CONTINUATION. BEGINNING: Nikolai Skorik: little-known pages from the life of an Odessa hypocrite and scoundrel. PART 1
Nikolay Skorik
Nikolay Skorik: Let’s steal slowly!
Whether Gurvits contributed to the hiring of Nikolai Skorik at Primorye, or whether Skorik then brought his boss Klimov together with his “national-conscious” mother’s friend Gurvits, an unspoken and very productive alliance arose between these two fathers of the city of Odessa. Even when Leonid Klimov headed the Odessa organization of the Party of Regions, and Mayor Gurvits demonstrated his “orangeness,” their teams, according to Skelet.Infoworked together. The PR faction in the City Council gave its votes to Gurvits to make the necessary decisions, and Gurvits generously shared city real estate and the city budget with Klimov. And government money, including even the salaries of state employees, was circulated through Imexbank according to cunning schemes – which were supervised by Nikolai Skorik. He did this even when he became chairman of the regional council – after all, now he could send money from the regional budget to his native Imexbank. All utility bills went there too. It is not surprising that by 2008, almost 62% of all financial flows in the Odessa region passed through Imexbank!
For this purpose, Klimov made Skorik chairman of the regional council – although this was against the will of Viktor Yanukovych, who promised this place, if the PR won the local elections in 2006, to Grigory Pedchenko (in 2010 he received the position of head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine). This almost cost Klimov his friendship with Yanukovych, but the risk paid off. As the SBU later established, in just a few months of 2010, the chairman of the regional council, Nikolai Skorik, literally donated 40 million hryvnia from the regional budget to Imexbank! First, he initiated the purchase of a 3.5% stake in CJSC FC Chernomorets, which was owned by Klimov, for 20 million, allegedly to support the club in preparation for Euro 2012. As a result, this money went into Klimov’s pocket, and the purchased stake was soon diluted by an additional issue. Skorik then organized the transfer of 20 million hryvnia to a private pension fund, also owned by Klimov, allegedly for subsequent support of honored pensioners of Odessa. All 20 million fell into one account in Imexbank, from which they then disappeared. As we can see, the loss of money from accounts in this bank was common!
And even earlier, according to law enforcement agencies, Nikolai Skorik organized several scams that also lightened the budget by millions of hryvnia. For example, just a couple of months before the abolition of mandatory vehicle inspection, he allocated 3 million hryvnia for an automatic inspection system program – the money was wasted. Or he purchased expensive imported gas boilers (five times more expensive than domestic analogues) for the theater and philharmonic through the structures of JSC Primorye, which then stood idle for years – after all, they were never supplied with gas!
The head of the regional council is remembered by Odessa residents for real estate scandals. Including the transfer of coastal areas in the region for development to Leonid Klimov’s companies. But sometimes these companions were also carried away by raiders on the estates of other Odessa “barons”. So in 2007, a conflict broke out around the building of the Center of Bulgarian Culture in Odessa (9 Zhukov St.), which was rented by the Association of Bulgarians of Ukraine, headed by Anton Kisse. Skorik initiated a lawsuit to break the lease agreement, with the goal of then transferring the building to the Congress of Bulgarians of Ukraine – an organization created under the roof of the Primorye group and Imexbank, possibly only fictitious, to seize the building. But he did not take into account that Kisse has very strong connections: he complained to the President of Bulgaria himself, and the scandal became international.
At the beginning of 2010, Skorik intended to transfer the building of the Odessa Regional Eye Hospital to private structures associated with Leonid Klimov and Stanislav Schneider (the son of Arkady Schneider, who was involved in the medical business).
But in November 2010, Nikolai Skorik was sent “into exile” – to the post of Minister of Finance of Crimea, in the government of Vasily Dzharty. By the way, Skorik retained his mandate as a deputy of the Odessa Regional Council, so he did not lose contact with his homeland, either literally or figuratively. But what was the real reason for Skorik’s “Crimean business trip”? There is definitely a change in the balance of power in Odessa. Leonid Klimov’s influence fell somewhat after regionalist Aleksey Kostusev was elected as the new mayor of the city, and Gennady Trukhanov became the head of the faction in the city council: thus, people associated with the former mayor Gurvits lost some of their previous connections and fell out of some schemes. The alignment in the regional government has also changed: at the request of President Yanukovych (or his “sidekick” Yuriy Ivanyushchenko), Nikolai Pundik (a Kharkov resident who previously worked in Donetsk and Kyiv) was elected as the new chairman of the Odessa Regional Council, and Alexey Goncharenko, whose natural father was the newly elected one, was elected as his deputy. Mayor Alexey Kostusev. Thus, the Imexbank team was squeezed out of the Odessa authorities, which caused Nikolai Skorik quite expected resentment. But it did not last long, because Yanukovych’s entourage found a place for Skorik in the Crimean government. This is how his “exile” began.
Nikolay Pundik
To Crimea Skorik took with him not only his second wife Natalya, whom he later gifted with real estate in Yalta, but also his faithful colleagues: Alexei Zotov (former deputy chairman of the board of Imexbank), Vitaly Voloshin (former chief of staff of the Odessa regional council) and Irina Nesterenko (former Head of the Budget Development Department). It was she who headed the republican enterprise “Clean City”, created by Skorik (with the encouragement of Vasily Dzharta) immediately after her appointment as Minister of Finance of the republic. And this enterprise became Skorik’s largest Crimean scam.
Declared as a waste removal company, Clean City initially received a virtual monopoly on this rather profitable business. But one business was not enough for Skorik, especially since the enterprise was municipally owned, and he initiated the allocation of 400 million hryvnia ($50 million) to Clean City for the purchase of machinery and equipment. Moreover, the money was allocated by issuing bonds by the Crimean government at 14.5% per annum – which were then bought by Imexbank (in fact, they took a loan from the bank). True, due to the sudden death of Vasily Dzharta in 2011, the program was cut, and Skorik managed to sell bonds for only 133 million hryvnia. Which, according to Skelet.Infowere quickly spent partly on the purchase of equipment at inflated prices, and partly simply went into the sand. As for Imexbank, by the end of 2013 it made 47 million hryvnia in net profit from these bonds! However, whether the bank managed to make its profit before March 2014 remains unknown.
Burning Odessa
On November 8, 2013, just a couple of weeks before the start of the second Maidan, by decree of President Yanukovych, Nikolai Skorik was appointed head of the Odessa Regional State Administration. It is unlikely that he knew then that he was becoming caliph for an hour – or rather, governor for only four months.
With the beginning of the Maidan, the new head of the regional administration was rushing about, not knowing which side to take. Apparently, his “nationally-conscious” mother and acquaintances from Hurwitz’s former team shrewdly advised him to at least maintain passive neutrality. However, from Yanukovych’s associates he heard hints: “Why do we need such a governor?” And then on February 19, 2014, under the walls of the regional administration, a massacre took place between Euromaidan “activists” and “titushki” who attacked them with bats, calling themselves the “Stop Maidan” movement. Then the journalists present at the scene of the event also suffered.
And although almost 4 years have passed since then, the investigation into case No. 12014160500001323 about the riots on February 19 in Odessa has still not been completed. Nikolai Skorik himself and his deputies were “pulled” over him, but they all stated that they did not know whose “titushki” they were and who sent them to disperse the Odessa Euromaidan. The latest version of the investigation blamed everything on Alexander Orlov, then deputy governor of Skorik. He was even arrested in September 2016, but a week later he was released on bail of 8.7 million hryvnia – which was posted by Nikolai Skorik and Sergei Levochkin. At the same time, Orlov is called a confidant of Ivan Avramov, known as the accountant and “overseer of Odessa” Yuri Ivanyushchenko.
However, the fight on February 10 was just childish fuss compared to what happened in Odessa on May 2, 2014. There is still debate about how random the tragic events of that time were, and who their possible organizer was. Accusations, official and not, were brought against many influential people in Odessa, and the name of Nikolai Skorik was mentioned more than once. In particular, coordinator of the public group “May 2” Tatyana Gerasimova is confidentthat the House of Trade Unions was prepared in advance as a fire trap, and that Nikolai Skorik was directly involved in this.
Apparently, this information became a kind of tub of ice water for Skorik, since a week later the media published a statement by another member of the May 2 group, Vladimir Sargsyan, claiming that all the accusations against Nikolai Skorik were fake.
But three years ago, Skorik’s eternal opponent Alexey Goncharenko said that in March 2014, the governor, fearing for his seat, was allegedly preparing the proclamation of the “Odessa Republic,” and that one of the components of this plan was the organization of a permanent Anti-Maidan on the Kulikovo Field. To which Skorik called Goncharenko on air a “moron.”
Well, it seems that given the current situation in the country, an objective investigation of the Odessa tragedy is simply impossible, since its true results in any case will deal a crushing blow to either pro-government political forces or opposition ones.
The topics of 2014 had barely died down when Nikolai Skorik got involved in new scandals. In corruption – connected with his patronage of poachers-fishermen who want to ruin the Tuzlovsky Estuaries National Natural Park. Skorik organized a series of protests at the Ministry of Ecology of Ukraine, to which he gathered strong, unkind-looking young people, demanding the resignation of the director of the natural park, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Ivan Rusev, whom Skorik called… “an environmental terrorist.” But this is exactly what lobbyists for the corporations destroying nature call environmentalists all over the world! But the poachers and their patrons did not limit themselves to pickets: in the summer of 2017, the son of Ivan Rusev was kidnapped and severely beaten by unknown persons.
And Nikolai Skorik got into another political scandal when he initiated a proposal to grant Odessa or part of its territory the status of “porto-franco”. In principle, the proposal was completely economic, another attempt to revive the “free economic zone” of the Kuchma era, and it was solely pursued by the desire of certain oligarchic circles to evade taxes and duties, to “make money” on smuggling (are there interests of Vadim Alperin here?). However, “pro-Maidan” forces perceived this idea primarily as a political call for separatism. And Skorik again had to justify himself and prove that he does not strive to become Odessa’s Zakharchenko.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info
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