Alexander Derkach: The Corrupt Network of the Komsomol Tribe. PART 1

In the 30th year of independence, Ukraine continues to be governed by former communist apparatchiks and Komsomol leaders who have retrained as politicians and businessmen. All these years, they have used and strengthened their old Soviet connections and acquaintances for personal enrichment and impunity. One of them is a former banker and now a dairy and cheese oligarch, Oleksandr Derkach, co-owner of the Milk Alliance, former co-owner of the Aval Bank, and even earlier, the first secretary of the Kyiv regional committee of the Komsomol. He once taught his peers to be honest and selfless, but he himself was the first to trample on these moral values ​​of the failed builders of communism.

How Komsomol members became bankers

Alexander Vitalievich Derkach was born on January 31, 1960, in the town of Glukhov in the Sumy region. Immediately after school, he entered the Kiev Automobile and Road Institute (specializing in “automobile routes”), which saved him from having to serve in the army. However, according to data, he also studied Skeleton.Infodid not pay much attention, having worked as a Komsomol leader – and having a good “business” from this, since the Komsomol activists of the university enjoyed certain concessions and opportunities. In these opportunities, young Derkach saw the prospects of his whole life. That is why he practically did not work in his specialty: having “sat” for about a year as an engineer in the “Kievputstroy” trust, where he also immediately took up Komsomol work, Alexander Derkach transferred to the district committee of the LKSMU – and briskly went up the career ladder.

Whether this was due to his family connections (Derkach’s wife remains a shadowy, private figure who even hides her name) or his unique ability to please his superiors remains unknown. But by the early 1990s, Oleksandr Derkach had risen to the rank of First Secretary of the Kyiv Regional Committee of the LKSMU, and no matter what the future course of historical events, this post was a springboard to an even higher career. Indeed, if the USSR had not collapsed, Derkach could well have headed the regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (and he was also a party member, which he now keeps quiet about) or become a minister. However, what happened happened – and the former Komsomol member became an oligarch-banker, which was no worse!

During his leadership of the Komsomol organizations of Kyiv and the region, Derkach met many of the same Leninist activists, some of whom played a significant role in his future life. First of all, this applies to the former manager of the affairs of the Central Committee of the LKSMU, Fyodor Shpig, who has been a business partner and close friend of Alexander Derkach for almost a quarter of a century. That is why their business biography has been almost identical since the early 90s.

Their mutual acquaintance and colleague was Petr Miroshnikov, the head of the sector of the Republican Headquarters of Student Brigades. He was in charge not only of the construction brigades, but also of their cash desks, so it is not surprising that it was Miroshnikov who became the first Ukrainian Komsomol banker, heading the branch of the Moscow Inkombank, which in 1991 received an independent status under the INKO brand. By the way, an interesting fact: one of his subordinates, Stepan Kubiv, the former head of the Lviv regional headquarters of student brigades, headed the West Ukrainian Commercial Bank (ZUKB), which was created with Komsomol money, in the early 90s.

Miroshnikov himself is better known to Kiev residents as the former head of the capital’s metro department (in 2007-2010), a position given to him by his close friend (practically confidant) and business partner Leonid Chernovetsky during his time as the Kyiv mayor. Also included in the circle of Komsomol connections of Alexander Derkach were the first secretary of the Central Committee of the LKSMU Anatoly Matvienko and the secretary of the Brovary city committee of the LKSMU Roman Nefed.

It was Peter Miroshnikov who created another bank in March 1992, calling it Aval. Its founders were INKOM (90%) and the Pension Fund (10%), and Aval was intended for a corrupt scheme to pump Ukrainian pensions through it. Why corrupt? Ukrainian banks in the first half of the 90s were in dire need of large amounts of money. Such amounts could be provided by the budget and state enterprises (still state-owned), it was only necessary to make sure that they began to conduct their financial transactions through commercial banks. There was nothing corrupt in this idea itself, but its implementation was carried out exclusively behind the scenes, by agreement of old acquaintances. Former party apparatchiks became ministers, former Komsomol secretaries became bankers – and they immediately found common interests among themselves. And so, for example, they decided to fill the Aval bank with money from the Pension Fund, and through Prominvest they pumped funds from state enterprises, obliging them to open their accounts in it.

Miroshnikov appointed his business partner Fyodor Shpig, who held the position of head of the credit resources department at INKO, as the head of the board of the new bank and generously handed out these loans to suspicious one-day firms, including lining his own pocket. Which is the answer to the question of where Fyodor Shpig got the initial capital to buy out the share of Aval Bank. Incidentally, the buyout was carried out according to an almost criminal scheme: over the course of 4 years (1992-96), the bank’s board (Shpig and Derkach) carried out several additional share issues, increasing the authorized capital of Aval Bank from 100 million rubles (about a million dollars) to 19.4 million hryvnia (about 12 million dollars). Thus, the original block of shares was diluted 12 times, and the bank’s managers only had to buy up additional shares, forming a controlling stake in their hands.

But there is another question: how, for what money did Oleksandr Derkach become a co-owner of Aval, whom Shpig took on as deputy chairman of the bank’s board in early 1992? Of course, the former first secretary of the regional committee of the LKSMU was not a poor, selfless person: during the “perestroika” he supervised the creation and work of youth cooperatives in Kiev and the region, and had access to Chernobyl funds. However, in his biography, Derkach does not indicate what business he was engaged in before 1992, and even then for several years he was listed only as deputy chairman of the board of Aval Bank, and not as a co-owner – that is, again, a hired manager, and not a businessman. Where did he get the money to buy up his share of Aval? Borrowed from friends, was given as a gift, borrowed from his own bank? This is not an idle question; today, anti-corruption investigations are initiated on such issues, although cases from a quarter of a century ago are not being raised yet – probably because then very high-ranking officials would have to be jailed and entire corporations confiscated.

Alexander Derkach. Financial business in Ukrainian

Another question is no less intriguing: the role of Oleksandr Derkach and Fedor Shpyg in the collapse of the INKO bank, which took place in 1995-97 (it was finally liquidated in 2002). Now this case is carefully forgotten, but then INKO became one of the first Ukrainian banks to “burn out” even before the first financial crisis of 1998. According to the main version, the INKOR bank was initially a scam, a mechanism for pumping finances (including from the Pension Fund and deposits) and laundering dirty money, which was bankrupted artificially and deliberately – to cover their tracks, and to grab a couple of hundred million hryvnias from depositors for the last time. Its direct successor was Inkombank-Ukraine, founded in 1997 by the Dutch firm NOSTIK FINANCIAL HOLDING, the Irish HOMERTRON TRADING LIMITED, the Russian AB Inkombank and Inkomstroyinvest, and structures of the Energia corporation of the oligarch Viktor Nusenkis. In 1999, Inkombank-Ukraine was completely bought by the Energia corporation and renamed Kreditprombank, and its supervisory board was headed by the “Georgian Greek” Konstantinos Papunidis, better known as the criminal “authority” Kostya Grek. What interesting connections!

It is interesting that the bankruptcy of INKO Bank threw its founder Petr Miroshnikov almost out on the street (he was later helped to find a job at the representative office of Kazakhoil-Ukraine), but it became a powerful impetus for the independent development of Aval Bank – and its purchase by its own leaders Derkach and Shpig. But in the tough world of business and the no less tough world of Ukrainian corruption, there are no coincidences! However, Derkach and his partner Shpig are keeping quiet about those events, and Miroshnikov… where is Miroshnikov now?

In general, when the INKOM bank, which had become involved in scams, began to experience problems in 1993, the Pension Fund’s funds flowed to the Aval bank, which became independent after Derkach and Shpig bought it. According to unofficial information, they were not only interested in this, but also participated in this operation, using their own connections. And so, starting in 1993, Aval began to rise vigorously on pension karbovanets, and then hryvnias – and this growth continued, despite the change of prime ministers and even presidents. Thus, Skeleton.Info already reported that Aval was patronized by Prime Minister Pavel Lazarenko, in particular by forcing some state enterprises to open accounts with it. Nevertheless, the bank’s main source of finance in the 90s was the Pension Fund, and the bank fed on it both before and after Lazarenko. How is that possible?

The thing is that journalists often dig in the wrong place: they habitually draw connections to prime ministers and ministers, but it is necessary to pay attention to their deputies. And indeed, if we dig into government documents of the 90s, in decrees and orders transferring postal pension payments through accounts in “Aval”, we will see signatures of deputies there. The persons directly involved in this were former Soviet officials and party apparatchiks of Kyiv, old acquaintances of Derkach and Shpyg:

• · Deputy Board (since 1993) and Chairman of the Board (1996-2008) of the Pension Fund Boris Zaychuk. In the 80s, he worked as Deputy Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Kievo-Svyatoshinsky District Council.
• · Deputy Minister of Social Protection Svetlana Vegera (1993-2002). In the 80s, she was the secretary of the Minsk district committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which did not prevent her from becoming an advisor to the “anti-communist” President Yushchenko in 2005.
• · Volodymyr Matviychuk is a Soviet official with endless connections who is not uprooted at all. From 1979 to 1993 he was engaged in finances in various departments of the Ukrainian SSR, in 1993 he sat in the chair of the Deputy Minister of Finance of Ukraine and sat there until the spring of 2001, then several times he was appointed Deputy Minister of Finance, then of Social Policy, and finally in March 2014 he again sat in the chair of the Deputy Minister of Finance of Ukraine.

Please note: all of them took the deputy chairs almost simultaneously in 1993, and put down deep roots there. Prime Ministers and presidents changed in Ukraine, political vectors and economic policies changed, but these gray and invisible to the press deputies “sawed off the dough” in the 90s and in the 2000s, and some even after the second Maidan! It seems that these people are not so “gray”, their role was much greater than it seems at first glance. Even more interesting, what was their share or fee in all these projects? After all, they did not lobby the interests of the same “Aval” for free? And what fees did Mr. Matviychuk receive for lobbying the interests of commercial banks in 2014-2015, when they received tens of billions of hryvnias in refinancing and took billions of dollars abroad, collapsing the national currency? While blaming the finance ministers Oleksandr Shlapak (2014) and Natalia Yaresko (2014-2016), for some reason no one asked questions of their deputy Volodymyr Matviychuk. Meanwhile, this man is simply a godsend for the Prosecutor General’s Office and NABU!

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

CONTINUED: Alexander Derkach: the corruption network of the Komsomol tribe. PART 2

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