Evgeniy Bakulin: Will the former figurehead of Naftogaz go to jail again? PART 1

Most likely not, because thanks to the efforts of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, he has turned into another elusive Joe. Unfortunately, instead of a real fight against corruption, Yuriy Lutsenko’s department is putting on another show for Ukrainians and the West, which again will have no denouement or finale. But Yevgeny Bakulin has something to answer for before the country he robbed, and not only for the notorious “Boyko towers.”

But the most astonishing thing is that Yuriy Boyko himself, whose name has been in the title of this scandalous case for years, has still not appeared before the Ukrainian justice system, remaining either untouchable or invisible to Lutsenko’s investigators. Moreover, now they are trying to rename this case “Yanukovych’s towers”, blaming all the main blame on the overthrown president, his entourage that fled, as well as the former head of Naftogaz – who, by the way, also fled long ago.

Shvonders and Sharikov

Bakulin Evgeny Nikolaevich was born on September 29, 1956 in the town of Kstovo in the Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) region. Then their family moved to the Ukrainian SSR, to Donbass, where after finishing school, young Zhenya Bakulin entered the Slavic Aviation Technical School of Civil Aviation. It was a calculated choice: although the school only trained technical personnel, studying there counted as military service.

However, some contradictory versions of his biography claim that he allegedly did not complete his studies at the school, and that in 1976-78 Bakulin was “in the troops.” Others claim that during this period he worked as assigned, in the airport technical service. From an economic point of view, Bakulin was not satisfied with such work, even though he specialized in fuel and lubricants. Sources Skeleton.Info It was reported that he even tried to “steal” something, but without success. As a result, having worked in his specialty for two years, Bakulin began to look for a new calling.

The next six years of his life are shrouded in a fog of omissions: his biography states that he worked as a simple worker at oil refineries. However, in the entire Donbass (even in the entire east of the Ukrainian SSR) there is only one oil refinery – Lisichansk, launched in 1976. And Bakulin’s biography states that he got a job there in 1984, as a senior installation operator. Did he travel all over the Union? Maybe. But the question of where and what Bakulin did between 1978 and 1984 remains open. There are even unconfirmed rumors that he allegedly served time for embezzlement (later expunging his conviction, like Yanukovych), where he met “authoritative people” who later played a big role in his future career.

But someone did promote Yevgeny Bakulin back in the 80s. Judge for yourself: a person without any special education (it is unlikely that he was taught oil cracking at the aviation technical institute), yesterday’s unskilled worker was appointed senior operator of the installation, where according to the staffing requirements he was supposed to have a higher technological education. Two years later he became deputy head of the shop, in 1991 head of the shop, and in 1993 even chief engineer of the enterprise! And this despite the fact that only in 1993 Yevgeny Bakulin received a fake diploma from the “Slavic International Institute of Business Management and Law” (a private university without a license, closed for violations in 1996), and only in 2004 a real diploma from the East Ukrainian University in the specialized “technology of fuel and hydrocarbon raw materials” (and even then in absentia, as a gift). One can’t help but ask: how did he manage the “cleaning up”, in the sense of such a complex and dangerous enterprise in all respects as the oil refinery? Who was this Shvonder who recommended him there?

Sources report that Yevgeny Bakulin’s first Shvonder was someone from the local “gasoline mafia”, already established in the 80s. Someone very influential, so that he first pushed his protégé to manage the workshop, and in 1993, seated Bakulin in the position of chief engineer and deputy chairman of the board of the Lisichansknefteorgsintez OJSC (LINOS), which was formed on the basis of the plant, for which he acquired the above-mentioned “manager” diploma. In the 90s, LINOS became a place where the interests of many groups clashed: Chechens (Dudaev’s emissaries), who had the support of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry behind them and were connected with Alexander Tretyakov (the future “orange oligarch”) tried to get in there, “Solntsevskaya” members tried to get in through their people in various Ukrainian groups (including “Kyiv-Donbass”) and Russian oil oligarchs, some international organized crime groups were opening channels through Latvian firms. The local “gasoline mafia” was, of course, not happy with such “guests”, but it had no choice: LINOS did not have its own sources of oil, and had to make deals with those who did. The deals were one-off, and the enterprise sometimes worked, sometimes stopped. LINOS was the center of the dirtiest oil schemes, not even corrupt, but openly criminal, and they could not do without the participation of Yevgeny Bakulin.

In this situation, in June 1999, Yuriy Boyko, a local celebrity who has been called the shadow master of the Lisichanek-Rubezhnoye-Severodonetsk region for several years, became the new CEO and chairman of the board. His origins are shrouded in mystery (he hides information about his parents and relatives), but Skeleton.Info It is known that he studied at the Moscow Chemical-Technological Institute named after D. I. Mendeleyev in the defense department of “organic nitrogen compounds”, and even in Soviet times made a rapid career at the Rubizhne plant “Zarya” (production of gunpowder, explosives, rocket fuel). Boyko had huge connections – in the CPSU, in the Soviet defense departments, in the KGB, and these connections stretched to Moscow.

Yuriy Boyko

So, until 1999, Yuriy Boyko was just one of the local “red directors”, but then his big connections started working. Boyko was taken out of the reserve personnel and began to be appointed to one key position or another. He headed LINOS – and a year later 67% of the company’s shares were sold to the Russian company TNK (now TNK-BP), which allowed the company to be relaunched and made Boyko a hero in the eyes of his workers. Having established the work of LINOS-TNK, Boyko left the plant to head Ukrtatnafta, and then Naftogaz – and here no one even hid the fact that Russian oil companies stood behind Boyko, and behind them – the Kremlin and the FSB (the “KGB” invested in oil shares since the early 90s). At the same time, Boyko, who had been promoted, became a link between his region and Kiev, as well as Moscow – which allowed him to become the head of the local elite, surpassing its previous leader Yuliy Yoffe. And instead of himself, he left Evgeny Bakulin as the chairman of the board of LINOS, as well as the executive director – with whom he not only worked well, but simply sang together. It was Boyko who became the second Shvonder for Bakulin, and Evgeny Nikolaevich’s further career was now built exclusively thanks to the patronage of Yuri Anatolyevich.

Evgeniy Bakulin at the helm of Naftogaz

In January 2002, Yuriy Boyko received the post of head of Naftogaz, and in August 2003, deputy minister of fuel and energy of Ukraine. He dragged his people with him to Kyiv, among whom was Yevgeny Bakulin. Boyko entrusted him with one of the most key posts in the fuel sector: general director of Ukrgazdobycha, the largest gas producing company in Ukraine. This was the time of big gas schemes. Within Ukraine, people close to the throne made fortunes on gas, and first of all on domestic gas supplied by Ukrgazdobycha. At the interstate level, there was a struggle for the main transit flow to Europe, which was a strategic goal of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). At that time, Ukraine purchased more than 50% of the volume of gas it consumed from Turkmenistan, which did not suit Moscow, which wanted to buy up and then resell Central Asian gas itself. Boyko’s role in this process was quite curious: on the one hand, he concluded contracts with Turkmenistan that were advantageous for Ukraine for gas supplies in exchange for barter payment (in goods and services), but on the other hand, he did not ensure that this payment was made – which later served as a pretext for a demarche by the Turkmen side. It was also Boyko who transferred the contract for the supply of Turkmen gas to the company RosUkrEnergo (since January 1, 2005), which was the brainchild of Gazprom and the then little-known oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who, according to Skeleton.Infostood Semyon Mogilevich himself.

But Boyko’s gas interests also directly affected the Lisichansk-Rubizhne-Severodonetsk region, where the largest enterprise was the Severodonetsk Azot Plant. The enterprise’s operations depended entirely on gas, which meant that Yuriy Boyko and Yevgeny Bakulin, who controlled the gas, effectively took control of Azot, and at the same time the city’s thermal power plant. In 2004, Azot was privatized: a closed joint-stock company of the same name was created, where the profitable workshops were transferred, and part of the enterprise’s shares were sold to Alex Rovt’s World White Chemical (a Ukrainian emigrant, a US citizen). At that time, informed people were talking about how Azot was actually divided into three: one share went to Rovt, who organized the sale of the products, another share went to the director of the plant, Kunchenko, and the “fathers of the city”, and the third to Boyko’s group, for gas supplies. And this was only one industrial region of the country!

All these schemes enraged the former “gas princess of Ukraine” (how much money was floating around!), and when Yulia Tymoshenko’s government was formed in March 2005, Boyko and Bakulin were immediately dismissed from their posts. But not for long: in August 2006, Boyko was appointed Minister of Fuel and Energy in Yanukovych’s government, and a month later, Bakulin was given back the post of head of Ukrgazdobycha and was added to it the acting chairman of the board of Ukrtransnafta. And in March 2007, Yevgeny Bakulin was appointed to the post of chairman of the board of Naftogaz, remaining in it until Tymoshenko’s second coming in December 2007. The media reported that Boyko personally lobbied Bakulin for this post as his one hundred percent man, while removing Volodymyr Sheludchenko, who was called Andriy Klyuyev’s man.

In March 2010, after Yanukovych’s victory, they both returned: Boyko to the post of Minister of Energy, and Yevhen Bakulin to the chair of the head of the board of Naftogaz. And along with Bakulin, his trusted man Gennady Yuryev returned – he was called Bakulin’s childhood friend, they worked together at LINOS, and then became friends with their families. Bakulin and Yuryev were involved in all of Naftogaz’s corruption schemes from 2010 to 2013. The two most famous episodes (because criminal cases were opened for them) are the case of the so-called “Boyko towers” and the case of Naftogaz’s contract with the Simferopol companies GazUkraina-Commerce and GazUkraina-Trading (both controlled by Kurchenko).

But little was said about the actual bankruptcy of Naftogaz, and if it was said, it was in the context of accusations against dishonest gas consumers – they allegedly did not pay well! The population was also declared guilty, as it allegedly consumed gas at “preferential prices”, although the tariffs of that time corresponded to the real cost of Ukrainian gas (with all taxes and margins). And the management of Naftogaz tried to cover these debts at the expense of budget subsidies. But what was the real structure of these debts? If you look at the reporting statistics of Naftogaz for 2012, you can see that gas consumers were completely unrelated, and the current tariffs were quite profitable. However, Naftogaz, in the person of its management, got carried away with “investing”, having taken out bank loans and carried out operations with Eurobonds. As a result, in 2012 Naftogaz owed Ukrainian and Russian banks 61.8 billion hryvnia (more than 8 billion dollars).

Debt of Naftogaz and its subsidiaries in 2012

This total debt was the result of several different scams. For example, in the case of the debt to Oschadbank, the state was simply “milked”, hoping to pay off this debt someday with the help of state subsidies. Ukrgazdobycha took a billion-dollar loan allegedly to pay salaries to its employees, claiming that Naftogaz was not transferring money for the extracted gas (where did it go?). Moreover, it took it from Nadra Bank (owned by Firtash) and Gazprombank – that is, from its most terrible competitors, who simply dreamed of getting their hands on Ukrainian gas production. Eurobonds were only called that because they were bought up by Ukrainian oligarchs and Russian companies, and the debt on them threatened Naftogaz with losing its status as a state company. Well, the most interesting thing was Naftogaz’s debt to Gazprombank. In 2012 alone, Bakulin’s department first returned his old loan in the amount of 12.388 billion hryvnia, and immediately took out a new one in the amount of 15.986 billion. The purpose of the loans was to pay for gas supplied by Gazprom, as was the case with the loan taken from the Russian bank VTB Capital. That is, Bakulin’s Naftogaz paid for Russian gas with Russian loans, implementing two of Putin (*criminal)’s plans at once: to export Russian gas for rubles, and to enslave Naftogaz in order to gain control of the Ukrainian GTS under Gazprom’s control.

Naftogaz debt structure in 2012

Naftogaz debt structure in 2012

Both plans were carried out with the diligent assistance of Energy Minister Yuriy Boyko, who regularly traveled to Moscow. In this case, everyone agreed that Bakulin was only carrying out Boyko’s orders and generally playing the role of a figurehead for Naftogaz. This was confirmed later, when criminal cases were opened, when Bakulin and his deputies were arrested, but Yuriy Boyko remained slippery and inaccessible to justice.

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

CONTINUATION: Bakulin Evgeniy: Will the former figurehead of Naftogaz go to jail again? PART 2

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