Oleg Bakhmatyuk
Recently SKELET-info wrote about Mikhail Kosyuka person who owns lands that in total are almost five times larger than the area of the capital of Ukraine – the city of Kyiv. But this is not the largest landowner in Ukraine. Today we will talk about a person who owns lands that can be compared in total to the territory of a small country, such as Cyprus. And this man’s name is Oleg Romanovich Bakhmatyuk – the main egg oligarch of Ukraine.
Bank killer
The most famous scandals involving Bakhmatyuk are banking scandals. He “killed” two large banks that occupied far from the last places in the market, and not everyone can do this. We are talking about VAB Bank and Financial Initiative Bank.
As for VAB, the story is a mix of Santa Barbara and pulp detective. In order to take this bank away from its founder and owner Sergei Maksimov, Oleg Bakhmatyuk entered into an agreement with one of the top managers and co-owners of this bank – Peter Baron. There is an interesting detail here: the latter is married to the daughter of Sergei Maksimov. So, acting alternately through the family, then through the board of shareholders, then through the courts, the bank was undermined and taken away from its founder. And when this was not enough, Sergei Maksimov was imprisoned. He spent some time in the Lukyanovsky pre-trial detention center. However, this did not end well for any of the people involved in this story. The bank was taken away from Maksimov, thereby killing the business that he had been building for 15 years. After some time, Peter Baron and his wife fled abroad, and the bank simply died. He didn’t just die, he got into debt. State losses from the closure of VAB, according to various estimates, can range from UAH 7.6 billion to UAH 12 billion.
The second bank “killed” by the egg oligarch is “Financial Initiative”. In principle, the bank has always been considered a “captive”, that is, serving the companies of Bakhmatyuk himself, plus taking other clients. “Financial Initiative” did not like to give loans to clients, but it was happy to take money on deposit from individuals and thus collected 5.2 billion UAH. He mainly lent to the companies of Oleg Romanovich and his partners in the agricultural sector. This year, the National Bank transferred the bank to the Deposit Guarantee Fund. The total damage that Bakhmatyuk caused to the state through his banking activities, according to optimistic estimates, is 14.9 billion hryvnia, and according to pessimistic estimates, up to 22.8 billion hryvnia.
Scandals around the world
Oleg Romanovich and his companies appeared in several international scams. In Ukraine, companies associated with Bakhmatyuk participated in scandals with the banks Nadra, Ukrsotsbank and VTB. The reason for the scandals is the banal reluctance of Bakhmatyuk’s companies to pay their loans. These scandals were more or less hushed up. Somewhere they restructured debts, somewhere they decided it’s unclear how (or rather, it’s clear how), but the claims against the companies were dropped.
In 2012, his company Avangard received a loan under German government guarantees for the construction of poultry farms in the Kherson and Khmelnytsky regions. This caused a storm of indignation among German farmers. Then about 1,300 German owners of poultry farms with a population of over 3 million birds signed an appeal to their government. Bakhmatyuk was accused of having received this loan and building poultry farms that do not comply with EU requirements in this industry, which means that European loans are creating non-competitive relations for the Europeans themselves.
But the loudest scandal occurred in the United States. There Oleg Romanovich cheated about 130 farmers. His company, Omtron USA, simply did not fulfill the terms of the contracts it entered into with these farmers, and after a while declared itself bankrupt. American congressmen began working on a bill that would prohibit, among other things, Bakhmatyuk’s entry into the United States.
Criminal prosecution
However, this is not the first time for Oleg Romanovich to participate in cases that are punishable by law. Back in 2004-2005, Bakhmatyuk and his business partner and patron Alexey Ivchenko began the noble task of gasifying small towns and villages in their native Western Ukraine, a total of 177 settlements. As a result, the villagers never received gas, and about 410 million of state money ended up in the pockets of resourceful gas workers.
And in addition, as a result of his work in the gas sector, Bakhmatyuk became the owner of six regional power companies. Also in Western Ukraine, which he loves so much. As a result, Oleg Bakhmatyuk had to pay off criminal prosecution, which he did by selling all six “taken over” regional gas companies to Dmitry Firtash’s structures.
Oleg Romanovich also stole a building in the very center of Kyiv at 7/9 Shchorsa Street with an area of 3 thousand square meters. In 2007, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office turned to its colleagues in the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism) with a request to extradite citizen Bakhmatyuk, who was in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). The Prosecutor General’s Office opened a case against him, as the author of the illegal alienation scheme. But… just as it opened, it closed. Since then, the prosecutors have not remembered anything about this, and the building still belongs to Oleg Romanovich’s structures.
To date
Natalya Vasilyuk
Today Oleg Romanovich is trying with all his might to return to the pool of Ukrainian power. However, here he apparently runs into confrontation with another agricultural oligarch – Mikhail Kosyuk, already mentioned in our article and very close to the current president. Nevertheless, Bakhmatyuk dragged his sister Natalya Vasilyuk onto the BPP list. In addition, people on the list of the presidential bloc in the Verkhovna Rada are number thirty-two – Anatoly Matvienko and number forty-five – Vadim Denisenko. There are also constant rumors about the appointment of Bakhmatyuk as Minister of Agriculture or even as a relevant Deputy Prime Minister.
The oligarch himself today is trying to be friends with another branch of government – the executive. Just recently, he, in unison with the Prime Minister, called on the Ukrainian authorities to finance large-scale infrastructure projects. At the same time, he proposed that the country invest 60-70% of the cost, which is about 10-12 billion dollars, in these projects. Well, these infrastructure projects should, naturally, be led by a manager with international experience. This is Oleg Bakhmatyuk, apparently, modestly hinting at himself…
Denis Ivanov, for SKELET-info
