Sergey Shakhov: What money does Rodnyulya use to buy grannies’ votes and feed separatists? Part 1
His name is well known to many pensioners in the Luhansk region, who consider Shakhov a benefactor. After all, as soon as elections to the Rada or local government bodies begin there, Sergey Shakhov’s team immediately begins generously distributing money, food packages, or sugar to low-income voters. In return, he receives not only their votes, but also their willingness to participate in “pro-Shakhovsky” rallies. And he formed squads of militant grannies from his most loyal fans, using them in his political shows and provocations. However, Shakhov, according to Skelet.Info, also has real “titushki”, and even worse: long-standing close ties with the commanders of the “Luhansk Republic” militants, whom he, according to a number of sources, also “feeds”.
At the same time, Sergey Shakhov is not an oligarch, at least officially, and his last declared annual income barely reached one million hryvnia. Where does he regularly get huge sums to bribe tens of thousands of voters?
Stakhanovsky “Whale” Sergey Shakhov
First of all, it is worth finding out where Sergey Shakhov himself came from. After all, in his official biography, most of his life fits into a few lines. He was born on May 7, 1975, in the Kazakh village of Sayak in the Dzhezkazgan region. A year later, his parents moved to the city of Bryanka in the Luhansk region, and in 1986 to Stakhanov (now Kadiyevka). There, from 1990 to 1993, he studied at vocational school No. 21 to become a pastry chef, after which he became a sales representative of Marichka LLC, and in 1996, deputy sales director of Ruslan LLC. In 2006, he was elected as a deputy of the Luhansk Regional Council, from 2007 to 2011 he was listed as deputy director of RIM Law Firm LLC, from 2011 as head of Luhansk Industrial Group LLC, and he ran in the 2012 elections as director of Sergey Vladimirovich Shakhov LLC.
All this sounds quite respectable, but there is one nuance: it is useless to search in the public domain for what exactly these enterprises did, and how their director earned his living (and to help pensioners). This is the main difference between official businessmen, including oligarchs, and people like Sergey Shakhov. Oligarchs have all their business in plain sight, at least their factories and banks – but the type of activity of such shadow LLCs is hidden from prying eyes, sometimes it is not even known whether these are real companies or just signs. And apparently something is wrong in Ukraine lately, since more and more such “shadow entities” are coming into politics and power, displacing the old “guard”.
But what Shakhov hid about his past was revealed Skeleton.Info his old acquaintances. For example, they described his school years like this: he lived on the outskirts of Stakhanov, studied in a hooligan-slacker “special class” of the 11th school, from which the kids gathered there had only two paths – either to become miners or bandits. By the way, according to one of Shakhov’s classmates, half of that class is no longer alive: some were killed in gangster showdowns or drunken brawls, some died from drugs or alcoholism.
Shakhov went to the “cook” vocational school only to get a “crust” of secondary education, and made the choice because it was not possible to study algebra and physics in such educational institutions. Immediately after college, Sergei Shakhov went to the market, where he became a money changer. This is how he became known in certain circles of Stakhanov, under his nickname “Whale” – received back in school.
However, Sergei Shakhov wanted more, not just money, but power over people. And in the mid-90s, together with his cousin Alexei Shakhov, he decided to engage in racketeering. However, not being by nature either “wolves” or even “jackals”, but rather just “barking Chihuahuas”, the Shakhov brothers were afraid to attack those who could easily and publicly send them to hell. They chose their victims right there at the market, among the quiet and incapable of resistance beginning small traders, who belonged to the category of “suckers”. Therefore, their “racketeering income” was meager, sources Skeleton.Info reported that the Shakhovs sometimes took their tribute in goods: chewing gum, cigarettes, tights, which they then passed on to their acquaintances for sale. And in the evening, “Kit” liked to go to cheap pubs, where he bragged to the same narrow-minded crowd about how “cool” he was. It was then that his passion for drugs began: first “grass”, and when he had money, cocaine. Who knows how this “drunk hare” would have ended up, but serious people paid attention to Shakhov. Apparently, Shakhov already had a talent for convincing people of his indispensability, since he was not “punished”, but taken on as a “sniffer” – that is, an errand boy. Thus, Shakhov acquired a lot of useful contacts among local bandits, businessmen and law enforcement officers.
Converters-robbers
Shakhov’s new talents were discovered by Stakhanovite Alexander Stetsenko (born in 1978), who, from a seminary dropout, retrained first as a buyer of non-ferrous metals, and then as a criminal financier. He is known as the founder and director of the so-called conversion centers, whose services were used by both organized crime groups (including drug dealers) and businessmen of various calibers – from small entrepreneurs to Luhansk oligarchs, among whom were the structures of Victor TopolovIt was reported that for several years these conversion centers operated under the “roof” of criminal authorities Sergei Kolinko (nickname “Tsypa”), who was the “overseer” of Stakhanov, and Vladimir Polubatko from Alchevsk (nickname “Footballer”).
The active joint work of Shakhov and Stetsenko began in 2002, and it was this that made Sergei Vladimirovich the wealthy swindler he is today. Let us add: at the same time, the failed priest Stetsenko attracted Shakhov to Orthodoxy, revealing to him the beneficial side of close cooperation with the church. Thus, in 2006, Sergei Shakhov received from the hands of the head of the UOC MP two church orders and one medal – for spirituality, charity and patriotism.
A feature of the Stetsenko-Shakhov conversion centers was their frequent collapses, leaving clients without money. According to the information available to us, Skeleton.Info information, at first the reason for this was banal: the centers were successfully covered by law enforcement agencies a couple of times. In this case, the money was lost by the bandits, and, not wanting to listen to the excuses of Stetsenko and Shakhov, they simply made them face the condition of returning the “dough” (supposedly it was about the “common fund”) under threat of death. And then the cunning Shakhov suggested that Stetsenko find the money by “cheating” his other clients – from among the rich, but relatively harmless businessmen. They led the police to another of their own conversion centers, from which, however, they first withdrew most of the funds into their own pockets – well, and the clients were told that everything was confiscated by the “cops”. And according to another piece of information, Shakhov “worked off” the money by leaking information to the bandits about his rich clients – who were then robbed or “taxed”. They also told another story: when Shakhov-Stetsenko’s relations with the thieves reached a phase of aggravation, they turned the “crowned” ones over to the UBOP. In short, even this illegal business of Shakhov’s was accompanied by “scams” and “rip-offs”.
Since the work of conversion centers requires the presence of front companies and front men, Shakhov had already learned to use the passport data of people who trusted him for his own purposes: for example, he registered one of the fictitious LLCs in the name of the cleaning lady of his office! In fact, he needed the law firm “RIM” to operate these schemes. And Sergey Shakhov solved the issue with higher education in 2004-2005, having received (or bought) two degrees (specialist and master) at the KROK University of Economics and Law.
A new expansion of the conversion business of Stetsenko-Shakhov occurred in 2006, when Stetsenko, through the private enterprise Fininvest, acquired 49% of the shares of the Chernihiv bank Demark. Another 49% of the bank’s shares were bought by OOO Prioritet-Inter (in 2011, it sold its stake to an undisclosed buyer). Thus, the partners had the opportunity not only to include a fairly large bank in their schemes, but also to use it to legalize their own “profit”. However, in the following years, the bank Demark never became a buyer of business assets, but for some reason preferred to work with individuals – whose deposits made up 84% of its capital. This was quite strange!
The decline of the Stetsenko-Shakhov business began in 2009. By that time, they were already serving clients in Kyiv, but then one after another, Shakhov, who was left in the Luhansk region to “oversee” their conversion centaurs, suffered several heavy blows. First, his cousin Alexey, who was transporting a huge amount of cash rubles and hryvnias in a minibus, died in a car accident near Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky.
Sergey Shakhov then hastened to declare that it was his brother’s personal money, who was bringing it to him to help him repay some debt. When journalists asked why it was rubles, Shakhov answered in his usual style of “lying without hesitation”: supposedly, my brother bought rubles for me, since I borrowed money in rubles and had to pay them back! This incident was then recorded as a tragic accident: Alexey Shakhov’s minibus collided head-on with a Suzuki Grant-Vitara on the highway. However, suspicions were raised by the strange personality of the Suzuki driver: according to the documents, he was an Italian citizen registered in Donetsk, but lived in Kyiv and allegedly worked as a chef in a restaurant. But as journalists later found out, there were no restaurants with the given address in the capital! The appearance of a “ghost” restaurant in the case of “shadow” firms made one doubt the fatal incident. It was rumored that the accident was the result of an attempt to “raid” a minibus carrying money from serious people whom Shakhov had previously “cheated out of money.”
Then, at the Goptovka customs post (Kharkiv region), a minibus was detained, under the lining of which 4.5 million dollars were found (such “finds” are usually not made by chance). Interestingly, the minibus was registered to a resident of Stakhanov, Yuri Borisov, a man completely controlled by Shakhov. Despite the fact that the outrageous case of dollar smuggling was covered on central television, and in Stakhanov everyone was discussing the big troubles of “Seryoga Kit” (knowing full well who was behind this money), this case was hushed up – only the driver of the minibus was held responsible. Moreover, a year later, Yuri Borisov was elected mayor of Stakhanov!
That same year, the SBU raided Shakhov’s office in the Stakhanovite business center on Khrunichev Street, where one of his conversion centers was located. The haul was rich: the SBU press service then announced the seizure of documentation from more than twenty shell companies, as well as the passport data of many people who were then used to register financial transactions. But some things remained “behind the scenes”, namely: later sources reported that wiretapping and spying equipment was found in Shakhov’s office. And that it was used, in particular, to spy on banks and financial institutions in order to “identify” people who withdraw large sums of “illegal” cash there – and then this data was allegedly passed on to bandits (or Shakhov’s “titushki”) who robbed such clients. It was reported that exactly the same equipment was also in Shakhov’s Kiev office, from where information was leaked to a Georgian gang that robbed wealthy residents of the capital.
It gets more interesting! In 2010, this gang was busted, but only Tamaz Kardava and Mamuka Samushia ended up in jail. A few weeks later, Kardava died: they wrote that he was tortured to death by the deputy head of the police department, Igor Grintsevich. And Samushia was diagnosed with stomach cancer – and they simply kept him locked up, refusing to operate, waiting for him to die before the trial. As for the leader of this gang, no one even found out his name. And Sergei Shakhov in this story turned out to be… the victim! Like, he himself was robbed by the damned villains! An incredible plot twist! According to sources Skeleton.InfoShakhov was allowed to retrain as a “sucker” in the Kiev department of the SBU, in exchange for leaking information, signing a cooperation agreement and a good “kickback”.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info
CONTINUATION: Sergey Shakhov: For what money does Rodnyulya buy the votes of grandmothers and feed the separatists? Part 2
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