Kolomoisky must have cursed the day he convinced Volodymyr Zelensky to run for president three times. As a result, the ungrateful Pinocchio deprived his dad Carlo of almost all property in Ukraine, and Kolomoisky has nothing to do: if you trample on Zelensky, they will immediately be extradited across the ocean, into the clutches of American justice. In fact, Kolomoisky was locked up in Ukraine, and he is forced to sit quietly. And, meanwhile, they continue to undress him, depriving him of the fattest assets, such as Ukrnaftobureniye.
The day before, the Pechersky District Court of the Ukrainian capital seized with the transfer to the Asset Tracing and Management Agency (ARMA) Kolomoisky’s gas production company Ukrnaftobureniye, which Benya owned on shares with two bigwigs, Vitaliy Khomutynnik and Pavel Fuks. This is one of the largest mining companies in the country (and today, perhaps, the largest) – according to the results of the past year, its profit amounted to 3.7 billion hryvnia (and the year before last, the profit was even higher – about 5.6 billion). The intrigue is that Benya was deprived of such a fat piece practically without any real reason for that – simply at the request of two English firms. In the case of Ukrnaftobureniye, Benya did not press other owners (as usual), did not give bribes and did not use budget funds.
In 2010, Ukrnaftobureniye received a license to develop the country’s largest Sakhalin gas condensate field, the one in the Krasnokutsky district of the Kharkiv region. Its proven reserves are estimated at $5.5 billion. The license was issued to Kolomoisky by Golden Derrick LLC (and not by the state company Nadra Ukrainy, which by that time had left the founders of Golden Derrick and tried to close this shop, controlled by the then Minister of Agriculture Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk and a manager from Viktor Yanukovych’s deck, Eduard Stavitsky ). Later it turned out that by 2011, Golden Derrick LLC had issued two dozen special permits for subsoil use on a non-competitive basis.
In general, under Yanukovych, the license from Ukrnaftoburenia was taken away. Kolomoisky was going to sue, but came up with a more interesting combination – he invited two British companies, Ariana Business Ltd and Ares Systems Ltd, to the shareholders of the mining company. There were rumors that these companies had some common interests with Yanukovych. In December 2012, these two structures bought a 45 percent stake in Ukrnaftoburinia from the offshore company Deripon Comercial Ltd, controlled by Kolomoisky’s Privat, and the problems resolved themselves. The Sakhalin field, in fact, remained with Kolomoisky.
And after the Maidan of 2014, Kolomoisky tried to get rid of the British imposed by Yanukovych, and for this he attracted new owners, Khomutynnik and Fuchs, to Ukrnaftoburenia. In 2017, Golden Derrick LLC again began issuing permits for the use of subsoil – they say that thanks to Fuchs’ connections (67 percent of Golden Derrick allegedly belonged at that time to the offshore Hartlog Limited, which Fuchs could control) with Petro Poroshenko. And now, allegedly “thrown” by Benya, the British are seeking the restoration of their rights.