Ruslan Demchak
We recently published materials about Petro Poroshenko’s “Mezhyhirya” and the no less impressive “khatynka” of his pocket prosecutor Shokin. What is surprising here is not so much the redneck scale of their “family nests,” but the fact that people who came on the wave of the fight against the values of Yanukovych and his friends themselves share these values. But this is surprising only at first glance. If you take a closer look at them, and even better at the teams that they brought to power, it becomes clear that they had no intention of changing anything. Take for example the faithful friend and fellow countryman of Petro Poroshenko, deputy from the BPP Ruslan Evgenievich Demchak. How is he different from the “Family” banker Arbuzov or the young oligarch Kurchenko? It is worth looking at his life and career to understand that he differs from these above-mentioned “young and early ones” only in his registration. He doesn’t have it from Donetsk, but from Vinnytsia, just like Pyotr Alekseevich.
The basis of Ruslan Evgenievich’s wealth is the UBG corporation – “Ukrainian Business Group”. He started out as an accountant under the auspices of businessmen from Odessa, brothers Oleg and German Andes. German Edmundovich is rumored to be a big fan of handsome boys. But these are just rumors. But the fact is that during the “reign” of Alexander Klimenko at the Tax Inspectorate, he was appointed head of the department for control over the production of alcohol and tobacco. It is clear that a person far from the “Family” will not be appointed to such a lucrative position. Apparently, these old, “family” connections are still working for Mr. Andes and his beloved ex-accountant Ruslan Demchak. But we will talk about this a little later. At the same time, in the mid-nineties, Ruslan Evgenievich was just learning how to invest. However, in those years this type of activity had a slightly different meaning.
And Demchak himself tells interesting things about his start to his career. The investment group Initiative, a company he organized, searched for classified information about the owners of enterprise shares (one can only guess how such information was collected), opened an office next to the enterprise and bought shares cheaply from the owners – plant workers, to whom these shares were transferred in exchange for vouchers. That is, in other words, insider information was clearly obtained through corruption, and then, taking advantage of people’s financial illiteracy, they were “swindled” into property. That is, he was engaged in raiding “for dummies.” And, the most interesting thing is that Ruslan Evgenievich speaks about this completely freely and openly in an interview. So the enterprises “Stroyindustry”, “Khimfavorit”, “Stroymekhanizatsiya” ended up in his hands. He sold all these enterprises according to the same scheme – first he transferred them to his brother, then he went bankrupt, thereby “killing” the remaining shareholders, and then he sold them, apparently as a bankrupt, for small official money, plus black cash, in order to bypass taxes at the same time. And it was “Initiative” that became the basis of his future group UBG.
Ruslan Demchak
The Ukrainian Business Group has opened many different companies, but the understanding that the Ukrainian population can be taken for suckers has not gone away. For example, the Dobrobut insurance company, part of this group, back in 2007 in the Darnitsky district of Kyiv, along with utility bills, “snuggled” insurance receipts to people. In these bills, insurance was listed as “mandatory”. Gullible pensioners went and paid, only after some time they learned that they might not have paid. Whether such an action could have been carried out without a corruption component and the involvement of local authorities is a question. We think it’s rhetorical. However, those who paid for insurance at Dobrobut and then applied for payments were denied under a variety of pretexts. It is generally quite difficult to get your money from this insurance company. In the payment ratings among insurance companies, Dobrobut was at the very bottom, and in 2012 it declared bankruptcy, throwing away all its clients at once. However, already in 2011, only secretaries remained in the offices who could not answer a single question. However, even after bankruptcy, Dobrobut sold insurance for a couple of years, only now it was completely illegal. But this is so, little things, touches to the portrait. Demchak was already earning most of his money from something else.
There were many schemes, and Ruslan Evgenievich worked like a bee. He was involved in illegal alienation of land. To do this, he resorted to outright forgery, registering himself, his brother, his wife and a bunch of other acquaintances in forged documents, according to which they became shareholders of collective farms. And thus he received land shares for them in the Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions. Later he sold these lands, “earning” about 100 million hryvnia. He also did not pay taxes on this money, which is why he got caught, but this will be discussed later. Almost simultaneously with the land scams, his ERDE Bank was engaged in financial fraud. These scams looked more complicated than land scams. Money was transferred to the accounts of certain enterprises registered with the above-mentioned bank as payment for fictitious bills. And then they were cashed in bank branches and transferred to those who needed this cash. That is, in fact, ERDE Bank was one of the largest conversion centers that put this criminal act on stream. The money was withdrawn in such large amounts that it was necessary to use armed Vulcan security guards and armored vehicles. It is clear that sooner or later the relevant authorities should have become interested in scams of this scale. They became interested. The first time we approached him was in connection with his insurance company Dobrobut, which we wrote about above. Then the police even seized the company’s servers. But somehow the matter was hushed up.
But in 2012, Ruslan Evgenievich was detained and put in a pre-trial detention center. At this time, he was running in polling station No. 18 in the Vinnytsia region. He was opposed in this district by Grigory Kaletnik, a regional governor and former governor of Vinnytsia. And Ruslan Demchak himself and opposition journalists then argued that it was he who imprisoned a brave and promising competitor. This is, at the very least, doubtful. In fact, cases against Demchak were opened on the basis of appeals from people’s deputies Vladimir Ariev and Oleg Novikov. Both one and the other were in the opposition camp in 2012, the Our Ukraine – People’s Self-Defense faction. The current boss of Ruslan Evgenievich, the nominal leader of the BPP, Petro Poroshenko, was also in the same faction. The funny thing is that Vladimir Ariev is still in the same faction with Ruslan Demchak. I wonder how they communicate, and just look at each other, during faction meetings and at party parties? Moreover, Arev is an ideological patriot and European integrator, and Demchak behaves, to put it mildly, unpatriotically. But let’s leave this fact more on the conscience of the “patriot” Ariev.
At a minimum, Demchak himself does not want to defend his homeland. He is still quite a young man and is obliged to pay his military duty. What the military registration and enlistment office reminded him of by sending a summons. But the deputy of the presidential party did not want to show by example how to love Ukraine and, apparently, simply did not show up at the military registration and enlistment office.
And besides, his corporation UBG conducts its financial affairs through Sberbank of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). Perhaps this is where his connections with the Adens brothers and, through them, with Alexander Klimenko, who is now hiding in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), about which we wrote above, come into play. Either way, it’s not a good story. Ukraine and the whole world are introducing sanctions against the Russian banking sector, and the representative of the presidential faction calmly and without hesitation carries out financial transactions through the largest bank of the aggressor country. And, according to rumors, he has already withdrawn several hundred thousand dollars to Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism).
Now Ruslan Demchak is a member of the Verkhovna Rada from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and deputy head of the Committee on Financial Policy and Banking Activities. That is, he deals with what he has experience in, very specific experience. With his talents as a strategist, such a position can be quite a good one. So, apparently, Ukrainians will have to wait for new scams, larger ones.
Denis Ivanov, for SKELET-info