Leonid Kryuchkov and Dmitry Kryuchkov: “jackals” of Ukrainian raiding. PART 1

The Kryuchkov brothers received their nickname “jackals” ten years ago, when they became one of the most active, vile and greedy Ukrainian raiders. But they built their family business not only on pocketing and taking over enterprises. Financial scams, outright theft on an especially large scale, even corruption schemes on military orders for the ATO – the brothers did not disdain anything. And although the hand of the law has repeatedly tried to bring them to justice, each time the Kryuchkovs left it, substituting others in their place. But will this “thief’s luck” accompany them forever?

Leonid Kryuchkov and Dmitry Koryuchkov. Where did they come from?

Dmitry Vasilyevich Kryuchkov was born on June 10, 1978, and his younger brother Leonid Vasilyevich Kryuchkov on September 18, 1979, in the family of Vasily Fedorovich and Tatyana Leonidovna Kryuchkov. Judging by open databases, in the 80s their family moved from Lvov to Kyiv, where they settled in a new (at that time) 10-story building on Heroes of the Dnieper Street (Obolon). But this is where public information about their origin ends. Meanwhile, although independent Ukraine has become a country of great opportunities, they are available only to those who have great connections. Two young people, even if they were very savvy, ambitious and not burdened by the “chimera called conscience,” with all their desire, could not have made their way to the top so quickly without someone’s patronage.

But whose? At one time, information appeared in the media that allegedly their father Vasily Kryuchkov was the head of the defense industry department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and in the 90s he worked in the Expert Technical Committee under the Cabinet of Ministers. But as it turned out, then the journalists got it wrong: the Soviet party boss was Vasily Dmitrievich Kryuchkov, born in 1928 (he is still alive today), and had nothing to do with the brothers’ father Vasily Fedorovich Kryuchkov, born in 1948.

Then who? Only the brothers themselves and a narrow circle of their close friends know about this. Well, numerous rumors are quite contradictory. Some say that the brothers’ parents had some business with the Surkises, others that with Alexander Omelchenko, since the capital’s ex-mayor at one time worked as the general director of the Kievreconstruction State Enterprise, and among the Kryuchkov family business you can find many construction companies. These are Inter-Energo Stroy LLC, Levelline LLC, Kievremstroy LLC, United Construction Holding Company, Stroyinvesttrade LLC, Energoprom LLC, Neftegazstroy PJSC, Topinvest OJSC, Investstroy Project LLC “, LLC “Modern Asphalt Concrete Technologies” and others – and some of them are privatized fragments of the former state “Kievreconstruction”.

The management construction company Kiev Trading Group LLC is very interesting – the head of which is Vasily Kryuchkov (father), and the co-owners are Leonid Kryuchkov (younger son) and the rather well-known scandalous offshore company BEYROK FINANCE LIMITED. The founders of the latter are Gennady Ilyin, previously associated with the organized crime group of Boris Savlokhov, and now a person close to Petro Poroshenko. It was Ilyin, according to Skelet.Infoin 2015, he made sure that the then head of the SBU, Valentin Nalyvaichenko, who became interested in this company, again lost his job.

No less interesting is the role in the life of the Kryuchkov brothers of a certain Mikhail Viktorovich Novikov, who is their partner in a number of companies – for example, in Inter-Energo Trans LLC he is the holder of the main stake. This man is a co-owner of a dozen enterprises in Kyiv and Sevastopol, but at the same time remains an absolute “anonymous” without any public information about himself. Or here’s a certain Igor Nelyuba: he is listed as the head of many companies, including the Ukrspetspostav Trade House and Modern Asphalt Concrete Technologies owned by the Kryuchkovs, and at the same time Sukhpay Ukrainy LLC. But if these two personalities are still unknown, then the partner of Kryuchkov and Novikov in Inter-Energo Trans, Grach Garushovich Antonyan, was revealed as a co-owner of a number of enterprises in Cherkassy, ​​where his business partners are Dmitry and Radislav Tkachenko – brothers of the governor Yuri Tkachenko, the permanent manager region since March 2014.

Such an interesting tangle of connections, although it does not shed any light on the root cause of the success of the Kryuchkov brothers. The company Marketing Agency “Finance-Inform Ukraine”, which became in 1998-2000, could say at least something about this. the first place of work for a student at the Kyiv University of Economics, Dmitry Kryuchkov – usually this is how they “moonlight” at the enterprises of relatives or very close friends. But, alas, there is no information about it in the public domain – apparently, it was cleared along with other data revealing the past of the Kryuchkov brothers.

Dmitry and Leonid Kryuchkov. First scams

In 2000, a graduate of the Kyiv Economic University, Dmitry Kryuchkov, received a position as a “management assistant-consultant” in the state enterprise NPO Libid. A position that did not provide much responsibility, but provided many opportunities in an enterprise that was a real Ali Baba’s cave, since the Libid NPO was the operator of the State Reserve (State Agency of Material Reserve of Ukraine). He worked there for two years – just when the State Reserve was headed by Evgeniy Chervonenko, and his deputy was scandalous schemer Viktor Nikolaevich Brechko. The same one who staged a diamond scam in Liberia in 2012 (where he went as part of the Ukrainian peacekeeping contingent), and then fled to France, where he bought himself a house near Versailles.

So, in the period 2000-2002, the NPO “Libid” was under the complete control of Brechko – which means that it was he who could place Dmitry there. And on this score Skelet.Info There is unconfirmed information that Viktor Brechko was a good friend of his father Vasily Kryuchkov, that they worked together at the New Wind company (which tried to assemble televisions in Kyiv from imported components), and perhaps even worked together back in Soviet times. However, another source claimed that Dmitry Kryuchkov’s patron at the Libid NPO was a certain lady “over fifty” from among the company’s management. In a word, again the ends are lost in conjecture.

Viktor Brechko could not live without scams: it was NPO Libid that became the main defendant in several theft schemes on an especially large scale, when tens of thousands of tons of petroleum products and fuel were sold through this enterprise from the State Reserve at a price much lower than the market price. They sold to their pocket companies, and the difference went into the pockets of the scammers. The role of “management assistant-consultant” Dmitry Kryuchkov in those matters remained unknown (although it was rumored that it was he who accepted and processed the “margin” for the fuel sold), but when the thunder struck, all the participants in the scam fled, including him. They fled in all directions: Chervonenko was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, Brechko became deputy head of the State Administration of Affairs (DSA), and Dmitry Kryuchkov moved directly to the State Reserve, under the wing of its new head Nikolai Pesotsky. Which he soon set up firmly.

Dmitry Kryuchkov did not work in his new position for long. Another person would have settled there, taken a closer look, and started “carrying” in moderation, but Dmitry decided to take everything at once. And in 2002, by order on behalf of the Verkhovna Rada (it was rumored that Brechko was behind it), the State Reserve was obliged to allocate 24 thousand tons of aviation fuel for the Ministry of Defense. The Ministry of Defense received the fuel, but was in no hurry to pay for it. In the meantime, the State Reserve (represented by Dmitry Kryuchkov) transferred the debt of the Ministry of Defense to the Ukrresursy company, and it assigned it… to Inter-Energo CJSC, that is, to the Kryuchkov family firm, which then multiplied into half a dozen subsidiaries. Immediately after this, Dmitry Kryuchkov quits his job at Gorezerve and returns to his family, becoming the head of the board of this very Inter-Energo CJSC. The Kryuchkovs file a lawsuit against the Ministry of Defense and receive from it 36.8 million in debt, which they do not return to the State Reserve, but pocket.

In March 2005, the Main Investigation Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs opened a criminal case on this fact, inviting the main suspect Dmitry Kryuchkov for explanations. But here’s the thing: at that time he already held the post of deputy head of the Rivne Regional State Administration Vasily Chervoniy, one of Viktor Yushchenko’s closest associates. Therefore, the criminal proceedings against Dmitry Kryuchkov were immediately closed, and instead of him, the main accused became his former boss Nikolai Pesotsky, to whom the 27-year-old deputy governor turned all the arrows. As a result, Pesotsky ended up in a pre-trial detention center.

But while Dmitry Kryuchkov was “sawing” the State Reserve from within, his father and younger brother Leonid Kryuchkov were also not sitting idle, but were actively involved in the derivation of Kievrekonstruktsiya, which was transformed from a state-owned enterprise into an open joint-stock company. A number of divisions of Kievrekonstruktsiya became independent companies and were pocketed – for example, Leonid Kryuchkov and his brother Dmitry became the owners of LLC IC Kievremstroy, which at the same time absorbed the state enterprises Mekhanizatsiya and Fasadrekonstruktsiya. Some of the enterprises and bases of Kievrekonstruktsiya were transferred to subsidiaries of Inter-Energo. Finally, starting in 2004, OJSC Kievrekonstruktsiya itself came under the full control of the Kryuchkovs: first it was headed by Dmitry, then by his brother Leonid, then they hired other managers. This was necessary when “Kievrekonstruktsiya” and other Kryuchkov firms began scams of construction pyramids: the loudest of them were residential complexes “Three Heroes” And “Aston Park”whose defrauded shareholders have been trying to get their money back for 10 years, attracting attention with protests. It was also reported that the Kryuchkov firms were involved in the high-profile Elite-Center scam.

In 2005, Dmitry Kryuchkov managed to stage two more high-profile scams. Firstly, while he was briefly chairman of the supervisory board of JSCB Garant (part of the UkrAVTO group of Tariel Vasadze), he issued a loan to a shell company in the amount of 80 million hryvnia against blank bills. This happened shortly before the change of shareholders of the bank, and the new owners, having learned about the fraud, initiated a criminal case. As a result, the bank became “problematic”, and, as always, its trusting depositors suffered.

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

CONTINUED: Dmitry Kryuchkov and Leonid Kryuchkov: “jackals” of Ukrainian raiding. PART 2

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