Nikolay Prisyazhnyuk. Former Minister of Agriculture, protégé of Yuri Ivanyushchenko and godfather of Yanukovych

At the beginning of October 2015, it became known that ex-Minister of Agrarian Policy Nikolai Prysyazhnyuk, who is accused of embezzlement from the Agrarian Fund of Ukraine on an especially large scale (UAH 500 million), lives quietly and travels around Europe. This surprised Ukrainian MPs and law enforcement agencies, because back in April 2014 he was put on the international wanted list by Interpol. It turned out that a couple of months after he was put on the wanted list, Interpol removed him, blocking all information on him. As a result, the former Ukrainian official, instead of sitting in prison, is enjoying a relaxing holiday abroad, and recently even attended his daughter’s wedding in Budapest. Remembering his past “exploits”, it is not surprising that the ex-soloist of the Modern Talking group Thomas Anders, whose fees usually amount to numbers with many zeros, performed at this wedding. It’s amazing how a simple miner Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk achieved such heights in public service? Everything becomes a little clearer when it turns out that he was a close friend and godfather of the now fugitive President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych.

“Naturalized” Donetsk citizen

Nikolai Vladimirovich was born in the small village of Ksaveriv, Zhitomir region. After graduating from the Kyiv Technical School, he worked for about a year at the Kristall plant as a diamond cutter. In 1979 he was drafted into the Soviet army, in whose ranks he served until 1981, and even managed to visit Afghanistan. After returning from the army, he moved to the city of Enakievo, Donetsk region. He started out working as a simple miner. Over time, he rose to the post of chief construction technologist at the Ordzhonikidzeugol enterprise. It was there, in 1986, that he met Viktor Yanukovych, then director of the car depot. As it became known later, they were close friends, and Viktor Fedorovich even baptized Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk’s son Roman.

“Criminal” business partners

During the collapse of the union, when cooperatives were created everywhere, Nikolai Vladimirovich began to engage in entrepreneurship. The first cooperative created by him was called “Service” and was based on a subsidiary farm of one of the Yenakievo Metallurgical Plants (EMZ). To organize it, Prisyazhnyuk made several useful contacts in the person of the criminal authorities of that time, Yuri Ivanyushchenko (nickname “Yura Enakievsky”) and Yuri Shumakov (nickname “Shumok”). Subsequently, the Ivanyushchenko-Prisyazhnyuk tandem had a number of common business projects, some of which bring money to this day.

In the early 90s, in order to obtain a business loan, Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk registered the company Roll Impex Unlimited in the USA. This company later became a co-founder of the Intertrade company. Another of its founders was a company registered in Liechtenstein – Palling Anstalt, created specifically for Prisyazhnyuk. The peculiarity of Anstalt is that it is almost impossible to calculate the final beneficiaries, and its creation only required the presence of any Liechtenstein citizen. Quite convenient, isn’t it? The Intertrade company was engaged in the resale of coke products and rolled metal from most factories in the Donetsk region abroad. A year after its creation, Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk, together with Palling Anstalt, created the company “Reef”, which had a fairly wide profile of activities – from freight forwarding to the production of pasta. At the same time, the “meat” business at “Service” went uphill, actually “crushing the authority” of the Yenakievo meat processing plant. Taking advantage of this, Prisyazhnyuk and Ivanyushchenko bought it for next to nothing and on its basis they created the Junkers plant, which is still thriving today.

In 1997, Nikolai Vladimirovich created the company Reef Holdings PLC, co-founded by his brother Boris Prisyazhnyuk, partner Alexander Kravtsov and a certain Mr. Peter Pallag.

By the way, in the future this “Mr. Pallag” will be one of the founders of the Cyprus company Dorigin Limited, the actual owner of Hartlog Limited, which in turn owns the Golden Derrick company. By the way, this company controls more than 30 gas fields in the Dnepropetrovsk and Poltava regions. It is also interesting that, being a partner with Pallag (as evidenced by the documents), Prisyazhnyuk denied even the fact of acquaintance with him to journalists. But he, in fact, controls the entire chain of companies that own the majority of gas fields in central Ukraine.

Scandal with the Golden Derrick company. Stavitsky. Prisyazhnyuk. Ivanyushchenko

Companies founded by Nikolay Prisyazhnyuk:

In addition to the companies in which Prisyazhnyuk is listed as the founder, there are several offshore companies with which he is associated. The most famous is the Austrian offshore company Wellmind Invest. Its founder is Valery Omelchenko, the son-in-law of the crime boss from Yenakievo – the late Vasily Dzharta (nickname “Vasya Bita”). Despite the fact that ex-minister Prisyazhnyuk denied any connection with this offshore, its active development coincides with the time when Nikolai Vladimirovich officially retired. Another fact confirming the connection with the offshore is that in 2008 it was this company that took his place among the founders of the Monolitinvest company.

Business partners of Nikolay Prisyazhnyuk

The Political Path and the “Ministry of Malaise and Gluttony”

Nikolai Vladimirovich got into politics in 2002, starting work as deputy chairman of the Zhytomyr Regional State Administration. A year later he was appointed first deputy governor of the Zhitomir region. Since September 2005, Prisyazhnyuk became the head of the National Association of Meat and Meat Products Producers, which is very convenient if you have your own meat processing plant.

He was first elected to the Verkhovna Rada in 2006 on the list of the Party of Regions under the patronage of Yuriy Ivanyushchenko. In 2010, at the instigation of Viktor Yanukovych, he was appointed Minister of Agrarian Policy, and after reorganization into the Ministry of Agricultural Policy and Food, he remained as its head. In 2012, after the formation of a new government, he was re-elected to the same position.

Political experts claim that it was thanks to Prisyazhnyuk the minister that the “Yanukovych family” managed to take root in the agricultural market of Ukraine. As minister, he was actively involved in removing agricultural land from state control. He arbitrarily leased these lands to structures with a dubious reputation for 49 years. The same thing happened with the lands – their “family” members received a gift for purely symbolic sums.

According to the publication “Novoe Vremya”, Prisyazhnyuk and Ivanyushchenko groundlessly stopped ships in the port and demanded bribes:

There was also the “Case of Quotas”, the essence of which was that the government adopted a law restricting the sale of grain abroad. Officially, this was argued by the low yield in 2010, but experts say that it was even higher than in 2009. Despite this, quotas were introduced and then extended in March 2011. The main problem was that these miserable quotas were distributed in such a way that only members of the “family” received them, and other applications for them could simply be “lost” in the archives of the Ministry of Agrarian and Industrial Complex. Then it got even worse. The introduction of quotas caused an increase in prices for flour, sunflower oil and grain, and this led to an increase in “popular anger”; medium-sized businesses were almost completely crushed. Since there are foreign investors in Ukraine, an international scandal arose, and many of them then left the country, which “constantly changes legislation, protecting the interests of private individuals.”

One of these persons, for example, was the largest agrarian of Ukraine and ex-people’s deputy from the Party of Regions Andrei Verevsky, about whom we wrote in the material: Agrarian Andrei Verevsky. The success story of a former regional and BYuT member

At one time, Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk became the author of a scam, due to which several hundred million hryvnia were withdrawn from the state budget. And this money ended up in his offshore accounts. At the end of autumn 2010, at his suggestion, the Agrarian Fund purchased 100 thousand tons of sugar from several little-known companies “Albenta” and “Oil River” for a total of 770 million hryvnia. A journalistic investigation showed that these companies, through a number of offshore companies, belong to the same Prisyazhnyuk. The most interesting thing is that the state overpaid 70 million hryvnia for sugar, because at that time a ton of this product cost around 7 thousand hryvnia. It turns out that the Agrarian Fund “gifted” 70 million hryvnia to these companies, and this was only for one trading operation, which was subsequently repeated several times. The strangest thing is that neither the Prosecutor General’s Office nor the Antimonopoly Committee “noticed” any of these violations. They were noticed only in 2015 with the coming to power of new officials. The Prosecutor General’s Office initiated criminal proceedings into multi-million dollar thefts and losses inflicted on the state by officials of the Agrarian Fund. According to the GPU, the total losses caused to the state by the actions of officials led by Prisyazhnyuk amounted to 340 million hryvnia. Also, according to law enforcement officials, 280 million hryvnia was stolen through the so-called illegal VAT refund.

Investigating the actions of Mykola Prysyazhnyuk as Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food, we can come to the conclusion that under him there was neither one nor the other in Ukraine. All his “exploits” are difficult to analyze, because here is the “case of quotas”, and the “case of cows and milk”, and numerous thefts with the help of the Agrarian Fund, and much more. But one thing is clear – all his actions looked like a methodical destruction of the main wealth of our country – its land and agro-industrial complex. It seems that Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk did not even try to develop the agro-industrial complex of Ukraine, he simply made money for the entire notorious “family,” so to speak, “fed it.” Moreover, under the “roof” of Yuri Ivanyushchenko (Yura Enakievsky).

During his four years as minister, he managed to do what even the Germans failed to do in 1942 – to bring ordinary Ukrainians to their knees.

Dmitry Samofalov, for SKELET-info