Kholodov Andrey: Tobacco captain of Zelensky’s team. PART 2

CONTINUED. BEGINNING: Andrey Kholodov: Tobacco Captain of Zelensky’s Team. PART 1

Wives, fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law of Andrey Kholodov

It is known that in 2006 Andrey Kholodov married Ekaterina Shakhovskaya, with whom they are raising five children together, and that this is already his second marriage. But for some reason he hides the name of his first wife. Nevertheless, the earth is full of rumors – claiming that his first love was Antonina Kholodova (born in 1974), née Buryak. And that she was some kind of relative of Igor Buryak – the former head of the directorate for the construction and maintenance of transport facilities and auxiliary infrastructure of the Kyivpastrans enterprise. This is the same Buryak who, after his dismissal in 2014, robbed his own office, taking documents and computer equipment from there.

The former director had something to hide, because Buryak was deeply involved in corruption. Including in the tobacco business of Andrey Kholodov, for which Buryak provided space at public transport stops – that’s how his tobacco kiosks began! And the kiosks were manufactured at the Kiev ZAO EFKON (EDRPOU 16290649), where Kholodov had his share, and under which in 2004 EFKON-Okna LLC (EDRPOU 32960203) was created, engaged in the production of building structures from metal-plastic. According to the information available to Skeleton.Info information, this LLC has been engaged in a hostile takeover and absorption of the CJSC that it had ruined since 2012.

As Kholodov himself once said, up to 90% of all Kyiv Soyuzpechat kiosks and several hundred other small capital MAFs were Efkon’s. However, he keeps silent about how many of these kiosks that sold cigarettes he controlled.

Until the fall of 2019, the owner of EFCON-Windows was Andrey Kholodov himself, and after receiving the mandate, he transferred the company to his younger brother, Maxim Kholodov. He also owns a number of companies, including Albali LLC (40137876), Favorit-M LLC (32158802), Istoki ChP (32981820), and Era Company LLC. He also controls Tabak Industrial LTD LLC (41882098) through his partner in these companies, Lesya Vasilchenko. It is worth noting that Lesya Vasilchenko, among other things, is now is also an assistant MP Andrey Kholodov on a permanent paid basis. But in Elite Rent Alliance LLC (38905745) and Ukraine Real Estate (40197909), Maxim Kholodov’s partner was his brother’s mother-in-law Stella Shakhovskaya, mother of Ekaterina Shakhovskaya. In fact, she is the creator of the Stella Shakhovskaya chain of salons and boutiques, where she then took her daughter as a co-owner and leading designer.

Ekaterina Shakhovskaya and Andrey Kholodov

Although Kateryna Shakhovskaya has been promoted for many years as a designer of wedding dresses and organizer of lavish celebrations, Kyiv residents remember her more for the accident that occurred on the evening of November 10, 2010 (right on Police Day, which was cancelled in 2015) in the center of Kyiv. A Bentley (license plate AA 7777 IA), flying along Khreshchatyk at a crazy speed, crashed into the intersection with Proreznaya Street and crashed into a Mercedes turning at the signal of a traffic controller. The impact turned the heavy Mercedes, knocked down the traffic controller (he was hospitalized with fractures) and threw the Bentley into the oncoming lane, where it hit several more cars.

As it turned out, Kateryna Shakhovskaya was in the Bentley, and she received minor injuries (a broken nose and rib) as a result of the accident, since she was saved by the airbag. Andrey Kholod immediately arrived at the scene, accompanied by Batkivshchyna MP Ruslan Bohdan and Party of Regions member Oleksiy Zhuravko, and began to “sort out” the situation. On their initiative, an investigative group of 15 (!) traffic police officers was created, which diligently falsified the facts.

Ruslan Bogdan

As a result, it was announced at the level of the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that Ekaterina Shakhovskaya was only a passenger in the Bentley, but a certain Vladimir Moskaluk (an old man from Irpen) was “appointed” as the reckless driver. And even then, he was almost acquitted by the fact that the traffic inspector allegedly directed traffic too quickly and incomprehensibly. After which, most of the videos with the accident disappeared from YouTube, and materials describing the incident in detail began to disappear from the media. By now, only one large one remains article on “Obozrevatel”“, as well as clippings copied just in case. And any attempt by journalists to return to this incident causes Kholodov to have a nervous breakdown.

Tobacco smoke of the fatherland

In the party list of “Servant of the People” Andrey Kholodov received the “privileged” 22nd place, which guaranteed him a mandate no matter the outcome of the elections. And he wisely left the ranks of founders and managers of his companies, including OOO “Tekam Plus” (EDRPOU 36017621), and also cleaned up his past. It would seem that he would be able to enter power practically blameless, but… Kholodov almost failed at the very start.

First of all, he has dual citizenship discoveredand this was not just a fact, but an official statement by a representative of the Central Election Commission. True, the public was not informed of the exact color of his second passport. But it was obvious, since, secondly, information appeared that in the period 2013-2018, Andriy Kholodov lived mainly in Vienna, in a house on Lainzer Strasse, worth 6 million euros – registered to Kateryna Shakhovskaya. The company “Solomia Trading GmbH” is also registered in her name in Vienna, and her wedding dress salon also operates. And next to their house, a few minutes’ walk away, is the luxurious mansion of Dmitry Firtash. Journalists even sent a request to the Border Service asking for official data on how long exactly Kholodov was outside of Ukraine – after all, if more than three months in a row or 180 days a year, he could not be a candidate for people’s deputy.

But the Border Service ignored the request, since Zelensky had already become president, and his “confidant” Andriy Bohdan took the place of the head of the Office. Kholodov was taken into the “Servant of the People” not just like that, but as an important member of the forming “Kyiv team of Zelensky”, which was tasked with taking power in the capital – that is, “overthrowing” Vitaliy Klitschko and replacing him with his “reliable person”. Apparently, the “reliability” of Kholodov, as one of the candidates for the post of head of the Kyiv City State Administration, was bought both by the mandate of the people’s deputy and the faction’s vote for his amendments to bill No. 1049. That is why both Razumkov and Bohdan, and Zelensky himself, so diligently turned a blind eye to Kholodov’s dual citizenship, residence in Austria and tobacco schemes. The finale of this election story was a scandal raised by Mikhail Brodsky (one of the owners of the site “Obozrevatel”): he claimed that for publicly “exposing” Kholodov he was threatened with the destruction of his business.

However, Andrei Kholodov spent time not only in Vienna. According to his data, Skeleton.Infothere is also real estate in Cyprus – and a permanent residence permit on this island, which is received by those who have paid at least 300 thousand euros for this real estate. Well, as journalists of the program “Schemes” found out, Kholodov’s offshore companies are registered in Cyprus, through which he carries out his tobacco business. In particular, this is “Reineweg LTD”, to which the Ukrainian LLC “Kyiv Market Solution” (39931708) is registered, which is the owner of almost 600 Kyiv tobacco kiosks.

Kholodov’s Cyprus “hut”

Also involved in Kholodov’s schemes were the companies “Florentino” (39746328), of which he was the owner until the summer of 2019 – now it has been re-registered to a trusted person Natalia Doroshenko, who also owns OOO “Intertabaco” (retail trade in cigarettes), and OOO “City Trading Company” (41868452), through which wholesale purchases of tobacco products are carried out. There is also OOO “Luxury Prime” (38915690), which recruits personnel for tobacco kiosks, whose director and owner Oleg Dunaevsky worked with Kholodov at “Tekam Plus”.

Andrey Kholodov wants to convince Ukrainian voters that since he personally “unregistered” himself from the beneficiaries and managers of these companies, he no longer has anything to do with the tobacco business. Well, apparently he considers Ukrainians to be idiots or “cattle that will swallow everything”! This is already obvious. But still, it is necessary to add that Kholodov’s plans to reshape the Ukrainian tobacco market are much more large-scale and… dangerous than we were told.

The point is not only that Kholodov has managed to increase the margin (profit) for his companies by reducing deductions to the budget from each pack of cigarettes. In fact, he had previously “earned” quite well from the fact that his kiosks sold “left” cigarettes, bypassing excise duties and taxes altogether. The point here is different: Kholodov is part of a group of “tobacco mafia” whose goal is to simply kill Ukrainian tobacco factories that produce products according to “white” schemes, that is, those that work honestly. And to replace their cigarettes with “illegal” ones, produced in excess of accounting (for example, from the Lviv factory) and contraband ones – coming through channels controlled by him from Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) and the “LDNR”. After all, the fewer legal excisable cigarettes on the market and the more “left” ones, the greater the profit of Kholodov’s companies will be.

By the way, it seems that a serious war is raging between the clans of the “tobacco mafia” over the Lviv tobacco factory, which has been part of many tobacco schemes for many years. Evidence of this is powerful impact Andrey Kholodov against the head of the State Customs Service Maksym Nefedov. It would seem that they did not share – contraband flows? But it is worth remembering that Nefedov, through his brother-in-law Andrey Dulik, is connected with the Lviv “customs mafia”, which has long been feeding on the schemes of the Lviv tobacco factory, which is Skeleton.Info spoke in detail in the article about Sergey Verlanov. Thus, if we begin to unravel this whole tangle, the matter will turn out to be much larger than six hundred capital kiosks!

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

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