Former head of the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine Alexander Danylyuk: an elusive liar

Obsequious officials and reliable executors of corruption schemes do not leave with a change of power, they are inherited by new bosses. Before Euromaidan, Alexander Danilyuk provided his services Levochkin and Yanukovych, immediately after him he began to provide them Lozhkin And Poroshenkoand then took over the baton as head of the Ministry of Finance from the scandalous Natalia Yareskowith whom he had known for almost two decades. Danilyuk is in great demand among everyone, but his high patrons are silent about what his talent is.

A year ago, in April 2016, an offshore scandal broke out around the newly appointed Minister of Finance. It turned out that Alexander Danilyuk “forgot” to indicate in his declaration two foreign companies in which he had worked as a director at least a year earlier. Radical MP Oleg Lyashko claimed that these companies were offshore and demanded the resignation of the newly appointed minister. Danilyuk first publicly stated that he had nothing to do with offshore companies, then claimed that these companies are not offshore companies, and then admitted that he once worked as a director in two Cypriot and one Caymanian companies, but since 2010 he is no longer involved in business. And all three times he shamelessly lied!

However, the scandal did not continue. First, NABU, with amazing efficiency, issued a conclusion that Danylyuk’s actions did not constitute a crime, because he lied not in an electronic, but in a paper declaration (and according to the law, liability arises for unreliable data in an electronic one). And then the scandal was happily forgotten, and the new head of the Ministry of Finance continued his “reform activities”, with the image of a crystal-honest professional. After all, in the end, Danylyuk’s “forgetfulness” was not the most terrible crime compared to the facts of monstrous corruption in the leadership of Ukraine, and public lies became practically the norm in him. However, these scandalous companies turned out to be trees for which no one saw the forest.

Alexander Danilyuk

Yaresko pod Grib

Alexander Alexandrovich Danilyuk was born on July 22, 1975 in the Moldavian city of Grigoriopol, into a family of Soviet scientific intelligentsia. By the early 70s, they moved to Kyiv, where then his father Alexander Petrovich became the director of the state enterprise Academproekt at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and his mother Lyudmila Vladimirovna taught cybernetics at the Kiev Polytechnic (now the National Technical University). This makes him even more similar to his namesake, Alexander Vladimirovich Danilyuk (human rights activist, adviser to the Minister of Defense), whose father was also a scientist, but his mother worked as a doctor.

Next was studying in the physics and mathematics class of school No. 15, entering the National Technical University (with the patronage of my mother), and receiving a diploma from the Kiev Institute of Investment Management. All this is in his biography, which for some reason no one pays attention to – but it simply sparkles with very interesting facts! Well, for example, what I noted Skelet.Info: Danilyuk received a diploma from the Institute of Management in 1995 (at the age of 20), and this despite the fact that this institute itself opened in 1994, and you had to study there for at least 2 years (on the basis of secondary vocational or incomplete higher education). But Danilyuk received a diploma in electrical engineering from his mother’s National Technical University (NTU) in 1998. Here, everything seems to be in order with the timing, but the question arises: how does he manage to combine his studies at NTU with his studies at the Institute of Management (1994-95), and then with work in commercial companies? Did you study by correspondence? At the evening?

But the most interesting thing is Alexander Danilyuk’s first place of work. In 1995, apparently, immediately after receiving a diploma from the Institute of Management (externally, in a year?), Danilyuk received a position as a broker in the investment company TEKT. Which was created by a raider who had just arrived in Ukraine from Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) Vadim Gribwho immediately set about capturing the Ukrainian market. And the TEKT company, which hired young Danilyuk (with a dubious diploma), was a direct instrument of Grib’s raider operations. What role did Alexander Danilyuk play in this? This is a good question! What is known is that TEKT brokers in the mid-90s participated in operations to purchase privatization certificates from the population, acquire blocks of shares in privatized enterprises, seize shares, and resell shares.

Vadim Grib

However, just a few months later, Alexander Danilyuk jumped from ordinary brokers to deputy director of B.A.S. LLC. Ltd., and a few months later to the position of head of department at Alfa Capital CJSC. What kind of companies they were and who they owned remained unknown – information about them was not publicly available. But, taking into account the peculiarities of business in the 90s, as well as the possible involvement of these companies in the structures of Vadim Grib, it cannot be ruled out that these were “one-day companies” used for one-time schemes of raider takeovers or laundering and withdrawal of money from the country.

Then Danilyuk worked for several months with his father at the Academproekt State Enterprise. At the same time, it is not known who exactly, he only mentioned that it was “in his specialty.” But which one? Electrical engineer or manager? But in 1998, an interesting turn took place in Danilyuk’s biography: he got a job in the Ukrainian branch of the American investment fund Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), created by the US government for promising investments in the economies of Eastern Europe. Danilyuk received a position there as a deputy investment manager, but that same manager was then… Natalya Yaresko, who then still bore her husband’s surname Figlus. This is how their fruitful acquaintance began! And they worked well together, judging by the fact that a year later Danilyuk, under the patronage of Figlus-Jaresko, went to pursue a more serious economics degree at the Indiana University Business School. Not Harvard, of course; by American standards, this university is considered “public”, but by the standards of Ukraine in the late 90s, it was, of course, just an elite academy!

And again, strangeness: after graduating in 2001, Danilyuk returned to Kyiv and worked for about a year as vice president of the Avechurs company. So, the strange thing is that there is no information, even fragmentary, about this company on the Internet; it is mentioned exclusively as a place of work in the biography of Alexander Danilyuk – and that’s all! But 2001-2002 is not the mid-90s, and information about the companies operating then was preserved on the Internet, at least in the form of brief background information (address, phone number, etc.). If it is not there, this is one of two things: either all data about it was carefully erased, or it was a shell company that was not “shown” in public information at all. But what did she do, and what did Alexander Danilyuk do in it?

What is hidden in offshore companies?

The biographies of Ukrainian oligarchs are much more informative and transparent than the biographies of top managers and officials like Alexander Danylyuk – they do not cut out whole chunks from them and do not hide their main business. And here there are continuous mysteries! For example, we read further: in 2002-2005, Danilyuk worked for the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company, moving between London and Moscow. How he got there and what exactly he was doing also remains unknown. But in 2005-2006, Alexander Danilyuk returned briefly to Kyiv, where he was appointed advisor to the prime minister Yekhanurov – this was his first experience working in the Ukrainian government (at least behind his back).

After the “parliamentary coup” and Yekhanurov’s resignation, Danilyuk again went to London (his family already lived there), where he began a new job as the head of the investment fund “Rurik Investment”. It was in the next three years that Danilyuk created and headed those companies with which he was later “reproached” in the spring of 2015: Rurik Real Estate Investment Limited, which deals with real estate, and its subsidiary CEEInvestments & Advisory LLP. Both companies were registered in the spring of 2007 in Britain and were not offshore. However, six months earlier, on October 16, 2006, the eponymous “Rurik Real Estate Investment Limited” (registration number ΗΕ 186282), which is already a classic “offshore”, was registered in Cyprus. Finally, the company “Rurik Investment” (USREOU 4763140) was registered in Kyiv, whose office was located at 12 Melnikova Street. Its founders were Alexander Danilyuk, David John Andrew and Charles Grant Bray, as well as the Cyprus company “HOGSMILL INVESTMENTS LIMITED” – which, in turn, is owned by Alexander Danilyuk and David John Andrew.

Let us add: the co-owners of these Cypriot companies are also the Cypriot companies “TRIDENT TRUST COMPANY (CYPRUS) LIMITED” (registered back in 1989 under the number ΗΕ 34265) and “STANDGUARD LIMITED” (registered in the summer of 1996 under the number ΗΕ 79647). The first of them seems to be the so-called. a licensed depository for the storage of bearer shares – since there are depositories with similar names in the Virgin and Cayman Islands. It should be noted that bearer shares placed in offshore depositories are not just one of the mechanisms of corruption, they are also used by criminal syndicates, including drug traffickers and terrorists. Of course, this does not mean that Alexander Danilyuk is connected with the international mafia, but in any case, the check of his companies should have been deeper and more thorough. The same system with three Rurik companies (in Ukraine, Cyprus and Britain) looks like a typical Ukrainian scheme used to evade taxes and transfer currency abroad. NABU limited itself to a formal reply regarding the legality of filling out declarations, without even thinking about delving into Danilyuk’s business.

But these are not the only companies of Alexander Danilyuk! In addition to the mysterious company in the Cayman Islands, the name of which he never revealed, journalists stated the minister’s involvement in the company “New Race LTD” (perhaps the name was translated incorrectly by them), registered in London in 2006, in which Danilyuk’s wife worked as a director Olga.

Interestingly, the announcement of Danilyuk’s involvement in these companies caused serious consternation among their owners, and they even began to edit their data. First, the description of the campaign services was adjusted on the Rurik Real Estate Investment website, removing from there proposals for the purchase of land in Ukraine. And then in April 2016, Alexander Danilyuk was retroactively fired from the post of director of Rurik Real Estate Investment (setting the dismissal date on May 22, 2015) and hired manager of CEEInvestments & Advisory LLP (December 31, 2015). Why back? Because on the website where data about companies was published, including journals of their history, records of Danilyuk’s dismissal appeared only in April 2016, and not in May and December 2015.

In a word, it turned out completely ugly, especially since Danilyuk continued to lie and claim that he had not been involved in business since 2010, that in British companies unscrupulous partners who had not followed his orders simply “forgot to fire” him. But for some reason Skelet.Info one got the impression that he was not at all afraid of being accused of violating the ban on government officials doing business (especially international business). Rather, Danilyuk did not want the matter to develop and the details of his business to become unknown, and the names of his business partners to be named. So is it by chance that NABU, controlled on the one hand by Bankova and on the other by the Americans, so quickly declared Natalia Yaresko’s successor and Poroshenko’s confidant innocent?

Alexander Danilyuk: Imitation of rapid reforms

Alexander Danilyuk’s assurances that he had not been involved in business since 2010 (which turned out to be a lie) were understandable: after all, since September 2010, he headed the Coordination Center for the Implementation of Economic Reforms, which was controlled by the Presidential Administration and its then head Sergei Levochkin. Let’s say more, Levochkin was the initiator of its creation, together with the director of Akhmetov’s Foundation for Effective Management, Natalya Izosimova.

Danilyuk was even given a team of 30 young “professionals,” whose main merit was a good knowledge of English and a diploma from Western economic schools (or experience working in Western companies). Moreover, Levochkin registered them as “freelance” workers at the Coordination Center, but formally they were employees of the “Fund for Economic Reforms,” which Lyovochkin controlled and paid them considerable fees from there. But for what? Indeed, from the very beginning, the work of the Coordination Center was called a fiction, a performance staged by Yanukovych and Lyovochkin to deceive the West and create the appearance of a pro-European course for Ukraine. Later, Danylyuk would complain that his proposals and reform programs were not even considered by Yanukovych and Azarov. But here’s the question: why then did Danylyuk head this center until February 2014, even after Yanukovych abandoned the Association? Is it because he was able to very successfully combine work at the reform center under the Presidential Administration and at a British-Cypriot-Ukrainian company buying real estate in Ukraine?

Danilyuk was dismissed from the post of head of the center only on February 24, 2014, by the new government. And on July 17 of the same year, the new President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, by decree No. 598/2014, appointed Danilyuk as his representative in the Cabinet of Ministers. The reason for this new high rise remains unknown, but Skelet.Info has information that Danylyuk connected his numerous old connections for this purpose, and agreed with Poroshenko on something important – and this was not at all a plan for the next reforms. And on September 25, 2015, the President, by decree No. 562/2015, appointed Danilyuk as deputy head of his Administration. Let us emphasize: at this time Danilyuk was still working (or at least listed) as a director and manager of his British and Cypriot companies, which became known only in April 2016, when Danilyuk replaced his former boss Yareska as head of the Ministry of Finance. The scandal turned out to be more “moral” than corruption, because its emphasis was shifted to not mentioning Danilyuk’s companies in his declaration, and he explained everything by forgetfulness. And yet, this was “ugly” even by the standards of the Ukrainian authorities, whose officials by that time already adhered to the tradition of transferring their companies to relatives. In addition, the issue of the dual Ukrainian-British citizenship of Alexander Danylyuk was repeatedly raised – which he, of course, denied. But who will believe someone who has lied more than once? Is it NABU?!

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

Subscribe to our channels at Telegram, Facebook, CONT, VK And YandexZen – Only dossiers, biographies and incriminating evidence on Ukrainian officials, businessmen, politicians from the section CRYPT!