Pavel Klimets: alcohol schemes of the vodka baron. PART 1

Since its appearance in this world, vodka has been used not only to scorch people, but to regularly shake the last money out of their pockets. And for this money, states and private producers have been fighting among themselves for centuries. The state imposed taxes and excise taxes on vodka, and producers came up with all sorts of ways to avoid paying them to the treasury. How exactly? It’s best to ask about this from the famous Ukrainian producer of vodka, as well as a “boil” similar to it, Pavel Klimts. He managed to make his fortune, even in the current crisis, estimated at 68 million dollars, precisely on all kinds of vodka schemes.

Dynasty of communists and businessmen

In 1927, a native of the Brest povet of the Polesie Voivodeship (Rzeczpospolita) Pavel Antonovich Klimets joined the “Communist Party of Western Belarus” banned there and organized an underground cell of supporters of the annexation of Polesie to the Soviet BSSR. After their dreams came true, Pavel Klimets Sr. became a big man in his area: in the late 40s he organized a collective farm and was in charge of grain procurements. During such preparation, in 1953, he was killed by the “forest brothers” who were still roaming those parts.

His eldest son, Mikhail Klimets, followed in his father’s footsteps and made a career in the district committee of the Komsomol and the CPSU, after which he became interested in local history. The youngest son, Alexey Klimets, having become an engineer, worked in the capital construction department of the Brest Regional Executive Committee. And the middle son, Anatoly Klimets, moved to Donetsk in 1966, where he began working as a television technician at the Byradiotekhnika enterprise (a consumer services plant). On July 23, 1967, he and his wife Stella had a son, Pavel Anatolyevich Klimets, the hero of our story.

Years later, Anatoly Pavlovich became the chief engineer, and then the director of the enterprise, a very famous and respected person in Donetsk. His extensive acquaintances extended from directors of other city enterprises and heads of departments of the executive committee to the “shadow” and even the criminal world of Donetsk. In addition, sources Skelet.Info they report that he was personally acquainted and even had some business with Yuri Khomutynnik, nicknamed “Yurets Zolotoy” (father of Vitaly Khomutynnik) and Evgeniy Kushnir, the future leader of one of the bloodiest Donetsk organized crime groups, who worked in neighboring Makeyevka at “Rembyttekhnika”, which was responsible for the murders of Bragin, Hetman and Shcherban in the 90s.

But if in the 80s they were engaged in gold farming and other completely illegal acts, then Anatoly Pavlovich preferred not to go beyond the Soviet shadow economy. Since good televisions and tape recorders were in short supply at that time, and spare parts for them were even more in short supply, Anatoly Pavlovich “rose sharply” based on the capabilities available to him. He could be called a “guild worker,” but they, as a rule, produced something, and Anatoly Pavlovich was engaged in the service sector and “trading” the deficit (on a considerable scale). At the same time, he skillfully organized his underground business: he not only shared with whoever was needed “at the top,” but also did not offend his employees in fees, so he had respect from all sides. So the son of an ideological underground communist, killed by bourgeois nationalists, began to live by no means according to Lenin’s precepts, and soon he himself turned into a classic bourgeois, except perhaps without a top hat on his head.

Their family not only lived in abundance, but did not hide it – for example, by showing off in imported “clothes”. Anatoly Pavlovich himself has been a fan of raincoats “like Bilmondo’s in the movies” since the 70s (he’s wearing them in many photos, and even on his monument the raincoat lies next to him on the bench), his daughter Marina also preferred French fashion, but his son Pavel was guided by the American “Cato”.

When the wind of “perestroika” and cooperation blew in the country, Anatoly Pavlovich was one of the first in Donetsk to raise his sails to it. Already in 1988, he managed to move Byradiotekhnika from communal ownership to collective ownership, that is, he actually began its privatization. This allowed him to open a wide variety of cooperatives at the enterprise (and on its premises). For example, his friend and colleague Sergei Gutsul started opening video salons – which then literally raked in money with shovels. They opened “lumps” (formally consignment stores through which they sold everything – from household appliances to perfumes and cigarettes), started a “cooperative cafe” (essentially their own restaurant), and there were also plans to have their own hotel. In a word, he developed on a large scale, no worse than other aspiring businessmen of that time.

Compared to the background of his successful father and venerable uncles, Pavel Klimets in the 80s looked somehow completely inconspicuous.

After the 8th grade, he entered the Donetsk Technical School of Industrial Automation to major in mining electromechanics. Then he got a job at the Donetskshakhtoprohodka trust, as a simple underground electrician. It is curious that Pavel Klimets left for the army only in 1986, that is, at the age of 19 – his family did not disclose the reasons for this. He returned home at the end of 1988, when dad was in full swing developing the “cooperative movement” in his Byradiotekhnika. And yet, according to the rules of that time, Pavel Klimets had to work in the direction for three full years, so he continued his work experience at Donetskshakhtoprokhodka, again as a simple electrician. According to sources Skelet.InfoPavel Klimets was only listed there (one more mechanic, one less, it was not noticeable), but he himself was actively engaged in commerce under the roof of the family business. And when the period of “working out” ended, Pavel Klimets officially moved to his father and in 1992 headed Byttechnika CJSC, which was a subsidiary of Bytradiotekhnika and was engaged in the trade of various household appliances and electronics.

He worked there until 1997, after which he became interested in the vodka business. CJSC Byttechnika passed into the hands of Sergei Gutsul, with whom Anatoly Pavlovich started his big business – it seems that in the second half of the 90s they separated. But in December 2000, Sergei Gutsul was killed on the Donetsk-Berdyansk highway. Who needed it? For a long time, journalists made hints towards Rinat Akhmetov, even claiming that Akhmetov allegedly later “squeezed out” the deceased’s business for himself. However, later the media reported that Byttehnika remained the property of the widow of Sergei Gutsul, and in 2005-2007. she sold it to the Dnepropetrovsk company Comfy. Thus, Akhmetov’s hypothetical involvement in the murder of Hutsul remained only unconfirmed speculation. But the reasons for the break between Hutsul and Klimtsy remained unknown, as well as why father and son abandoned their specialized topic of household appliances and went into alcohol and real estate.

Pavel Klimets. Donetsk miracles: vodka from cologne and Kaiserman’s tax magic

The Olimp vodka company officially started in 2000, and just then mass advertising of its vodka of the same name began on Ukrainian television. But as some residents of Donetsk say, it’s just that since 2000, “Olymp” began to bottle its own branded vodka, and not the incomprehensible “shmurdyak”, and began to conduct the alcohol business in a more or less civilized manner. However, “civilized” means deceiving the state by underpaying millions to the budget, instead of poisoning its citizens in the old fashioned way.

In 1996, in Donetsk there were several companies with the name “Olympus”, the owners of which often did not even know each other – Ukrainian entrepreneurs simply lacked imagination and vocabulary when choosing names for their enterprises. The Klimtsov family suffered the same thing. At that time, some changes occurred in their business, which led to the fact that Byttechnika JSC and the chain of stores went to Sergei Gutsul, and Bytradiotekhnika JSC with the rest of its subsidiaries, including Olimp, remained with the Klimtsov, but moved into other areas . One of them was vodka – which brought their family business out of the crisis.

There is no information available about Pavel Klimts’s first steps in the vodka business, but it is known that in Ukraine, and especially in the Donbass, vodka and gasoline were the two main “gangster topics.” At first, he and his father traded in foreign (or allegedly foreign) alcohol, and the private enterprise “Onyx”, which he owned, was engaged in importing the brands “Absolut”, “Metaxa” and “Xenta” even in the “zero” years. But opening your own vodka production, at least semi-legally, and even more so privatizing the Donetsk distillery, was possible only if you had great connections in the government and very good relations with criminal “authorities.” Otherwise, the vodka business was either closed by the authorities or taken away by bandits. That is why there are not so many vodka “kings” and “barons” in Ukraine. For example, for the closest “neighbors” of the Klimts, the Gorlovka vodka family Nechitailo-Ridzhok (National Alcohol Traditions concern), the head of the company worked as the deputy mayor of Gorlovka, and her sister worked as the head of the city tax inspectorate. And still it was very difficult for the sisters!

The Klimtsov vodka business began and developed thanks to the connections of Anatoly Pavlovich, who, however, did not live to see the triumph of his brainchild (he died in September 2001). There was even a rumor that Anatoly Pavlovich received someone else’s vodka business – either in the form of compensation from his partners, or as a “gift” from bandits, after the big Donetsk redistribution of 1995-96. The father and son began producing their own vodka at a leased and then privatized Donetsk distillery (having closed the kvass and lemonade workshop there), with the traditional brands “Pshenichnaya”, “Russkaya” and “Ukrainian Special”. Then they launched their own brands: “Olympus”, “5 drops”, “Prime”, “Bilenka”, “Vdala”, “Privatna Kolektsiya”, cognacs “Marseille”, “ZhZL” and “Bakhchisarai”.

Things went so well that the Olympus company, which was involved in the vodka business, became the family’s flagship enterprise. Then, in the period 2000-2001, the Donetsk Distillery was reconstructed (it became known as “Lik”), and the rapidly developing “Olympus” acquired the Kharkov Distillery and the Crimean Wine and Cognac Factory “Bakhchisarai”, and also built it in 2003-2005. Distillery “Prime” in the village of Malinovka (Kharkov region), today it is the main enterprise of the company.

The media also reported that for successful “competition” Pavel Klimets used the services OCG of Alexey Chebotarev and Alexander Lishchenko (more about Lishchenko: Alexander Lishchenko: from the life of Kyiv “authorities”. PART 1), who previously worked in the Kyiv “Brigade” of Pryshchik. By order of Klimts, Chebotarev’s people “made nightmares” of certain vodka enterprises, either intimidating and even torturing their owners, or arranging economic “set-ups” for them and plunging them into debt. According to rumors, they “helped” not only “Olympus”, but also “National Traditions” (Nechitailo-Ridzhok).

Huge profits allowed Pavel Klimts to invest in other projects: the Donetsk restaurant “Africa” (where Akhmetov and Yanukovych loved to visit) and the Prague hotel (the dream of which Anatoly Pavlovich cherished), the Zolotok Koltso shopping center, several housing complexes, the Maximum club » in Kyiv, tourist complex “Helios”. He opened his own bank, Ukrainian Financial World, and the insurance company Vega, and in 2008, he merged his construction companies into Prime Capital Group LLC. He invested in the food industry: he opened a bakery plant and a poultry factory in Volnovakha, and plants for the production of bakery products and animal feed in Dobropolye.

However, behind this external success hid the shadow side of Pavel Klimts’s vodka business, based on three pillars: “leftover alcohol”, fraud with excise stamps and fraud with VAT refunds. At one time, Ukrainian media wrote a lot about this, including publishing house “Bagnet”owned by the “gesheft general” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Vasily Gritsak (do not confuse him with his namesake from the SBU). Gritsak then controlled the production of excise stamps through the EDAPS consortium, and therefore conflicted with those who counterfeited them – but purely out of his own greed, and not out of resentment for the state.

As a “legal” alcohol, Klimets used not technical alcohol, like “garage” counterfeit producers, but almost food grade alcohol, but purchased through fraudulent schemes. Of these, two main ones were described in detail. The first is alcohol, officially purchased for… perfume production (it is a little different from food alcohol, just like medical alcohol).

It was for this purpose, journalists wrote, that Klimets opened the perfumery enterprise “VIP-parfum”, which not only produced colognes, but purchased and then “wrote off” huge volumes of ethyl alcohol. “Written off” as an export, and to European countries, and at a wholesale price three times higher than the cost of French perfumery! It turned out that in 2001-2004. “VIP-parfum” was not only the largest exporting perfume company in Ukraine (75% of export volume), but also one of the largest in Europe. How so? More on this scam below. But the point of the scam with perfume alcohol was that the excise tax on it was only 1.2 hryvnia per liter, and in 2003, Deputy Prime Minister Mykola Azarov personally gave “VIP-parfum” an excise tax benefit, reducing the excise tax on alcohol for this company up to 42 kopecks! So she began to purchase cologne alcohol in trains – which was then supplied to the Olimpa distilleries through supply companies (Akvadon LLC and others) and turned into Bilenka. This business flourished until 2009, when the government raised the excise tax on perfume alcohol to 39.4 hryvnia per liter. Immediately after this, the VIP-parfum enterprise suddenly became unnecessary for Pavel Klimets, and in 2010 he put it up for sale.

The second scheme is the use of the so-called. export alcohol. It is very simple, and was used by Ukrainian vodka “barons” from the late 90s to 2008-2009, and sources Skelet.Info they claim that it worked under Yanukovych, and is still working successfully today – moreover, separatists are already participating in these schemes. More specifically: front companies (Centurim LLC and others), which Klimets was supervised by Gennady Shchetinin, processed fictitious exports of Ukrainian alcohol at a zero excise rate (without paying excise tax at all). But the tanks with it did not go to Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) or Europe, but to Ukrainian distilleries. At the same time, VAT was refunded on the fictitious export of alcohol! At the same time, both alcohol schemes worked in tandem with the excise tax: when “Olympus” used either fake excise tax stamps, or real ones, but acquired through illegal means, without paying for them to the budget of Ukraine.

Pavel Klimets “earned” in even larger quantities from VAT refunds from fictitious exports of his “VIP-parfum” products – that’s why its declared value was so high! But the author and curator of the excise and tax scheme “Olympus” is called Vadim Kaiserman. His father, Alexander Yakovlevich, was a boss in Soviet trade and made his first fortune trading in scarce products. They say that Anatoly Pavlovich Klimets was personally acquainted with him, and that allegedly somewhere in 1990 he even had the idea of ​​creating, together with Alexander Yakovlevich, a “cooperative” to supply the “Afghans” and “Chernobyl victims” with sausage and condensed milk. Then Alexander Yakovlevich retired from business and emigrated with his wife Ida Alexandrovna and youngest son Evgeniy to Florida, leaving his eldest son Vadim “on the farm.” And he, from the beginning of the 90s, was appointed head of the Tax Administration of the Donetsk region, and in 2007 was appointed first deputy head of the State Tax Administration of Ukraine. Vadim Kaiserman was called one of the “fathers of the tax mafia” of Ukraine, and unlike the founders of other mafias (prosecutor’s, police, etc.), he remained completely elusive and got away with it, voluntarily resigning in 2010. As they said, because he began to extort money from very big people, who eventually complained to Akhmetov and Ivanyushchenko, whose faithful executor he had been since the 90s.

But after himself, Kaiserman left a lot of his people in the tax and customs authorities. And one of his “favorite students” was Vitaly Khomutynnik, who became closely acquainted with Kaiserman through his father and the leaders of the Donetsk organized crime groups of the early 90s, among whom he actively “moved.” They say that Kaiserman called Khomutynnik “a bright head.” What he thought about the head of Pavel Klimets is unknown, but numerous sources Skelet.Info It has been argued more than once that Kaiserman was so closely involved in excise and tax scams of Olympus, and so diligently covered up this corporation, as if he had a good share of it. In particular, it was reported that Kaiserman once initiated the free transfer of 43 million excise stamps to Olympus!

According to journalists, Pavel Klimets also used fake excise stamps, printed both in Ukraine and abroad. And in 2010, he also “converted” 130 million excise wine stamps (priced 12 kopecks) into vodka stamps (which cost 7.40 hryvnia), which were then affixed to Olimp products.

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

CONTINUED: Klimets Pavel: alcohol schemes of the vodka baron. PART 2

Subscribe to our channels at Telegram, Facebook, CONT, VK And YandexZen – Only dossiers, biographies and incriminating evidence on Ukrainian officials, businessmen, politicians from the section CRYPT!