Oleg Bakhmatyuk: billionaire from an egg. PART 2

CONTINUATION. BEGINNING: Oleg Bakhmatyuk: billionaire from an egg. PART 1

Oleg Bakhmatyuk. Throw everyone

37.9 billion hryvnia – this is exactly how much Oleg Bakhmatyuk owed at the beginning of 2017 to investors, creditors, the state and business partners. This specific and official amount of the oligarch’s debts was named by the National Bank after its second bank, Financial Initiative, burst and crumbled. After the National Bank, without waiting for the return of the refinancing (10.9 billion), initiated the initiation of a criminal case against Bakhmatyuk for “theft on an especially large scale” and began to look for ways to force the debt to be repaid at the expense of the property of his corporation “Ukrlandfarming”. This brought the oligarch so much out of his usual indifference that he addressed an open letter to President Poroshenko with a request to protect his business from “attempts at raider takeover by the NBU.” In which he also accused the NBU of bankruptcy of two of its banks: CB Financial Initiative and PJSC VAB.

Oleg Bakhmatyuk: billionaire from an egg. PART 2

The history of this mega-fraud is so large-scale that it is difficult to say where exactly it all began – since Oleg Bakhmatyuk has a long-term tail of debts for a variety of scams. Skelet.Info Here are just a few of the most famous and largest:

• In 2006-2008, to rebuild the Chernobaevskaya poultry farm, Bakhmatyuk took out loans from investors in the amount of 137 million hryvnia, and also received compensation from the state for interest on these loans. In 2011, an audit found that only part of the objects declared in the project had been built.
• In 2010, the Avangard holding placed a package of Eurobonds worth $200 million on the London Stock Exchange, guaranteed by its own shares. The repayment of these bonds has not yet occurred, and Bakhmatyuk remains the owner of 100% of Avangard shares.
• In 2010, PJSC Rise Company, owned by Bakhmatyuk, violated an agreement on the supply of raw materials (158,000 tons of corn) to the Nibulon company. By decision of the GAFTA arbitration court dated May 23, 2014, Rise Company was obliged to pay $22 million in debt and compensation. This money went into Bakhmatyuk’s debt treasury.
• In 2011, Ukrlandfarming took out a five-year syndicated loan in the amount of $600 million (!) from Deutsche Bank and Sberbank of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) for the construction of new poultry farms. The money was spent on buying up other agricultural corporations, but Bakhmatyuk was never able to return it.
• In 2011, Oleg Bakhmatyuk acquired the Omtron USA company in the United States. Instead of conducting an honest business, he introduced some shady schemes into the company, and then brought it to bankruptcy. Contrary to his calculations, American farmers who collaborated with the company sued it and won – and Bakhmatyuk had to pay them compensation.
• In South Carolina, the oligarch acquired the Townsend company, which was coordinating the work of many poultry farms. Bakhmatyuk persuaded them to take out loans to expand production, but then took the money abroad and bankrupted the company. After this, Oleg Romanovich was banned from entering the United States.
• In 2012-2013, Ukrlandfarming placed Eurobonds worth almost $500 million at 11% per annum (the Yanukovych-Azarov government also participated in the guarantees). Instead of repaying the bonds, the debts on them were assigned to the banks “Financial Initiative” and “VAB”, which then went bankrupt.

And this does not include the mass of environmental problems created by its poultry farms. It is worth noting that even in the USA, large poultry farms are, first of all, a question of “where to put the shit?”, as well as dead chickens, broken and rotten eggs, etc. Horror films have even been made about this – for example, “The Bay” (2012). But this is in America, where production waste is carefully stored, and then they only think about what to do with it. In Ukraine, the “chicken god” Bakhmatyuk did not fool himself with such problems: chicken droppings, expired eggs and other biologically hazardous waste from his poultry farm were dumped almost under the fence of the villagers! This happened, for example, in the village of Makarov, Kyiv region.

This is what Oleg Bakhmatyuk likes to call himself “the largest Ukrainian producer of chicken and eggs” and “one of the largest employers in Ukraine.” And he was one of the “leading bankers of the country” until his banks burst, leaving depositors, the National Bank, and creditors of his agro-industrial scams with their noses.

The first to be covered was VAB Bank, which Bakhmatyuk literally wrested in 2011 from the Russian-Ukrainian oligarch Sergei Maksimov – he was finally “persuaded” to sell his problem bank, putting him in a pre-trial detention center (from where he was released immediately after the deal). Bakhmatyuk owned the bank through the offshore company Quickcom Limited. At that time, many wondered why he needed another captive bank? It turned out that he purchased it specifically for a large-scale scam. By inflating deposit rates, the bank attracted about 9.5 billion hryvnia from depositors and 3.6 billion legal entities, which were then generously distributed with preferential long-term loans to Bakhmatyuk’s companies. Among them were:

• Star-Master LLC (loan 354 million hryvnia). This company, through Gadyachsky Meat Processing Plant LLC, Agro Alpha LLC and AgriAlfa LLC, belongs to Ukrlandfarming.
• JSC Zheleznodorozhnik (938 million hryvnia). The heads of the company were Oleg Soloshchuk, Nadezhda Gromyko and Andrey Dzundza – employees of Stanislavskaya Trading Company LLC, which became the legal successor of Zheleznodorozhnik after its liquidation.
• Leder Plus LTD LLC (438 million), headed by Bakhmatyuk’s managers Oleg Vasylishin and Anton Filimonenko.
• Ukraine-Agroinvest LLC (406 million), headed by Ukrlandfarming managers Natalya Kostyrkina, Yaroslav Shulgan and Andrey Stolpnik.

At the same time, the bank had to repay Eurobonds. And in the summer of 2014, VAB-Bank suddenly began to introduce restrictions on the withdrawal of money, in October it stopped paying money to depositors, then it delayed the payment of dividends on Eurobonds – which triggered the bankruptcy mechanism.

At the beginning of 2015, it was the turn of the Financial Initiative bank, created by Bakhmatyuk in 2004 and which by that time he owned through another offshore scheme, to go bankrupt. By the way, the peculiarity of Bakhmatyuk the banker was that he owned his banks individually, without accepting any partners there.

Oleg Bakhmatyuk: billionaire from an egg. PART 2

Directly related to these banking scams was a very incomprehensible “restructuring” of the debts of the Avangard holding company on bonds previously sold in London. In 2015, Bakhmatyuk managed to extend the circulation period of these bonds until October 2018, and at the same time buy up previously sold blocks of Avangard shares, becoming its sole owner.

Did an open letter to Poroshenko help Bakhmatyuk, did he find protection from him the same way he once found it from the Yanukovych family? It should immediately be noted that even earlier he found this protection in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It was the National Police investigators who were tasked with investigating the case brought against Bakhmatyuk regarding the theft of especially large amounts of refinancing from his banks. They “investigated” and closed it at the beginning of January 2017, saying that they did not find evidence of a crime. Shocked Ukrainians then had only one question: how much did he “unfasten” them? A little later, the head of the Anti-Corruption Center, Vitaly Shabunin, announced the fact of a conspiracy between Bakhmatyuk and Minister Avakov.

The fact that relations between Bakhmatyuk and the authorities remain friendly and businesslike was evidenced by information published back in January 2017 by Sergei Leshchenko. He announced an impending conspiracy between Bankova and two agro-industrial oligarchs – Bakhmatyuk and Yuri Kosyuk. The talk was about state aid to “domestic agricultural producers” in the amount of 4 billion hryvnia, most of which would have been received by the enterprises of these two “agrarian gods”: the Avangard holding (Bakhmatyuk) and the Myronivsky Hliboproduct holding (Kosyuk). Despite the fact that the information was published and caused some resonance, Bankovaya did not consider it necessary to back down – and the conspiracy was carried out. In particular, in October 2017, it became known that Mironovsky received 809 million hryvnia (half of all subsidies allocated to farmers), and Avangard received 142 million. This is an order of magnitude more than was allocated to other manufacturers! And this despite the fact that “Mironovsky” already received 340 million VAT refunds at the end of 2017, and the government money previously poured into Bakhmatyuk’s banks was “forgotten and forgiven” – and now the state has begun to pour finance into his “Avangard”.

Moreover, the government’s plans for 2018 include increased funding for these holdings! Information also appeared that it was allegedly planned to use “Yanukovych’s billions” confiscated by the GPU for this purpose. That is, in essence, divide them among your own. After all, in the best case, this money would have been used to cover Bakhmatyuk’s debts to the state, in the worst case, it would also have been stolen, and like all previous injections into his business. By the way, these same goals can explain the abnormal rise in price of the products of his Avangard holding in 2017: either this is how Bakhmatyuk saves his business, or he again shamelessly fills his bins with banknotes. Experts believe that Bakhmatyuk’s true goals can be found out by obtaining information about his foreign exchange transactions: if he is now actively buying dollars, it means he will withdraw them from Ukraine.

And here’s what’s very interesting: if the patronage of Bankova and the Cabinet of Ministers of “Mironovsky Hliboproduct” is easily explained by the very long-standing relationship of the Poroshenko and Groysman families with its owner Yuriy Kosyuk and especially with his former (was it?) co-owner Alexander Dombrovsky, then for what kind of services do they provide his “avant-garde” Oleg Bakhmatyuk?

Thus, all the “signs” indicate that Oleg Bakhmatyuk received a complete amnesty for his sins from both Bankova and the Cabinet of Ministers. True, NABU, which takes a sharply anti-presidential position, still has questions about him. And now Bakhmatyuk risks making a big mistake, taking the wrong side in the midst of a political crisis. But neither warning calls from the Solomensky court about upcoming NABU searches, nor personal acquaintance with Deputy Head of NABU Anatoly Novakin whose company Bakhmatyuk cheerfully celebrated his birthday in August 20117. However, Oleg Bakhmatyuk has successfully changed his shoes to the new owners of Bankova more than once.

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

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