Maxim Mikitas: family secrets of the billion-dollar tender. PART 1
Scandals surrounding the nuclear waste storage facility being built just 100 km from Kyiv continue. After it became clear that the total cost of the work has increased almost 10 times, and these costs will be covered by increasing electricity tariffs, the names of the contractors who will use this money have become known. Among them was the company “Ukrstroymontazh” of the odious Kyiv developer Maxim Mikitas, now registered to his wife. It turned out that her victory in a supposedly fair and open tender worth almost a billion hryvnia smacks of nepotism and corruption, in which not only construction companies, but also Energoatom are mired.
Indeed, it was the press service of Energoatom that rushed to save the reputation of the state corporation, trying to accuse journalists of falsifying facts and even “using the technologies of Russian information saboteurs.” The object of their attack was the online publication GlavKom, whose authors imprudently focused attention on the tender procedure itself, and accidentally confused “open tenders” and “competitive dialogue” with the “negotiation procedure” (or vice versa). This allowed Energoatom to take advantage of their mistake and wholesale label all the material as unreliable data. But at the same time, Energoatom also made a mistake by opening for public review the list of bidders: the companies SK Ukrstroymontazh LLC (winner), PJSC Ukrenergomontazh and the Ukrstransstroy corporation. Because with a more detailed study of the life and work of Maxim Mikitas, you can find out that two of the three companies participating in the tender belong to the same family.
Maxim Mikitas: family secrets of the billion-dollar tender. PART 1
Son Maxim came to his father
Maxim Viktorovich Mikitas was born on September 13, 1980 in the city of Pripyat, where his father Viktor Grigorievich Mikitas (1946-2016), who built the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, worked at the Yuzhteploenergomontazh (UTEM) enterprise. During the 1986 accident, Viktor Mikhailovich took part in its liquidation, after which he was hospitalized, became disabled of the 2nd group, but continued to work at UTEM – which became the main factor in the future career of his son.
After the accident, their family moved to Kyiv: after all, Viktor Grigorievich was an engineer at UTEM, and also a participant in the liquidation, so they were given a new apartment in the capital of the republic in the first place. There, Maxim graduated from secondary school No. 286 in 1997 and entered the Financial and Economic Institute (now the Kiev National Economic University) with a degree in financial management. The choice of economic profile was made under the influence of the times: in the 90s, the only promising profession in the country was an accountant. Therefore, it is worth taking note: the famous developer Maxim Mikitas has not studied construction technologies, his level of education is, at best, the chief accountant of a construction trust (his second higher education is in construction economics), and he is simply a “smart” businessman. There would be nothing reprehensible in this if he had built only shops, even just residential high-rises – however, objects of the “Shelter” and “Storage” level for nuclear materials, in the opinion of Skelet.Infostill require the participation of top managers who understand that doing business on such contracts must be done responsibly, and not habitually save on materials and quality of work. Meanwhile, Maxim Mikitas’s companies are notorious not just for their shoddy work: they disgraced themselves twice (in 2008 and 2012) in a similar way, performing work at such an extremely important facility as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. How then were they entrusted with building a nuclear waste storage facility?! I really don’t want nuclear disasters to become another Mikitas family tradition…
Viktor Grigorievich Mikitas, 90s
It’s hard to say how Maxim Mikitas’ life would have turned out if he had made his own way in it. But he didn’t have to do this: immediately after graduating from the institute, Maxim came to the office of his father, who at that time held the position of deputy director of UTEM (which became an open joint stock company). He assigned his son as an economist to the management group of the Armyansk project, and then Titan and Caborga. Then his father got him a job at OJSC SMU Kievskaya CHPP-6, where Maxim worked in 2004-2007. worked as deputy head of the board for economics, and then he himself headed this enterprise, which served the largest thermal power plant in Ukraine. However, by the time Maxim Viktorovich came to work there, SMU had already completed all large-scale work (installation of new boilers), so he only had to sign estimates for minor repairs of pipes and valves. It was of little interest and not at all profitable, so in 2006 Maxim Mikitas created his own company, LLC SK Ukrstroymontazh. Yes, yes, the same one who is now registered to his wife and who won that scandalous tender from Energoatom.
His first experience in business was somewhat unsuccessful and scandalous. Firstly, the basis for “Ukrstroymontazh” was the “SMU of the Kyiv Thermal Power Plant-6” entrusted to him, the capacities and workers of which he used. However, Mikitas was far from the first Ukrainian director to create a personal LLC at his enterprise. Secondly, having taken on his first orders, received with the help of his father, Maxim Mikitas immediately got into several unpleasant stories, the reason for which was his inept fraud. For example, the installation of a boiler room using wood waste for the Uniplit company (Ivano-Frankivsk) was carried out so clumsily that they simply could not start the boiler room – and the customer sued Mikitas’s company, demanding the return of the money. At the same time, Maxim Viktorovich simultaneously cheated OJSC Tsentrostalkonstruktsiya (Rivne) by not paying them 150 thousand hryvnia for the supplied metal structures. In a word, he dishonored his father in every possible way, poking and throwing “over little things.”
Maxim Mikitas. The Berezki scam
In February 2008, Maxim Mikitas switched from unsuccessful attempts to build industrial facilities to residential development in Kyiv. He became the general director of CJSC Kievsotsbud (CJSC Kievsotsstroy, later re-registered as PrJSC), a rather interesting enterprise created back in 2003. Both then and now its owners are several Cypriot offshore companies, the ultimate beneficiaries of which can only be guessed at. Well, specifically in February 2008, two offshore companies sold their shares in Kievsotsbud to two other offshore companies – which were associated with the owners of Kiev Vitamin Plant CJSC and Kiev Printing Factory Zarya OJSC. They said that Viktor Mikitas was also in the share with them – who, thus, put his son at the head of the company.
Information about the change of owners and management of Kievsotsbud in February 2008
Before Mikitasey, the Kievsotsbud company was engaged in construction in the field of social facilities (hence the name), since 2008 it has focused on the construction of commercial housing. But, apparently, Maxim Mikitas’s rare project was carried out without scams and scandals. This was the case with the construction of the Berezki residential complex (Vyshgorod), which Maxim Mikitas, as director of Kievsotsbud, hired his own company, Ukrstroymontazh, to build. Which, in turn, also hired someone there. In general, Ukrainian construction projects are worse than gas ones!
Among these subcontractors were Zhitloshlyakhbud LLC and Ukrenergobudmekhanizatsya OJSC – which Maxim Mikitas did not pay for the work performed and rented equipment. He also did not fully pay for construction materials from the Vertical company. All of them filed a lawsuit against Mikitas – where dozens of individual plaintiffs were already crowded, calling “Kievsotsbud” the second “Elite Center”. The fact is that having collected money from people for future apartments, “Kyivsotsbud” disposed of it, let’s say, in a mysterious way – because at the end of 2008, due to the crisis and financial difficulties, the company slowed down the construction of the Berezki residential complex. A criminal case was even opened against Maxim Mikitas under Article No. 191 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. at the same time Skelet.Info There is information that people who actively opposed Mikitas’s scams in 2008-2009 were threatened by unknown persons. In particular, even several bloggers received death threats!
Another interesting fact: Vyshgorod residents who observed the construction of the Berezki residential complex and showed excessive curiosity (touch, feel, look), claimed that the quality of construction of the residential complex before 2008 (the first houses were laid there in 2005) was higher than when they went there later Subcontractors of Maxim Mikitas arrived. And this was not the first time that the quality of the work of Mikitasey firms was called into question.
Mikitas the father, it is worth noting, also did not sit idle (in the sense of not having his own business), in 2008 he became the head of the supervisory board of PJSC Ukrenergomontazh. Yes, yes, this is the second company that participated in the Energoatom tender! So, then, in 2008, “Ukrenergomontazh” and “Ukrstroymontazh” together won a number of tenders to carry out work in the Chernobyl zone, but they messed something up there – both financially and in the quality of the work. The Ministry of Internal Affairs even opened a criminal case against them (another one). But Maxim Mikitas later assured that these were just the machinations of competitors.
The companies “Ukrenergomontazh” and “Ukrstroymontazh” are related not only because they were created by father and son, but also because they were together included in the list of associated private companies that worked under the roof of the “Ukrainian State Construction Corporation” (state corporation “Ukrbud”) . The history of which is so complicated that it will require a separate topic. Well, in short, the one and a half thousand construction enterprises united in 1991 into “Ukrbud” have decreased by 460 in 15 years, partially turned into private companies, partially went bankrupt or were absorbed, and were overgrown with offshore companies and clone companies. At the same time, private firms that belonged to the board of Ukrbud used the remaining state-owned ones as cash cows. And even Ukrbud itself had a clone – it was the PJSC Construction Company Ukrbud, created in 2004 by Prime Minister Yanukovych, through which the Donetsk people were going to control the entire structure of the corporation. Another company, Ukrbud Corporation, affiliated with the main one, also emerged.
Under the roof of Ukrbud and Yanukovych
Sources Skelet.Info reported that Viktor Mikitas, who had huge connections in Ukrbud, decided to go there with his company Ukrenergomontazh in order to get large contracts for construction and repair work in Chernobyl – which were traditionally carried out there by his native UTEM, with whom he got into a fight. However, the father and son’s own Chernobyl business somehow didn’t work out then, but in 2010, after the return of the Donetsk team, they received a big bonus from them: by order of Prime Minister Azarov, Maxim Mikitas was appointed head of the Ukrbud corporation. For what kind of merit?
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info
CONTINUED: Maxim Mikitas: family secrets of the billion-dollar tender. PART 2
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