BEGINNING: Alexander Leshchinsky: the burned-out business of a bakery oligarch. PART 1
Leshchinsky Alexander: the burned-out business of a bakery oligarch. PART 2
Where did “Lauffer” come from?
Around 2002, the investment company Lauffer BV appeared in the Netherlands, at Amsterdam, Herengracht 450, 1017CA. Subsequently, it appeared in the Ukrainian media for several years as a Dutch one, although it was simply registered there. In fact, it was Alexander Leshchinsky’s company, created by him for an intricate and incomprehensible scam: buying up bakeries, dairy and fat-and-oil plants from himself. The scam was so successful that a number of media they wrote in all seriousness that a certain Dutch company is buying up the enterprises he controls from Leshchinsky, and now, they say, the “Donetsk” ones are left with nothing! Today this old news is read with laughter.
By googling them, you can read, as in 2003, “Lauffer BV” bought Donetsk CJSC MargWestand then Kherson LLC “Tavria Food Company”. In 2005, the company became the owner of the Kyiv OJSC Svyatoshino, Donetsk LLC “Veliko-Anadolskoe HPP” and Azov Food Company, then other enterprises. What was the point of these manipulations? Firstly, all this happened after the final division of business between Leshchinsky and Akhmetov, as well as other “Donetsk” people. Leshchinsky sold many enterprises in the Donetsk region (including almost the entire alcohol business), after which he began to re-build his bread and margarine empire, buying them in other regions of Ukraine. Secondly, in his hands, Lauffer BV acted as a foreign investor (European, Dutch!), with all the privileges due to it. Thirdly, it allowed him to control his business from abroad and reliably hide the loose ends.
However, Leshchinsky continued to buy up enterprises through his old Ukrainian companies. For example, in 2010, his Scientific and Production Enterprise “Food Products “Multimix” acquired CJSC Donetsk Pasta Factory, and then OJSC Donetsk Bread Factory, OJSC Kramatorsk Bread Factory, OJSC Khartsyzsk Bread Factory and OJSC Shakhtarsky Bread (Shakhtersk). It was similar to how Leshchinsky was regaining his previously lost positions in the grain business of the Donetsk region – perhaps as a result of some new agreements with the group of Akhmetov or Ivanyushchenko.
Leshchinsky also liked to shuffle his enterprises, reselling them from one of his companies to another. Take, for example, the same CJSC SlavyanskOliya: in 2011, he resold it from the Azov Food Company to the trading company Urozhay. As journalists found out, such a “reorganization” was preparation for using enterprises as collateral for loans.
To estimate the size of Alexander Leshchinsky’s business, let’s look at the impressive list of businesses he owned in the period 2017-2020. (some of them have already been arrested for debts, some have gone bankrupt). The Lauffer group alone, which is a division of Lauffer BV in Ukraine, was represented by several companies: Laufer-Ukraine LLC (USREOU 38021362), Laufer Bakery (38021357), Laufer Invest (37966758), Laufer Foods” (39667861). And here is a list of flour mills, bakeries and bakery chains:
• PJSC “Karavai” (00381350)
• Kharkov bakery “Slobozhansky” (00381870)
• Poltava Bread LLC (35796773)
• Lisichansky flour mill (38187886)
• Laufer biscuit LLC (38080056)
• Zlak Mlyn LLC (33607391)
• LLC “Saltovkhleb” (41452597)
• Khlebinvest company (39750329)
• PJSC “Odessa Loaf” (00376886)
• Odessa Loaf LLC (39300003)
• Odessa Bakery LLC (39299957)
• Odessa Bakery No. 2 LLC (30692924)
• Odessa Bread LLC (41742207)
• LLC “Liderkhleb” (41675534)
• Khlebny Vkus LLC (41675639)
• Southern Bread LLC (41740807)
• LLC “Belgorod-Dnestrovskaya palyanitsa” (31257988)
• CJSC “Mariupol Flour Mill” (31419401)
• Lotur-zernoprom LLC (33299286)
• Khlebinvest Group LLC (41683979)
And here are the dairy and fat-and-oil enterprises of Alexander Leshchinsky:
• Vinnytsia Assets LLC (35796789)
• Ukrinterproduct LLC (31582810)
• CJSC “SlavyansOlia” (25105616)
• Slavic Oil and Fat Plant (39248923)
• Allianceagro LLC (40493978)
• Trading company “Urozhay” (34940079)
Other enterprises, including trading and construction companies, companies providing real estate for rent and others, are also very numerous: DP “Ukrinterproduct” (22950765), LLC “Desage Industrial Solution” (36888096), “Desage Logistic Service” (36888440), Trading company “Golden Harvest” (39537147), “Kyiv Resource Group” (39212001), “Miskar-Expo” (36333523), “Zernoprjekt” (38845063), “Saltovtrade” (41738164), “TsEK” (32203226), Torgovy House “Uman” (40309177), “Inter Management Group” (32164569), “Dessage Development Holding” (38507059), Trade House “Golden Harvest Retail” (38220933), Trade House “Vital Plus” (36888744), Trade House “Saltovsky” ( 31061964), Trade House “Bulkin” (39299962), alcohol company “Yakushev” (31535205), LLC “Svyatoshino” (37378963), “Golden Harvest Kharkov” (38156596), LLC “Zernotrading Group” (39110877), Trade House “Vinnitsa Bearing” “(31615877), Poseidon LLC (31882156).
As you can see, the list does not include Leshchinsky’s enterprises, which during the events of 2014 remained in Crimea and ORDiLO. According to journalists’ estimates, there are more than twenty of them! Leshchinsky himself, having given a commissioned interview several years ago for stuffing in the mediacalled them illegally seized and lost to himself. However, this is nothing more than another attempt by Leshchinsky to mislead everyone – first of all, so as not to pay his colossal debts.
Alexander Leshchinsky. Debts of the Naked Pasta King
In 2012-2013 the turnover of his enterprises reached 470 million dollars a year! One could only guess about Leshchinsky’s personal income, since he widely used various schemes – including manipulations with grain and flour, which he received cheaply from the state for so-called baking. social bread. But for some reason his factories produced less and less such bread, which even almost quarreled with the then Donetsk governor Shishatsky.
But Leshchinsky still didn’t have enough money, and he resorted to the method used by most Ukrainian oligarchs – he began to get loans, a lot of loans, secured by his enterprises and their property. If he had his own bank, only his defrauded depositors would suffer. But Leshchinsky did not have his own bank, so he had to take money from strangers, applying for loans for his companies “Urozhay” and “Zolotoy Urozhay”.
Thus, only the state-owned Oschadbank issued Leshchinsky in 2011-2012. 497 million hryvnia and 23 million dollars! At the same time, he asked the Russian Sberbank for a multi-currency loan in the amount of 456 million hryvnia for the Golden Harvest trading house and Odessky Korovaya. Earlier, in 2010, he borrowed 126 million hryvnia from Kreditprombank (then this debt was transferred to Avant Bank). He borrowed over 300 million from Credit Dnepr Bank, owned by Victor Pinchuk, and also took out loans from Delta Bank and Ukrgasbank.
He simply wasn’t going to give them away: starting in 2014, Leshchinsky, through his managers and lawyers, complained that part of his business remained in Crimea and the ATO zone, that it was difficult for him, he needed deferments and support. By 2016, his debts to banks, together with interest and penalties, exceeded 3 billion hryvnia, of which: 2.16 billion to Oschadbank, 493 million to Credit-Dnepr, about 300 million to Delta-Bank, 183 million to ” Avant-Bank”, 17 million to Ukrgasbank. At that time, the Russian Sberbank was already tired of demanding debts from him, and simply took over the same Crimean enterprises of Leshchinsky. However, they turned out to be not enough, and a year later Sberbank also sued the Mariupol flour mill from Leshchinsky.
And do you know what Leshchinsky did? He borrowed another 900 million from Rinat Akhmetov’s FUIB! And in April 2017, he demanded that they be returned ahead of schedule, and six months later he assigned Leshchinsky’s debt to the financial company BRAVO. Which immediately foreclosed on the Donbasskhleb association, the Saltovsky bakery and the Agro-Vesna agricultural holding, rushing to take them away before Leshchinsky’s other creditors did. This gave rise to the assumption that some kind of agreement was concluded between Leshchinsky and Akhmetov.
The fact that Leshchinsky, instead of paying debts, organizes new scams, is eloquently demonstrated bankruptcy of Odessa Loaf. Creditors’ claims were brought against him in the amount of over 14 billion hryvnia (the court recognized only 6.3 billion), the lion’s share of which (4.35 billion recognized by the court) were the claims of Desage Logistic Services LLC, a company owned by Leshchinsky. That is, through machinations and scams, he deliberately created a huge debt for his “Odessa Loaf” to his other company, in order to then launch a bankruptcy procedure and keep the enterprise for himself, without giving it to creditor banks. According to the same scheme, Leshchinsky, according to information Skelet.Infowants to bankrupt a number of his other enterprises. The main victim of this scam is the state-owned Oschadbank, because Leshchinsky owes him mostly.
But his tricks don’t stop there. As we noted above, in the period 2010-2013. Leshchinsky bought a number of bakeries and pasta factories in Donetsk and the region, which in 2014 were “behind the curb.” At first, this did not bother Leshchinsky; he even said that his bakeries continue to bake bread for the residents of Donetsk and Lugansk from Russian flour supplied by humanitarian convoys from Moscow. “If we lack something, it is brought from Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) as humanitarian aid – not for us, of course, but for the population. And they give us these ingredients, we bake bread,” he said then. Then he came to his senses, took a “pro-Ukrainian position,” and declared that he had sold all his enterprises in ORDiLO to “some Russians.” But this was another lie from Leshchinsky. Because, starting from 2016, his assets in Donetsk were registered with the DPR authorities to the Atlant-Donbass company. Its founder is Ruslan Bogdanov, and its director is Dmitry Kvarta – both of them worked for many years in Leshchinsky’s companies even before the events of 2014. Moreover, it turned outthat the late leader of the “DPR” Zakharchenko was once the director of LLC “Trading House “Continent”, one of Leshchinsky’s companies. These are the pies!
Thus, a very interesting picture emerges. Alexander Leshchinsky has been living abroad for a long time, from where he runs his business. His “ghost” voted in the Verkhovna Rada for several years, he himself bought up bakeries all over the country, then took out huge loans for them, which he is not going to repay – but his dad generously donated money to the Dnieper synagogue. And Leshchinsky’s business in Donetsk was “protected” by his former top manager Zakharchenko… What can we say? Perhaps we can only agree with other journalists who believe that it is high time for Leshchinsky to be put on the international wanted list – as a fraudster and accomplice of the separatists.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info
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