Leonid Yurushev. Secret “sponsor” of Arseniy Yatsenyuk

One of the most mysterious personalities in Ukrainian business is billionaire Leonid Yurushev. Throughout his business career, he has not given a single interview or comment to the press. There are also various rumors about his biography, some say that he was in prison, others that he is involved in laundering Arab money, others talk about his connection with the Donetsk people. While the Ukrainian media are wondering who he is and where he came from, the businessman continues to “make money” from various frauds in the construction and financial sectors. So who is Leonid Yurushev, and what is hidden in his past?

Mysterious past

Leonid Leonidovich was born back in 1946 in the Donetsk region. He received his education at one of the mountain technical schools. Judging by the data of the Ministry of Education, Leonid Yurushev does not have a diploma of completion of a higher educational institution. According to his official biography, he began his career as a worker at a furniture factory. After this, there is no data at all about his life until 1994; it feels like someone carefully covered up his actions in the past. There are rumors that he had serious problems with the law, however, nothing is said about how he “solved” them.

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Leonid Yurushev managed to create a cooperative movement engaged in the sale and production of household goods. It was this start-up capital that helped him become one of the co-founders of Forum Bank, thanks to which he made his financial fortune. According to sources, from 1999 to 2001, Yurushev headed the audit commission of Forum Bank, and from September of the same year he was the head of its supervisory board. It is noteworthy that one of the bank’s shareholders was the Geneza publishing center, controlled by the then Prime Minister Pavel Lazarenko and his entourage. Rumor has it that through this structure he laundered funds acquired through “backbreaking labor.”

In 2006, Leonid Leonidovich “knocked out” permission from the AMCU (Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine) to purchase a 50% stake in Forum. From that moment on, he became its direct owner (before that he controlled it with the help of the Provita and Elmak structures). After this, the businessman began active negotiations on the sale of the bank to foreign investors. As a result, it was bought for a colossal amount (almost $800 million) by the German Commerzbank.

Nothing personal – just business

Leonid Yurushev is closely connected with the carriage building business in Ukraine. Because of this, in 2002 he began a “business” friendship with Sergei Tigipko. Together, the businessmen took over the Kremenchug steel mill. Later, Yurushev and the TAS group controlled by Tigipko seized control of the Kryukov Carriage Works. Together with Tigipko, they also went to the Dneprovagonmash plant. Things were moving towards the creation of a huge specialized railcar-building consortium, but in 2005, due to a conflict of interests between businessmen, a real war began, during which raider attacks were launched on the Kremenchug Steel Foundry several times.

The most brutal battle was the episode that occurred on May 17, 2006. The shareholders scheduled a meeting for this day at the premises of the Dnepropetrovsk research institute “Ukrchermetmekhanizatsiya”. The meeting room in which the meeting was to take place was attacked by a group of people (about 200 people). They all held bats, brass knuckles and chains in their hands. Having broken the doors of the meeting room, they began to beat up the meeting participants, as well as their security. This bacchanalia was stopped by the police together with the Berkut detachment. During the operation, 172 people were detained, and their voting power of attorney with the signature of one of the members of the Forum supervisory board, Natalya Pukhalskaya, was confiscated. Yurushev was accused of organizing this “terrorist” attack, who (strangely enough) himself did not come to the “bloody” meeting. Sergei Tigipko won the fight for the Kremenchug steel plant, and Yurushev’s proteges were quietly removed from leadership positions.

Another high-profile episode in the relationship between Yurushev and other oligarchs was the division of the Dnepropetrovsk Car Repair Plant. Until 2006, this enterprise belonged to Leonid Leonidovich and Mr. Alexander Boyko, who held the post of head of the supervisory board at the enterprise. This Boyko, back in the late nineties, bought a controlling stake in the enterprise and owned more than 50%. When in 2005, Yurushev bought 40% of the company’s shares from Invest Holding and the First Euro Alliance Ltd corporation. The situation at the plant became tense, as positions in the plant’s management were divided equally between its main shareholders. This provided support for constant squabbles between the oligarchs. They had a conflict of interest, since Yurushev’s railcar building projects were related to Iran, and Boyko had plans for projects in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). Unexpectedly for everyone, Leonid Leonidovich decided to sell his shares

In fact, after the deal, Boyko became the full owner of all the assets of the plant, however, he also turned out to be a complete fool. Having bought shares from Yurushev at a reduced price, he never expected that the plant was closed in November due to behind-the-scenes games with the mayor of Dnepropetrovsk Ivan Kulichenko. More precisely, they didn’t close it, but moved it, arguing that it was necessary to build a new residential area on the site of the “industrial zone.”

Construction fraud

Leonid Yurushev was once a tireless builder, having created the Yaroslavov Val company in 2001, he got involved in a number of major “construction” scandals. Less than a year after the creation of this construction company, the businessman, together with his insurance company Forum, founded the Aquapark enterprise, which won the tender for the best architectural design of a water park in Kyiv. The Yaroslavov Val company was supposed to complete construction in 2 years. The project was grandiose, however, as we see, there is no water park on Lake Telbin even now. By selling investors a huge number of shares of the “promising” project, Yurushev earned almost 20 million UAH, which he immediately put into circulation at his bank.

The most scandalous construction project for Leonid Leonidovich was the construction of luxury housing right in the Mariinsky Park, on Grushevsky Street 9a. Neither Alexander Omelchenko, the then mayor of Kyiv, nor his successor Leonid Chernovetsky and his “young team” managed to stop the construction. Initially, it was planned to build a 15-story building, but the notorious Sergei Babushkin, the then chief architect of Kyiv, himself approved the project, in which the house was 22 floors. The prosecutor’s office opened a criminal case against the employees of the Kyiv City State Administration who approved the construction, investigated a criminal case for abuse of official position, however, the house was built.

According to oligarch.net:

According to Ukrainian media, for a long time Leonid Yurushev remained the main investor of Arseniy Yatsenyuk. According to the publication Ukrayinska Pravda, in total, the headquarters of the current Prime Minister received almost $20 million from Leonid Leonidovich. When the time came to “pay off his debts,” Yatsenyuk happily leaked several projects beneficial to him to his patron. One of them was the provision of the largest duty free area in Boryspil to the BF & GB Travel Retail company, controlled by Leonid Leonidovich.

More details in the story:

As you can see, Leonid Leonidovich has plenty of secrets. In a sense, Arseniy Yatsenyuk owes him, and now, having come to power, he is trying to recoup the money spent on him. Yurushev, as a “gray eminence,” asks him only for “small” services that bring him millions. And our current Prime Minister no longer cares about all the hours spent on the Maidan with a bullhorn in his hand. He feeds with his own hands one of the representatives of the “Donetsk” clan, although he is carefully hiding.

Dmitry Samofalov, for SKELET-info