Arthur Gerasimov: from marketer to President’s man

Petro Poroshenko suffers reputational losses by bringing Artur Gerasimov closer to him

The Euromaidan of 2014 became a real “social elevator” that elevated many people, who literally just yesterday were nobodies, to the heights of power in Ukraine. During their time in power, many of them acquired a scandalous reputation, which, however, does not prevent them from remaining influential people. And sometimes a scandalous reputation even “helps” in successful career development.

An example of this could be a marketer, an unsuccessful candidate for people’s deputies of Ukraine in 2012, and today the head of the faction of the ruling Petro Poroshenko Bloc in the Verkhovna Rada and a confidant of the head of state – Artur Gerasimov.

Arthur Gerasimov. From a marketer to “Shakhov’s team”

According to open data and his own biography, Artur Gerasimov, born in 1972 in the urban village of Reshetilovka, Poltava region, received his first education in 1995, graduating from Kiev National University. T. Shevchenko, Faculty of Sociology and Psychology, after which he spent 2 years in graduate school. While still studying in 1994, he became deputy director of the Ukrainian Marketing Group (UMG), and after graduating from graduate school in 1997, he headed it. The company specializes in conducting marketing research.

For 15 years, no one had heard much about Arthur Gerasimov, with the possible exception of very narrow circles. However, in 2012, he gained wide, albeit scandalous, fame as a member of “Shakhov’s team.” However, it is possible that it was this fame that later helped him reach new heights in life.

The year 2012 was remembered by many during the election campaign to the Verkhovna Rada for the appearance and activities in the Lugansk and part of the Donetsk region of the so-called “Sergei Shakhov’s team.” This association was headed already at that time by an odious businessman, ex-deputy of the Lugansk Regional Council, who had the scandalous fame of Stakhanov’s shadow master, Sergei Shakhov, who decided to enter parliament himself and bring his people through.

The election campaign of the members of Shakhov’s team took place in a very unique way due to its technology, nicknamed “fifty kopeck technology”, since massive distributions of funds were carried out – 50 hryvnia each.

The essence of the technology, or as it was also called “systems,” was as follows: a person filled out a questionnaire and received 50 hryvnias of “material assistance” and a booklet with 30 tear-off barcodes, each of which gave the right to receive the next “fifty kopecks.” Formally, the person owed nothing, except that he could bring other people “to the team” who also received money. Of course, in exchange it was assumed that recipients of fifty dollars would become active supporters and agitators of “Shakhov’s team,” which would entail a return in the form of votes received on election day.

One immediately notices the similarity of the “system” with a financial pyramid, or with some marketing moves, the undoubted culprit of which was Artur Gerasimov, who also participated in the large-scale campaign of “Shakhov’s team” as a candidate for the Verkhovna Rada in electoral district No. 51 in the city of Gorlovka, Donetsk areas.

Then the entire city was dotted with billboards depicting Artur Gerasimov and his colleague in district No. 52, Vladimir Poddubny, as members of “Sergei Shakhov’s team.”

Actually, it was surprising what could possibly connect the at that time quite respectable Arthur Gerasimov and Sergei Shakhov, who had a trail of criminal scandals leading up to the management of conversion centers and seemed to be known in the criminal world of the Lugansk region under the nickname “Kit”.

However, it was rumored that behind Sergei Shakhov there were patrons, which was the name given to the people’s deputy from “Our Ukraine” in the Luhansk region just before 2012, Viktor Topolov. But for Artur Gerasimov, according to data Skelet.InfoPetro Poroshenko himself could have been standing even then, in any case, during the election campaign a photograph appeared of Gerasimov and Petro Poroshenko, at that time Minister of Economy in the government of Mykola Azarov, with a phrase about a 14-year acquaintance and a personal guarantee of the professionalism, knowledge and decency of the former.

However, the first pancake came out lumpy – none of the members of “Shakhov’s team” passed, and he himself was accused of bribing voters, a criminal case was opened under the relevant article and the future people’s deputy of the 8th convocation of the Verkhovna Rada was put on the wanted list.

However, the 2012 Gorlovka elections also backfired on Gerasimov himself over time, linking him with one of the most odious characters of the so-called “Russian Spring”, although for the time being this was not a hindrance.

Artur Gerasimov – the President’s man

After his loss in the elections, Artur Gerasimov lived quite unnoticed for the next 2 years, until he appeared again in the spring of 2014, this time as a confidant of presidential candidate Petro Poroshenko, heading Poroshenko’s election headquarters in Donbass: he was involved in organizing first presidential and then parliamentary elections. And already in the fall of 2014, during early elections, Gerasimov himself entered the Verkhovna Rada of the VIII convocation on the BPP party list (No. 43) and soon gained fame as the curator or “watcher” of the Donetsk region from the presidential party. In the latter, he was helped by the fact that he was the chairman of the Donetsk regional organization of the BPP.

In exercising control over the region, Gerasimov is believed to be assisted by the people’s deputy from the BPP, associated with the regionals, Maxim Efimov, who in this way apparently pays for the constituencies ceded or “sold” by him in the 2014 elections.

However, the people’s deputy does some things with the help of his assistants. In any case, human rights activist from the city of Kurakhovo Alexander Garmash claims that illegal coal mining in the city area is supervised by Artur Gerasimov’s assistant Evgeniy Tatarchuk.

The latter, by the way, is listed on Artur Gerasimov’s official page on the BP website as an assistant-consultant on a voluntary basis, and also appeared in Gerasimov’s “Gorlovka epic” in 2012.

Even earlier, the same Yevgeny Tatarchuk, by the way, a former law enforcement officer, appeared in history for changing the party leadership of the BPP in Mariupol.

In 2015, the suspended ex-chairman of the Solidarity branch, Sergei Nesterov, accused Gerasimov of selling the chairman’s seat to millionaire Yuri Ternavsky, Akhmetov’s man.

Assistants to People’s Deputy Gerasimov: Evgeny Tatarchuk and Pavel Smolikov immediately responded to Nesterov’s public statements. The latter “became famous” during the 2014 election campaign, when he actively tried to influence the election results in the 42nd electoral district: it was Smolikov who allegedly stole the seals of the election commission, threatened its chairman Sergei Duritsyn with a machine gun, shouted “I’ll piss in your mouth!” “

And after Sergei Nesterov, who was forcibly removed from the leadership of the Mariupol branch of Solidarity, showed obstinacy and began leaking information to the public about the affairs of Poroshenko’s henchmen, Tatarchuk and Smolikov apparently decided to deal with him. Gerasimov’s assistants learned well the lessons of Shakhov’s political school: they started with traditional threats and a stream of obscenities, and then an attack was made on Nesterov.

However, despite these scandals, or maybe, on the contrary, thanks to them, Artur Gerasimov’s influence in the BPP grew, and he also grew in position: on May 30, 2016, he became the permanent representative of the President of Ukraine in the Verkhovna Rada, and on April 3, 2017, he completely headed the faction BPP in the Verkhovna Rada, becoming in fact the first person of the BPP in parliament. At least formally.

This growth speaks of one thing – in spite of everything, the president believes Artur Gerasimov and he is 100% a confidant of Petro Poroshenko, despite the discreditable connections that have been following Gerasimov since 2012 and for another could have ended almost with accusations in high treason.

Bes’s sworn friend and Gorlovka team members

The success in politics of Artur Gerasimov undoubtedly became possible thanks to the Euromaidan and the conflict in Donbass, with which the head of the presidential faction is associated with his “Gorlovka epic” of 2012. At the same time, she also connected him with one of the leaders of Donbass terrorists, the “ex-military commandant of Gorlovka” from the DPR, Igor Bezler, nicknamed Bes.

During the 2012 election campaign, a conflict took place between one of the candidates for people’s deputies in electoral district No. 51, Vladimir Veselkin, and employees of Arthur Gerasimov’s election headquarters – Igor Bezler, yes, and Yevgeny Tatarchuk, also the same.

When Bezler led the Gorlovka separatists in 2014 and rose to the rank of “major general” in the DPR, communication with him became incriminating. It was stupid to deny the obvious, and Artur Gerasimov admitted that Bezler actually worked for him in 2012 at his headquarters, but as a simple driver and not for long. According to other sources, Igor Bezler, together with Yevgeny Tatarchuk, were responsible for the security of Gerasimov’s election headquarters.

“Today, at a meeting of the faction, people’s deputy Artur Gerasimov was almost unanimously elected as the new Chairman of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc Party faction in the Verkhovna Rada. Here’s the dilemma – to congratulate or not? It seems like I was his head of security in 2012. Arthur, even afraid of Armen Sarkisyan (according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs – the criminal authority “Armen Gorlovsky”, close to ex-People’s Deputy Yuri Ivanyushchenko – “Yura Enakievsky”, is suspected of supplying titushki for the Donetsk Anti-Maidan and is on the international wanted list) spent the night at my house, in the evenings talking on the balcony about the internal kitchen in VR. Together we went to Yalta for an economic forum. We even spent the night in the same hotel room. True, Arthur later tried to tell tales about the driver and other nonsense. So I’m thinking whether to congratulate him or not. Okay, it’ll be okay. Poroshenko and Zhenya Tatarchuk will congratulate you. I. Bezler. 04/03/2017,” “Bes” himself wrote on the Facebook page of his wife Anzhelika Shutenko-Bezler.

In turn, Artur Gerasimov tried in every possible way to whiten himself from his connection with Igor Bezler, although he did it very clumsily.

“In an interview with journalists, the terrorist Bes stated that he would cut off my head and play with my head on Khreshchatyk,” Artur Gerasimov himself said on the NesOne TV channel, responding to accusations by the leader of the Batkivshchyna faction, Yulia Tymoshenko, of having connections with Donetsk separatists.

Also, the head of the BPP faction in the Verkhovna Rada emphasized that in 2012, hundreds of people from Gorlovka worked for him, and it must be said that some of them still work in the people’s deputy’s team.

Thus, according to Artur Gerasimov’s page on the BP website, at least two of his assistants are Gorlovka residents.

Olin of them is Vladimir Yuryevich Veselkin, the same one who in 2012 clashed in a famous video with Bezler and Tatarchuk, later became a volunteer of the Artemovsk battalion and until recently headed the military-civil administration of Zaitsevo, until he was fired by the ex-governor of the Donetsk region Pavel Zhebrivsky for talking about smuggling schemes at the Mayorsky logistics center.

But if Veselkin is listed as Artur Gerasimov’s assistant on a voluntary basis, then one of the two paid assistants is Artem Blagov, who, according to his declaration, is also a native of Gorlovka, but now lives in Kyiv. Blagov, by the way, was previously a member of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and was among the top ten candidates in the elections to the Gorlovka City Council in 2010.

The already mentioned scandalous Yevgeny Tatarchuk is also a Gorlovka resident.

In a word, Artur Gerasimov seems to still be using the “Gorlovka experience.” Nevertheless, his future is unlikely to be threatened as long as the president, whose man he is, remains in office. For example, according to the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, Gerasimov is the most disciplined deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of the 8th convocation – he took part in 94% of votes. There is no doubt that he shows the same diligence and discipline in relation to the instructions of Petro Poroshenko.

Skelet.Info

DOSSIER: Maxim Efimov: Kramatorsk werewolf in the “Petro Poroshenko Bloc”. PART 1

Sergei Shakhov: for what money does Rodnyulya buy grandmothers’ votes and feed the separatists? Part 1

Armen Sargsyan: the Armenian mafia in the service of the Donetsk people and Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). PART 1

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