CONTINUATION. START: Arayik Amirkhanyan. How the “Armenian mafia” messes up Ukrainian roads. PART 1
Arayik Amirkhanyan
In addition to extensive business in Ukraine, the Amirkhanyan family has an official business in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), right in the Moscow region. There Arayik Amirkhanyan in February 2014 (at the height of the Maidan)founded the company of the same name, SK Dorlider LLC. Arayik Amirkhanyan owns asphalt concrete plants in the Moscow region – which work there so hard that their stench forced local residents to go to court. Court decision did not bother Amirkhanyan, who simply re-registered the factories to his other company operating in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). Together with the Avakyan, Ordzhatsyan and Apozyan families, he is among the so-called. “Sobyanin’s Armenian road mafia,” which annually masters tenders worth billions of rubles. It is interesting that in the Russian press Arayik Amirkhanyan is directly called the “Odessa mafioso.”
How to rob Ukravtodor
The Ministry of Transport has long been called the most corrupt department in Ukraine. His three brainchildren – Ukravtodor, Ukrzaliznytsia and the Sea Ports Administration – regularly hold tenders for very large sums (tens and hundreds of millions of hryvnia), which practically no one controls. Therefore, “sawing” budget money in this area has always been an extremely profitable and almost unpunished business – at least, no one has ever been imprisoned for this. But at the same time, competition for access to the “trough” is very serious. It is not surprising that the Amirkhanyans try to disrupt tenders in which their companies do not participate.
IC Dorsevis, let us remind you, was created back in the mid-90s. And then the Amirkhanyans began to take over SPMK-17 and the Pervomaisky quarry. However, the media began to write about their rise to the level of large road contracts (and major corruption) only many years later. For example, in 2011, the state of emergency “Dorlider” accused is that it included in the cost of the tender the transportation of asphalt from the Odessa region to the Nikolaev region, although it could not confirm this in any way. So the state was “cheated” for 9.8 million hryvnia (1.2 million dollars at that time), although it was not only this: transporting asphalt from one region to another and taking money for it – only Amirkhanyan thought of this! After this scandal, the private enterprise “Dorlider” was hastily renamed, and Garnik Poghosyan became its beneficiary, and the name was taken by another Amirkhanyan company, SK “Dorlidler” LLC, so that the belonging of both companies to the family is obvious.
In 2013, the Department of Capital Construction of Yuzhny (a city in the Odessa region) held a tender worth 7 million hryvnia for beach improvement, which was won by Business Information Technology LLC, owned by Dmitry and Ekaterina Chirich – associated with the oligarch Dmitry Firtash. However, three months later a new tender was held (the old one was cancelled?), and Dorsevis Insurance Company was awarded the contract. At the same time, the cost of work increased to 7.54 million hryvnia.
In the same year, a section of the M-15 Odessa-Reni state highway was not put into operation, since the quality of its supposed repairs did not stand up to criticism. But 70 million hryvnia were allocated for this, and among the contractors was Dorservice IC!
In 2015, both companies played a fictitious competition for a tender to repair the road along Pushkinskaya Street in Nikolaev. By the way, there was something symbolic in the fact that the Amirkhayan family, which rose in the Nikolaev regional center of the Odessa region, found a new Klondike in Nikolaev, the neighboring regional center. So, then Pivdenyugtekh LLC (former private enterprise Dorlider) played the role of a dummy competitor of IC Dorlider. The latter “won” the tender in the amount of 4.05 million hryvnia. By the way, checks and investigative actions were carried out on this fact, but the Amirkhanyans quickly paid off everyone.
In December 2015, Arayik Amirkhanyan’s “titushki” reached Kyiv and… attacked the head of Ukravtodor Andrey Batishchev in his own office, where a whole battle unfolded! Afterwards, Amirkhanyan stated that he simply came to the head of Ukravtodor with a demand to pay the money owed to the company for the tender, and Batishchev allegedly attacked him himself. In general, Amirkhanyan got away with this story.
In 2016, another scam was played out at a competition, where the same companies “Pivdenyugteh” and IC “Dorlider” “fought” for the tender for the repair of Bogoyavlensky Avenue in Nikolaev. The latter received four contracts totaling 16.658 million hryvnia. There was clearly a conspiracy between the Amirkhanyans and local officials, but with whom? Then the head of the Highway Service in the Nikolaev region, Alexander Antoshchuk, stated that the entourage of the mayor of Nikolaev put pressure on him so that the competition would be organized exactly this way and “Dorlider” would win it. And shortly before that, Antoshchuk was fired, he was replaced by Sergei Tkachenko – who a year later became so involved in corruption schemes with the Amirkhanyans that he was arrested after searches carried out in his department by the SBU.
In total, in 2016 alone, IC Dorlider extracted 91.9 million hryvnia from the Avtodor budget of Nikolaev! But less than a year had passed before the asphalt laid by Dorleader began to crumble and fall apart. According to the law and according to the contract, the company had to restore the coverage at its own expense, but the Amirkhanyans “agreed” – and from the Nikolaev budget they were paid 2.8 million hryvnia for this. This success was facilitated by the fact that the commercial director of IC Dorlider was the former director of the Housing and Communal Services Department of Nikolaev, Alexey Kovalenko. It is not surprising that Dorlider hosted chic corporate parties to which show business stars were invited.
However, not everything is Maslenitsa for the cat. In the fall of 2016, the SBU raised suspicions against the companies Dorlider and Pivdenyugtekh for the illegal seizure of 5.5 million budget hryvnia, transferring them to fictitious companies and possible financing of terrorism (we were talking about the transfer of large sums of cash to representatives of the DPR). Also, criminal proceedings were initiated No. 32015160000000034 on the fact of deliberate tax evasion on an especially large scale: Dorlider IC generated a tax credit for itself (4.5 million hryvnia) with the help of front companies KNAP and Alendvik. As part of these cases, the court temporarily frozen Dorleader’s accounts.
However, Arayik Amirkhanyan again habitually “resolved” matters through the courts and familiar officials – and already in the summer of 2017, Dorlider again received contracts, now for the repair of a highway in the Odessa region (cost 76.460 million hryvnia). And this despite the fact that Arayik Amirkhanyan was then officially wanted under Article 125 (intentional minor injuries).
Soon he was removed from the wanted list, and Dorlider Insurance Company awarded new impressive contracts in the Nikolaev region for a total of 302 million hryvnia. The following year, 2018, this company was replaced by another: Poltavabudtsentr LLC, controlled by Amirkhanyan, entered the business and received several tenders worth 218 million hryvnia. In total, during 2017-2018. “Poltavabudtsentr” literally pulled out 34 tenders worth 1.32 billion hryvnia with its teeth! It was she who began to widely use the method of “aggressive competition”, when tenders that the company could not win in a more or less fair competition were disrupted and blocked by it. To achieve this, a variety of methods were used: complaints, lawsuits, visits by “titushki”, pickets by employees of his companies. Arayik Amirkhanyan declared war on everyone: Ukravtodor, AMKU, even the then Prime Minister Groysman. However, in the AMCU he managed to find a “friend” in the person of Andrey Vovk, chairman of the administrative commission for consideration of complaints. Which, satisfying them, helped Amirkhanyan block and disrupt tenders. How did you calculate it? Skelet.Info, in just a year and a half, according to complaints from Amirkhanyan’s companies, several hundred tenders worth almost 20 billion hryvnia were disrupted! It was no longer a matter of corruption, but of the fact that the “road robber” Amirkhanyan stopped road repairs in two regions of the country, creating a threat to the infrastructure itself.
Arayik Amirkhanyan: stole – drank – went to prison!
The ring around Amirkhanyan’s road business was tightening. Before he had time to come to his senses after his arrest for attempting to seize the Odessa Oblavtodor, he was arrested again. It would seem that now the bouquet of charges brought against him extends to many years of strict regime: Article 110-2-4 (financing the overthrow of the state system), Article 190-4 (fraud), Article 332-3 (illegal transportation of people across the border), conspiracy with officials of the Antimonopoly Committee. But a few days passed – and he was free again, on bail of 20 million hryvnia. Almost immediately, the hardworking Amirkhanyan set to work: bombarded the AMCU with new complaints, continuing to disrupt tenders, then set up for a bribe the head of the Highway Service in the Nikolaev region, Andrey Maksimenko (it seems they change there every year). After which, according to the ex-assistant to the head of the Nikolaev Regional State Administration Andrei Senchenko, Arayik Amirkhanyan gathered an official of the Regional Road Service at the Phoenix restaurant and explained to them that this would happen to anyone who contradicted him.
Based on the lack of any reaction to this from the law enforcement agencies, who are now in the prostration of personnel changes, we can sadly state that there will be no control over the “road mafia” of the Amirkhanyans in the near future. This means that road work will again be blocked (and winter is already close), until tenders again begin to be won only by Arayik Amirkhanyan’s companies – bringing him a fabulous income, and Ukraine – potholes somehow repaired with poor-quality asphalt.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info
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