Alexey Pavlenko
During the first major press conference in 2016, President Petro Poroshenko announced the need to “reboot” the composition of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. This gave rise to a lot of conversations and discussions on the political sidelines of our country. Some people’s deputies are even more radical. They advocate the resignation of the entire Cabinet of Ministers, headed by Prime Minister Yatsenyuk. Such a decision could be called completely justified, because the current government with all its actions confirms its insolvency and ineffectiveness. Several ministers even announced their desire to resign – last year it was Alexander Kvitashvili (head of the Ministry of Health) and Andrei Pivovarsky (head of the Ministry of Infrastructure). This year they were joined by the Minister of Agriculture Alexey Pavlenko. He even wrote an official letter of resignation. True, he did this without any desire – the leadership of Samopomichi put pressure on him, according to whose quotas he got into the Cabinet of Ministers. Pavlenko doesn’t want to leave his home at all, because he spent a whole year to perfectly set up “schemes” to siphon money from the state budget of Ukraine through agricultural enterprises. Where did Alexey Pavlenko come from in the Ukrainian government, and why did the media begin to call him the “undertaker” of the Ukrainian agro-industrial complex?
The impeccable path of a businessman
Alexey Pavlenko was born in 1977 in the city of Uman, Cherkasy region. Pavlenko’s higher education is quite solid. In 1998, he received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. The following year, he received a diploma in financial management from the International Business School. It took him another year to become a master of foreign economic activity management at the Academy of International Trade under the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine. In 2001, he went to study in the Netherlands to obtain a master’s degree in business administration at Naenrode University.
Pavlenko’s first place of work, according to his official biography, was KPMG, where he provided auditing and business consulting services. Apparently, he worked quite well, because already in 2002 he became a consultant to the board of directors of the Dutch company ABN AMRO. In the same year, he was appointed to the post of head of restructuring and business development of the Dutch company Damen Shipyards Group. In 2004, he began working in Ukraine as General Director of the Rise group of companies, his competence included issues of strategic planning and financial control. In 2006, he was appointed executive director of the Foxtrot company. Home appliances” (owned by Valery Makovetsky). According to the publication Antikor, Alexey Pavlenko, together with the Dutch citizen Vladimir Schulmeister, stole quite a lot during his work at Foxtrot:
In subsequent years, he successively became a member of the supervisory boards of the Agroprogress and Zhitlobud companies. Around the same time, he became a partner in the investment fund Pharus Assets Management. It is also noteworthy that after his appointment as head of the Ministry of Agrarian and Industrial Complex, Pavlenko remained a member of the supervisory board of Zhytlobud and did not stop collaborating with Pharus Assets Management. And even on the contrary, in every possible way he helped “related” companies earn huge money.
Revelations and promises of Pavlenko in the Verkhovna Rada after taking office as minister
https://youtu.be/VuYhEu3L7BI
Influential patron
Knowledgeable people say that the main person in the Ministry of Agrarian and Industrial Complex is not Minister Pavlenko himself, but his colleague in the Samopomich party, Ivan Miroshnichenko. He is a people’s deputy, and also the main representative of the transnational company (TNC) Cargill in Ukraine. They say that it was at Miroshnichenko’s suggestion that Pavlenko was made minister. They are connected by a partnership in the Pharus Assets Management fund. In addition, almost every enterprise that depreciated as a result of Pavlenko’s actions as minister was bought for next to nothing by companies controlled by Miroshnichenko. It should be noted that ex-acting officer also worked for Cargill. the head of GPZKU Valery Tomilenko and in general, at Samopomichi there is a whole “galaxy” of workers from this company.
Ivan Miroshnichenko
Here it should be said that Cargill, and Alexey Pavlenko, who pushed it through his ministry, are behind the scandalous abolition of the export duty on sunflower seeds. Taking into account the fact that during the period of this duty Ukraine became a world leader in the export of sunflower oil. In the same case, if all the seeds are exported, then the only competitive industry in Ukraine may be destroyed.
“Corn wars” and stolen $7 million
In 2012, China provided Ukraine with a $3 billion loan aimed at state guarantees for the implementation of large projects in the agricultural sector. Half of this amount ($1.5 billion) went to the State Food and Grain Corporation (SFGC). In exchange for these loan funds, Ukraine pledged to supply China with 4 million tons of corn per year. After the conclusion of the contract, the position of director of this enterprise became the most “delicious” of those controlled by the Ministry of Agrarian and Industrial Complex. In the end, Samopomichi representative Valery Tomilenko (ex-Cargill employee) managed to win it, and later he was replaced by another representative of the political force and Alexey Pavlenko’s former colleague at Rise, Boris Prikhodko.
While acting as the head of the GPZK, Tomilenko, at the “request” of Pavlenko, signed a contract with Noble Resources SA (one of Ivan Miroshnichenko’s structures), which brought huge losses to the state company and dragged it into a long-term international scandal, which was barely hushed up. This document deals with the purchase of a large batch of corn, which is necessary to fulfill the terms of the contract with China. The total grain purchase amount was supposed to be $13.117 million, of which $7.2 million was transferred as an advance payment in December 2014.
The main problem was that Noble Resources SA did not send GPZK a single document according to which the corn grain belonged to the corporation. In fact, it turned out that GPZK “donated” Noble Resources SA $7.2 million. The fraud, to put it mildly, is simply “provocative.” The saddest thing is that it was carried out under the cover of Minister Pavlenko. Not only did the state budget lose a large sum as a result of such fraud, but there was also a threat to disrupt the contract with China. From the outside, this looks like direct lobbying by the leadership of the GPZK of the interests of Noble Resources SA.
And now to the main thing. Globally, China is Cargill’s strategic competitor. And if the contract between Ukraine and China is broken, then TNC Cargill will have an excellent chance to use Ukrainian crop lands (given under the contract to China) for its own transgenic crops. In turn, this will lead to China buying corn not from Ukraine, but directly from Cargill. If this happens, the company’s financial dividends will be in the billions of dollars. This is the “corn-grain war”.
War for Ukrspirt
During the time of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukrspirt was run by Yuriy Ivanyushchenko (Yura Enakievsky). According to law enforcement agencies, through the hands of his protege Mikhail Labutin (former deputy general director of Ukrspirt), he withdrew about 180 million UAH from the enterprise. The amount is not small, is it? In “regional” times, many frauds at Ukrspirt were successfully turned a blind eye. After the escape of Viktor Yanukovych, Igor Shvaika became the new Minister of Agriculture, who managed to surpass the members of the “family” in the level of “inconspicuous” theft of public money from Ukrspirt. In short, everyone and everything was stolen at this enterprise.
With the appointment of Pavlenko to the post of head of the Ministry of Agriculture, concrete showdowns began between Samopomich and Svoboda. The former head of the Ministry of Agro-Industrial Complex, Svoboda resident Igor Shvaika, famous for his “alcohol” fraud, did not want to just give his “feeding trough” to Alexey Pavlenko. True, he did not manage to resist the new minister for long – the “dealers” from Samopomichi turned the financial flows from the enterprise into their own pockets.
During the election of the new head of Ukrspirt, Pavlenko&Co had some minor problems. Together with his former colleague at the Rise company, Yaroslav Krasnopolsky, they almost openly tried to falsify the personnel competition. At the end of March 2014, the competition commission under the Ministry of Agrarian and Industrial Complex announced that the main candidates for the post were Anatoly Dalibozhik (then deputy director of Ukrspirt and Pavlenko’s creature) and Nina Garkavaya (Ivanyushchenko’s creature). Both of these figures have a rather negative reputation. Dalibozhik was involved in fraud at a distillery in the Ivano-Frankivsk region (he was even fired under a criminal article). In turn, Garkavaya is a pensioner who worked at the enterprise at a time when it was completely controlled by Ivanyushchenko. As a result, Pavlenko had to cancel the elections due to a rising wave of indignation from the media.
Alexey Pavlenko
It should be noted that under the leadership of Alexei Pavlenko in the Ministry of Agrarian and Industrial Complex, such competitions for filling vacant positions at state-owned enterprises controlled by the ministry were not only opaque, they were black. When selecting candidates at a particular enterprise, a simple scheme was used. If during the competitive selection “our own people” did not make it through due to solid competitors, the minister simply canceled the competition, declaring that none of the candidates satisfied it. After a while, the competition was announced again, although “undesirable individuals” were no longer allowed to participate in it.
Today, there is no director at Ukrspirt, which means that Pavlenko and his team, if desired, can carry out their “entertaining” machinations to pump money out of the state-owned enterprise. These are such great guys.
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Now Alexey Pavlenko is peacefully waiting for the Verkhovna Rada to accept his resignation. Judging by the way he expresses himself in conversations with the press, his conscience for the practically buried agro-industrial complex of Ukraine does not gnaw at him. We quote: “The decision to recall me is in no way related to my work as minister.” And while the swindlers in the Ukrainian parliament pretend to be innocent lambs, awaiting their “fate,” their criminal schemes continue to bring huge financial resources to their patrons.
Dmitry Samofalov, for SKELET-info