Mikhail Grinshpon: space sawyer of Ukraine. PART 2

BEGINNING: Mikhail Grinshpon: space “sawmaker” of Ukraine. PART 1

In 2000, a scandal arose that led to the resignation of Dovgopoly, and then Grinshpon – and it was reported that Mikhail Petrovich even temporarily left Ukraine. The formal cause of the scandal was another incident during the exercise: on April 20, a Tochka-U missile deviated from its course and hit a 9-story building in Brovary, killing three of its residents. Kuzmuk immediately took advantage of this to “cleanse” his surroundings. The informal reason was given as some disagreement between Kuzmuk and Dogovpoly, whom Grinshpon joined. Well, anonymous sources reported that all three went too far in selling off army property and wasting the budget of the Ministry of Defense, and all this was connected with the then arms scandals in which names were mentioned Vadim RabinovichLeonid Minin, Semyon Mogilevich, Leonid Vulf, Viktor But, Semyon Derkach. And they set a condition for Kuzmuk: either he gets rid of his deputy and adviser, or he too will resign. However, after their longtime friend from the Ministry of Armor, Igor Smeshko, became deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council in 2002, and headed the SBU in 2003, Mikhail Grinshpon not only materialized in Kyiv again, but also received a new bread-and-butter position: adviser to the head of the National Space Agency of Ukraine.

Then, in 2000, only Nikolai Mayak remained at the feeder, who was demoted to vice-president of the State Enterprise “UATC”, giving up his place and initiative, but continuing to squeeze profit from the remnants of Ukrainian military transport aviation under the new leadership. Only in 2008, having barely extricated himself from four criminal cases opened against him, Nikolai Mayak fled from Kyiv to Zhitomir, where he became a professor at a technological university.

Take with both hands

Only fragmentary information is known about Grinshpon’s business in the 2000s; entire chapters were simply torn out of his chronicle – for example, his attitude to the Nadra Bank scam. After all, Mikhail Grinshpon (like Topolov) became one of its founders back in 1993. However, in 1997, “Nadra” was given to Mogilevich’s people (and he appointed his brothers over it Segaley), but the Kyiv-Donbass holding remained with Asmakov’s people. However, in 1999, Asmakov was killed, his share of shares and Roitman’s were taken over by the Konstantinovsky brothers, Viktor Topolov retained his share in Kyiv-Donbass, but the fate of Grinshpon’s share remained unknown, as did his relationship with the Konstantinovskys. But here’s what’s interesting: Skelet.Info already reported that when he was an investigator and then the head of the Kyiv Organized Crime Control Department, Vladimir Geletey provided services to Asmakov’s organized crime group, and then served as a “police roof” for the Konstantinovskys. It was also reported that with the money of the murdered Kyiv “authority” Valery Pryshchik invested in business, “Ubopovite” Alexey Savchenko (a colleague of Geletey) created “Conversbank”, and then invested the money in the purchase of the Avant bank – which received the nickname “Ubopovsky”. And now one more small detail that will clarify a lot: the founder and owner of Avant Bank was initially (since 2008) Lawrence Group LLC, which previously belonged to Mikhail Grinshpon, and in 2011 he sold his share to Lawrence Group (and Avant Bank) to Alexey Savchenko. By the way, at the same time Geletey became vice-president of Avant Bank. In general, it turns out that Grinshpon’s relations with Geletey and other “Ubopovites” were quite trusting, and if so, it is unlikely that Grinshpon then broke with “Kyiv-Donbass” and Konstantinovsky. However, it is not known about any large joint projects of theirs.

However, at the beginning of the 2000s, the Konstantinovskys and Topolov got into the construction business, and here Grinshpon first showed himself as a raider. The building of the OJSC “Ukrainian Research Institute of Analytical Instrumentation” attracted his attention back in 2000, when Grinshpon, through his people, began buying shares in the enterprise. First, he got 16% and introduced his people to the board of shareholders. Then he began to put pressure on the director of the research institute, Alexander Dashkovsky, persuading him to “joint ownership” – for which Grinshponov’s LLC International Recruitment Agency Palmira was used, which became the owner of 60% of the shares of OJSC Ukranalit. But then Grinshpon had a period of bad luck, he had no time for raiding, and during this time, Dashkovsky, who came to his senses, transferred the property rights to the research institute’s real estate to a subsidiary of Ukranalit-Avto CJSC. In 2003, the returning Grinshpon tried to punish the “swindler”, but Dashkovsky had patrons in Yushchenko’s entourage, as well as among the emerging team of the future Kyiv mayor Leonid Chernovetsky. The dispute dragged on, and in 2005 the courts clearly sided with Dashkovsky, leaving Grinshpon high and dry. But for Dashkovsky, this victory was purely symbolic, because in the end the rights to the real estate of the research institute ended up with Vyacheslava Suprunenko – Chernovetsky’s son-in-law.

But Grinshpon compensated for the failure with Ukranalit by tidying up in 2007-2008. came into possession of 61% of the shares of OJSC ATP-1 – the same one where he once worked for 16 years. But he was not guided by nostalgia: the enterprise, which is an integral part of the Kievgorstroy Holding Company, performs a huge amount of work on construction sites in Kyiv and the region (the enterprise has about five thousand vehicles in its fleet), and at that time had up to $5 million in profit per year! In addition, he was interested in the territory of the enterprise, located within the city. The deal took place through the offshore company Kidare Limited, managed by Grinshpon, but after that the stake was distributed among individuals.

In the same 2008, Mikhail Grinshpon announced himself in the media as the founder, co-owner and director of the Nelora company (which he owns through the offshore Nelora Limited), which planned huge investments (from 500 million to 2 billion dollars) in the construction business. One could only guess about the origin of this money, sources Skelet.Info they talked about the capital of “Kyiv-Donbass”, and about the “common funds” of the Kyiv organized crime groups, and about the “Ubop cash desk”, and that they are all being invested in the business at once through “Nelora”. Among Grinshpon’s plans were the purchase of the Romanovsky Glass Factory (previously bankrupt), development of the ATP-1 territory (with the transfer of the vehicle fleet outside the city), participation in the Kyiv City project and the construction of the Zelenaya Gora residential complex in Gorenichi (through the Cypriot subsidiary Nelora -Land”). But the crisis that followed destroyed most of these plans.

Another Nelora project was construction on the territory of Bolshaya Alexandrovka (Boryspil Highway), where Grinshpon organized the purchase of plots and plots back in 2005: with a total estimated value of land of $250 million, plots were bought for 40-45 thousand hryvnia. But after the release of the new law “On Amendments to the Land Code of Ukraine” in February 2006, it became possible to invalidate these transactions – which was proposed to the villagers by Oleg Sheremet, a lawyer from the “Litvin Bloc” who specialized in land disputes. There were different opinions about the goals that Sheremet pursued, but his activities caused a protracted war, and as a result, Oleg Sheremet was killed in December 2007.

The decline of the construction industry after the global crisis did not dishearten Grinshpon: he quickly found new sources of excess profits. This is where his post as adviser to the head of the National Space Agency of Ukraine came in handy! How he used it before remained unknown, but in 2009 Grinshpon achieved the implementation of his next project: NKAU entered into a contract with the company “MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.” (MDA) on the creation of the first Ukrainian communications satellite “Lybid” and the construction of its control center in Ukraine. It would seem like the right thing to do, however…

Mikhail Grinshpon (standing in the middle) at the signing of an agreement between MDA and Ukrkosmos State Corporation

The Lybid project had an initial cost of US$254 million and was expected to culminate in the launch of a satellite at Baikonur in 2011. However, the launch was postponed several times: to 2012 and 2013 – under the pretext of modernizing the satellite and increasing funding for the project, in 2014 – due to the cessation of military-technical cooperation with Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), and since 2015 – due to problems with the construction of the Ukrainian rocket- carrier. So “Lybid” remained in the warehouse of the Russian company “Information Satellite Systems”, and the amount spent on this project far exceeded what was originally planned: various sources called from 300 million to 2 billion dollars, which in the end turned out to be simply “cut up”. The most interesting thing is that, according to the agreement with MDA, all payments with it were made through the offshore company Briklin Limited, whose director was Mikhail Grinshpon (he introduced himself as its director at the International Banking Forum in Minsk in 2015).

But it was not only at Lybid that the adviser to the head of the NKAU warmed up his hands well. In December 2012, the Ministry of Ecology of Ukraine, which in recent days was headed by Eduard Stavitskyannounced another tender for satellite imaging and sounding services, which was “won” by the company “GX satellite communication management ltd” – which earned 26 million hryvnia. And as journalists very quickly found out, this company (Cyprus offshore) is the beneficiary of the Nelora Land company. But how Grinshpon’s company managed to receive such an interesting tender became known only recently – after journalists became interested in the fate of two crumbling houses on Turgenev Street. In search of the “responsible person,” they ended up in the office of a representative of the GX Satellite Communication Management company, Mikhail Grinshpon, who represented the interests of the company that owns the Ukrainian Industrial Group. So, as it turned out, the founders of UIG were… the wife, mother, father and mother-in-law of Eduard Stavitsky! And although he himself has been on the run for a long time, their long-time business partner and friend of their family, “Uncle Misha,” is vigilantly keeping an eye on their real estate. Which immediately raised the question: did Eduard Stavitsky, when he was Minister of Environment, help Grinshpon’s companies win only one tender? As they say, there is something to look for here for both journalists and prosecutors!

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

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