Igor Kolomoisky. 10 years later

In connection with current events, we suggest recalling one of the most striking interviews of Mr. Kolomoisky to the newspaper “Mirror of the week”given in 2005

Igor Kolomoisky: “I told Pinchuk: “Life is a supermarket, take what you want, but the checkout is in front”

All three Ukrainian billionaires – Akhmetov, Pinchuk and Kolomoisky – are almost the same age. The most public of them is the son-in-law of the ex-president. In the last year, Rinat Akhmetov has become relatively accessible. 42-year-old Igor Kolomoisky is the most private character in the upper caste of Ukrainian business. Three months of negotiations of varying intensity preceded the consent given by Igor Valerievich to the interview with ZN. Having finished the interview, we thought deeply… and asked the leader of the Privat group, after proofreading the material, to send us a text with a signature on each page. Kolomoisky agreed without hesitation: “I can confirm every word I say with both documents and witnesses”…

Igor Kolomoisky was born in Dnepropetrovsk. Metallurgical engineer by training. Graduated from the Dnepropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute. Has been in business since 1985. He is a member of the supervisory boards of the largest enterprises of the Privat group: Moskomprivatbank, NPK Neftekhimikprikarpattya, Ukrnafta. The group controls metallurgical and ferroalloy plants and monopoly positions on the Ukrainian manganese ore market. The assets include packages of five mining and processing plants. The group owns metal-ferroalloy production in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) and Romania. The total value of the enterprises of the group, the major shareholders of which are also Gennady Bogolyubov (Read more about him in the article Gennady Bogolyubov: what is the other half of “Privat” keeping quiet about?) and Alexey Martynov, according to very rough estimates, is estimated at one and a half billion dollars.

“A tough businessman who tries to defend his interests to the smallest detail. He often tends to revise the rules of the game during the game itself. Therefore, you should pay special attention to doing business with him. He is not public, but he is powerful and influential.” This is the opinion of his competitors about Igor Kolomoisky. Let us add on our own behalf that neither under the previous nor under the new government did Kolomoisky recognize dictates or authorities.

When Victor Pinchuk gets angry, he switches to a quiet, emphatically polite tone of communication, which sends shivers down the spine of his interlocutors. When Akhmetov gets angry, his light gray eyes turn black. What does Kolomoisky do when he gets angry? Now we know – he agrees to an interview…

— Igor Valerievich, first of all, could you tell our readers what the Privat Group is? Everyone says: “Privat”, “Privat”, a large financial and industrial group with interests in a lot of areas, with huge capital.” What property does the group own and in what areas are its main interests?

— I think that “Privat Group” is a phantom, a journalistic term. Reality is Privatbank, which has shareholders. Each of the major shareholders has other businesses in addition to banking. But all these businesses are not united and are not bound by economic and corporate responsibility. What journalists call the Privat group is not a holding company or a corporation. Here we cannot draw analogies with Interpipe, ISD or SCM.

— What do you personally own in Ukraine?

— I have about 30 percent of shares in Privatbank. I own other property through indirect, unaffiliated companies. Some of them are residents, some are not.

Gennady Bogolyubov owns 30 percent of Privatbank shares. Among the owners of the bank are Alexey Martynov, as well as the management of Privatbank.

In principle, there is a conditional distribution of supervision of business programs among Privat shareholders. Martynov primarily deals with ferroalloys, Bogolyubov is the president of Privatbank, this is his main workload, although there are many others. I deal more with corporate things, oil, and partly metallurgy.

– Some claim that Sergei Tigipko left Privatbank with a dowry that exceeded the amount formally required. Is this true?

– No, not like that. If Sergei Leonidovich had divorced the structure a little later, and not at the stage of market development, he would have received much more. But what’s done is done, and today he has nothing to do with Privat. In some small objects, where we have a small package and he has a larger one, we have maintained interaction. But these are not large-scale enterprises and are not even worth talking about.

— We have received information that in Italy, at the birthday party of Igor Surkis’s daughter, there was a dispute between you and the favorites of the previous government. You said that life was good under the new government, but they said it was bad. What were the parties’ arguments?

“It was not a serious discussion and it was not me who took part in it, but my friend.” And he really objected to his opponents, who claimed that life in Ukraine is very bad now: “Before, we could not participate in the competition for Krivorozhstal, but now we can.” And they told him that now people are in prison, to which he remarked: “There is a way out of prison, but you can’t leave the forest with a severed head”…

— How do you assess the economic situation in the country and its prospects?

— From the numbers, everything looks beautiful. But the standard of living of the population is very low, and this worries me. Although the reasons for the same rise in prices are overwhelmingly not internal, but external: energy resources are becoming more expensive, external market conditions are unfavorable for metallurgical products, which seriously impacts the budget. Although there are signs that the drop in metal prices is seasonal