved in Kharkiv,” Bulakh said.
Vote buying allegations
Kharkiv police on June 21 stated that it received over a dozen citizen reports that Hranovsky’s campaign was handing out boxes full of medication to residents in District 169. Police launched an investigation into the potential crime of voter bribery.
Local news sites posted photos of small cardboard boxes with stickers labeled “The Oleksandr Hranovsky Fund” with smaller boxes and bottles of various medications inside. The boxes came with letters wishing their recipients good health and happiness, also marked with the Oleksandr Hranovsky Fund logos.
Hranovsky also has not responded to requests for comment about these allegations.
Kolomoisky connection?
There are also allegations that Hranovsky is now trying to ally himself with Kolomoisky, whose influence over Zelensky is still debated.
Kolomoisky has admitted that he is “advising” Doveryai Delam (Trust in Deeds), a party recently created by Kernes and Odesa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov, who has faced multiple allegations of corruption that he denies.
In May, the Schemes investigative journalism program filmed vehicles registered to Kolomoisky arriving at Hranovsky’s house. The two denied meeting each other.
A few days later, Hranovsky announced that he had left the Poroshenko Bloc.
Independent lawmaker Leshchenko told the Kyiv Post that Hranovsky was the link between Poroshenko and Kolomoisky after the 2016 nationalization of Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank, where an alleged fraud had cost taxpayers $5.5 billion after a decade of insider loans while Kolomoisky controlled the bank.
“At one point he became an intermediary between Poroshenko and Kolomoisky,” said Leschenko. “At the last moment, he went over to Kolomoisky’s side.”
If nothing else, Hranovsky is seen as resourceful and willing to offer his services to important officials or oligarchs.
“This person has many contacts in the law enforcement system and he simply changes the clients that he works for,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Kyiv Post.
Kostyantyn Kulik, a former top prosecutor, told the Kyiv Post that Lutsenko and Hranovsky had sabotaged Kulik’s attempts to investigate Kolomoisky’s alleged ties to the criminal group of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and the former president’s associate, Serhiy Kurchenko, a businessman frequently referred to as “Yanukovych’s wallet.” Kulik said that both Lutsenko and Hranovsky were cooperating with Kolomoisky.
Kolomoisky denied being a political ally of Hranovsky. He said, however, that he regularly meets him and “talks about life” with him.
Remaining influence
After Poroshenko’s defeat in the April 21 presidential election, Hranovsky clearly lost some of his political clout.
Specifically, Zelensky has fired officials accused of having links to Hranovsky, including Oleh Valendyuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine’s Kyiv branch, and Pavlo Demchyna, a deputy head of the powerful law enforcement agency.
Hranovsky told the Kyiv Post in 2017 he had been acquainted with Valendyuk for 10 years and with Demchyna for seven years but denied influencing law enforcement.
Hranovsky may retain some influence over the historically corrupt Prosecutor General’s Office as long as Lutsenko, a Poroshenko loyalist, keeps heading it. One of the units at the Prosecutor General’s Office is colloquially known among some officials as the “Kononenko-Hranovsky department” – after Hranovsky and his ally Igor Kononenko, an ex-Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker.
Kulik told the Kyiv Post in May that Hranovsky heavily interfered in the work of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
“Hranovsky constantly comes to the Prosecutor General’s Office, and they talk in the smoking room with (Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoly) Matios, (Deputy Prosecutor General Anzhela) Stryzhevska and others,” said Kulik. Matios and Stryzhevska did not respond to requests for comment.
It is also unclear if Hranovsky has ongoing connections with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU.
In 2018 the Schemes program filmed NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk’s car and the car of Hranovsky entering Poroshenko’s residence and then both cars leaving at the same time.
Sytnyk told Schemes that he and Poroshenko had discussed the creation of the anti-corruption court at the meeting. Sytnyk denied meeting Hranovsky at Poroshenko’s residence, but said he had met Hranovsky at the NABU office to discuss the anti-corruption court.
Hranovsky has also been accused of having ties to Tetiana Slipachuk, the current head of the Central Election Commission, but denied promoting her candidacy for the commission’s head. In 2015 she praised Hranovsky in a comment under a Facebook post. Slipachuk did not respond to a request for comment on the issue.
Another top official, State Investigation Bureau Deputy Head Olga Varchenko, used to be a deputy head of the so-called “Kononenko-Hranovsky department” at the Prosecutor General’s Office. Varchenko has admitted being acquainted with Hranovsky, but the lawmaker has denied influencing her.
Sky Mall dispute
One of the major controversies surrounding Hranovsky involves Kyiv’s Sky Mall shopping center, which used to be managed by Hranovsky and formally owned by his business partner Andriy Adamovsky.
Estonian businessman Hillar Teder and the Czech investor and Dragon Capital CEO Tomas Fiala have accused Adamovsky and Hranovsky of illegally seizing the mall from them in 2012. Adamovsky and Hranovsky deny the accusations.
The mall is currently owned by companies that are not formally linked to Adamovsky but he admitted still being involved in the Sky Mall dispute in a June 24 interview with the Evropeiska Pravda (European Truth) newspaper.
In 2016 to 2017, the London Court of International Arbitration and the High Court of Justice ruled that Cyprus-based Assofit Holdings, which had previously run Sky Mall, must be transferred to Tedar’s Arricano firm. Currently Arricano is enforcing the London court rulings in Cyprus.
However, the situation in Ukraine has not changed, and Arricano has no control over the mall.
Yevgeniy Malieiev, head of Arricano’s legal department, told the Kyiv Post that Sky Mall can only be transferred back to Arricano if Ukrainian law enforcers investigate the issue and if courts rule in favor of the company. He argued, however, that this was unlikely as long as Lutsenko was prosecutor general.
The Prosecutor General’s Office, the National Police and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine all previously investigated corporate raiding, fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion cases against Hranovsky and Adamovsky. However, all of these cases have been closed, Malieiev said.
“Nobody from the previous government wanted to do this, and a new government hasn’t been fully formed yet,” Malieiev said. “We are waiting for the July 21 (parliamentary election).”
Meanwhile, Olga Tkachenko, a former aide to Hranovsky and chief executive of Sky Mall, is under investigation in a corruption case into the state-owned Odesa Portside Plant, where Tkachenko used to be a member of the executive board. Hong Kong’s Expotrade Global Limited is accused of buying fertilizers from the plant at below-market prices. However, Tkachenko has not been charged in the case, and no one has been convicted since the case began in 2016. The slow progress has been attributed by Hranovsky’s critics to his political influence.
