In recent days, a lot has been written about one of the contenders for the post of chief postmaster of Ukraine, Dmitry Nikitin. Dmitry Nikitin is a resident of Odessa, known in his hometown for endless scandals in the housing and communal services sector. It is unclear what this provincial figure has to do with the post office.
For a whole year now, Nikitin has been actively pushing Nikitin to the position of director of the State Enterprise Ukrposhta by Yatsenyuk’s ally Alexander Malin. He is also a resident of Odessa, now works as an adviser to the Prime Minister. Under Yanukovych, Malin was the vice-governor of the Odessa region, for which he was included in the lustration list. Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Odessa resident Alexander Malin have been friends for a long time. In 2009, Malin became a party member of Yatsenyuk and headed the Odessa “Front of Change”. It was in those years that Malina and Nikitin were united by their love for dubious transactions – the Odessa media constantly reproached both of them for corruption. There is a lot of information on the Internet about the astronomical amounts of kickbacks and bribes that Vice-Governor Malin accepted while supervising the construction sector of the Odessa region, about various scams, about his own luxurious fleet of vehicles, about large plots of land and expensive real estate.
In 2012, Dmitry Nikitin and his companies Avers LLC and GERTS LLC became involved in a corruption scheme to remove the Magnolia children’s sanatorium from state ownership, along with 3.5 hectares of land near the sea. Knowledgeable people say that it probably would not have happened without Malin’s support.
Dmitry Nikitin
And Dmitry Nikitin, being the deputy chairman of the Odessa Regional Council and one of the founders of the HERZ company, became famous in Odessa for being able to make this company a monopolist, through which all payments from Odessa residents for utilities passed. From each payment, HERZ kept 2.4% for himself. This is an incredibly profitable business, given the billion-dollar turnover in housing and communal services. Experts calculated that up to 30 million hryvnia was flowing into the accounts of the HERZ company every month. Another Nikitin company, Avers LLC, also carried out a simple but profitable business. This installation company installed heat meters in houses, bought thermal energy from Teplokommunenergo and resold it to housing and communal services. That is, she was an intermediary between two utility companies. This continued until it became clear that Dmitry Nikitin’s gasket to Avers LLC attributed extra gigacalories, after which a scandal occurred and this analogue of the Horns and Hooves company disappeared from the information field for some time. However, Dmitry Nikitin still works at Avers LLC as a “development” director.
These are the “achievements” this provincial entrepreneur has. Perhaps in Odessa such activities are received with a bang, but what does Ukrposhta have to do with it? Where is Ukrposhta and where is Nikitin? For what merits did the Ministry of Infrastructure nominate a candidate for the position of head of the state postal operator?
There can only be two correct answers:
1. Money.
2. Yatsenyuk’s request.
Whatever the answer is correct, the Ministry of Infrastructure will get into a scandal anyway, because now the minister will have to explain why he is promoting to the post of general director of Ukrposhta a person who is not suitable for this position either by professional or moral qualities.
Was it not enough for Minister Andrey Pivovarsky to have scandals with the appointment of heads of Ukrzaliznytsia, ports and airports? And now he has nominated a person with a dubious reputation, no managerial experience and absolutely no experience in the postal sector to the position of head of a strategic enterprise.
The candidacy of Nikitin and four other applicants has yet to be considered by the appointment commission of the Ministry of Economic Development, and we hope that it will not be guided by the “criteria” by which Nikitin was nominated by the Ministry of Infrastructure. And whoever ultimately becomes the head of Ukrposhta, Andrey Pivovarsky must answer for this adventure and explain what guided him when nominating such strange candidates.
Valentin Ivanchenko, for SKELET-info
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