Andrey Dovbenko. Russian mafia liaison
In early March, it became known that the Court of Cyprus sentenced the country’s former Deputy Prosecutor General Rikkos Eritokritou to 3.5 years in prison on charges of conspiring with the law firm Andreas Neocleous to raid the Providencia trust fund, which owned assets worth tens of millions of euros to the Rosinka company. the beneficiaries of which were Russian citizens. This event is directly related to the highest echelons of power in Ukraine, writes crime-ua.com.
According to Forbes, Rikkos Eritokritou and the law firm Andreas Neocleous were found guilty of attempting to raid the assets of the Rosinka company in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) worth $200 million.
The former deputy prosecutor general of Cyprus was taken into custody in the courtroom. Along with him, the son of the founder of the law firm Andreas Neocleous, Panagiotis Neocleous, was also taken into custody – the court sentenced him to 2.5 years in prison. The firm’s former partner, Andreas Kipriozlu, was sentenced to 1.5 years in prison.
The judge ruled that the law firm Andreas Neocleous itself must pay a fine of €70,000. In the near future, the Cyprus Bar Association will consider revoking the license of this law firm.
As we wrote earlier, at the end of September 2015, the Supreme Court of Cyprus, by a unanimous decision, dismissed the Deputy Prosecutor General of the Republic Erotokrita from her post.
The indictment states that for his services, Erotokritou received more than half a million euros from the bankrupt Cyprus Popular Bank, stolen with the complicity of Panagiotis Neocleous. The latter was let down by greed: having decided to bribe Erotokrita, he simultaneously tried to do this at the expense of a bankrupt bank, which was serviced by the company Andreas Neocleous and Co. The investigation followed precisely this documentary trail of corrupt officials.
According to Rosbalt, Neocleous himself and his law firm Andreas Neocleous & Co. have been mentioned more than once in connection with the offshore assets of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. In particular, it was reported that Bogdan Holding GmbH, a holding directly affiliated with Poroshenko, belongs to the Cyprus company Hesutu Limited. In 2013, this company was on the board of directors of Bogdan Motors. Hesutu’s sole shareholder is Teckford Investments Financial Corporation from the British Virgin Islands. As it turned out, Panagiotis Neocleous (son of Andreas), a citizen of Cyprus, co-owner of the law firm Andreas Neocleous and Co., is directly related to Hesutu Limited.
According to the Cypriot press, the President of the Republic Anastasiades, head of Neocleous & Co. Neocleous and ex-Deputy Prosecutor General Erotokritou are old friends and come from the same port city. At one time, Neocleous, the eminence grise of Cyprus, contributed to the election of Anastasiades to the presidency. His campaign headquarters was headed by Erotokritou, whom Anastasiades subsequently appointed to the post of Deputy Prosecutor General, and he lobbied for his interests, initiating criminal cases against competitors and political opponents.
Cyprus Popular Bank, now absorbed by the Bank of Cyprus, specialized, like the Neocleous family that controlled it, in servicing oligarchs from the post-Soviet space. The main clients of Cyprus Popular Bank and Neocleousov are billionaires connected to the Kremlin and other public, united in a collective image called the “Russian mafia”.
At one time, this Cypriot bank created a network of subsidiaries in the former Soviet countries, operating under the Marfin Bank brand. Including in Ukraine.
Marfin Bank, registered in Odessa, was bought by the scandalous banker Nikolai Lagun in 2014, but now, according to information from specialized publications, it is part of the orbit of influence of MP Ivan Fursin. The Estonian Marfin Bank became the property of the Dnieper shadow oligarch Vadim Eromolaev and operates under the guise of Versobank AS, gradually acquiring scandals and criminal cases.
The Neocleous law firm is present in Ukraine under the guise of Andreas Neocleous & Co. However, since 2013, it has been listed in the State Register as undergoing a liquidation procedure. Only in 2016 did it “come to life”, and recently it changed its name to Neocleous & Dovbenko (abbreviated as N&D), which is quite fair – its affairs in Kyiv are run by a young talented lawyer Andrey Dovbenko.
Before Yanukovych fled, he served the “wallet of the Family” – Sergei Kurchenko – advised the “young oligarch” on issues related to mergers and acquisitions. Roughly speaking, he provided legal support for the purchase and subsequent management of commercial assets for money previously stolen from taxpayers.
It is noteworthy that until last year the name of Andrei Dovbenko was almost never found in open sources. And if we did, it was only in the context of journalistic investigations into the affairs of the Yanukovych gang, where our lawyer was not even a minor character. However, from February-March 2016, Dovbenko became a media person. He distributes comments in the press, created two accounts on Facebook, created a personal website, and actively maintains personal blogs in several top online publications. He comments on everything from judicial reform to the liquidation of banks. On one website we came across a note in which Andrei Dovbenko discussed how to choose the right solid fuel boiler.
Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but at the moment Dovbenko began to emerge in the media space, an interesting event happened: the Cabinet of Ministers appointed Pavel Moroz, an old colleague and comrade of Andrei Dovbenko, as Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine for State Registration.
So that you understand: Moroz controls the registration of ownership of everything in this state. Starting from your home and car, ending with Akhmetov’s factories. Even those located in ORDLO were “nationalized” by terrorist gangs and transferred to “external control” by the wanted criminal Sergei Kurchenko, who at one time was helped by Pavel Moroz’s friend Andrei Dovbenko to manage the actually stolen assets.
Let us note that at the end of January, the director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, Artem Sytnik, said at a briefing that a new type of raiding has blossomed in Ukraine. “Right now there is massive raiding due to interference in the register of property rights. We are receiving mass appeals about the fact that the rightful owner is simply being thrown away,” Sytnik said. He recalled a recent incident when a building was seized by machine gunners in the center of Kyiv.
“A representative of a Cypriot company came and said: “Look, we are already the new owners, because we were included in the register.” This is a new form of raiding,” the NABU director emphasized.
In response to this statement by Sytnik, Deputy Minister of Justice Pavel Moroz assured that there are no mass raider seizures using the register of property rights, but only isolated interventions in the register. Two weeks later, on February 17, Moroz at the board of the Ministry of Justice reported on the successes in the fight against raiding: “In 2016, an anti-raiding law came into force, 30 novelties of which made it impossible to apply 90% of raiding schemes. Also, since 2016, the Ministry of Justice has had a Commission for the consideration of complaints in the field of state registration; now it is the only institution in the country that can quickly respond to isolated cases of illegal alienation of property.”
The commission that the deputy minister is talking about is headed by himself. During February, he spoke about her activities several times. “In January 2017, we received only about 50 complaints about registration actions that were taken after the anti-raid law came into effect! That is, in fact, their number has decreased by 5 times!” – Moroz boasted at a press conference on February 8. “Now the number of raider attacks in Ukraine has decreased by 90%, but we do not lose our vigilance! The Commission of the Ministry of Justice is working and returning illegally alienated property to our citizens and businesses,” Moroz was quoted by the Uryadoviy Kuryer newspaper on February 21.
However, from businessmen and people’s deputies one can hear completely different assessments of the activities of the Moroz commission. The essence of these assessments is that, under the guise of fighting corporate raids, using the mentioned commission, Minister of Justice Pavel Petrenko and his deputy Pavel Moroz established their own monopoly on corporate raiding.
According to the information released, the commission makes the necessary decisions at the request of interested parties. According to the media, for solving small issues the price starts from 10 thousand dollars, and for assistance in raiding large industrial facilities they pay from half a million to several million dollars. Journalists claim that money is transferred to the Ministry of Justice through a law firm headed by a former classmate of Minister Petrenko, Andrei Dovbenko. Transactions such as legal services of Andreas Neocleous & Co. are processed. In fact, we are talking about a fee for entering new data into the State Register of Property Rights, the Register of Legal Entities, or for canceling any registration action.”
Alexey Presnako
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