Vladimir and Sergey Kaltsev: long-rotten pillars of the OPZZH in Zaporozhye. Part 1

To win over the fleeing Servant of the People electorate, it is not enough for opposition parties to simply criticize the authorities from TV screens and call for a return to the good old days. Life still moves forward and requires new solutions implemented by new people. After all, trust in many politicians of the old formation had dried up long before Zelensky was ready to run for president – which, in fact, ensured his landslide victory three years ago. A striking example of this is the story of the Kaltsev brothers, who are struggling to stay afloat in the political world, jumping from one sinking boat to another. Moreover, they themselves had a hand in ensuring that these boats eventually sank to the bottom.

Will this fate befall OPZH? It is quite possible, especially if the party continues to rely in the regions on people like Kaltsev. After all, these pillars have long been “rotten” from corruption and intrigue, and not only compromise the OPZZH before voters, but can also destroy it from the inside, as they already did with the Party of Regions…

Sergey Kaltsev and Vladimir Kaltsev: family secrets

On April 20, 1960, in Berdyansk, in the family of the director of the canteen Fyodor Aleksandrovich Kaltsev and his wife Evgenia Petrovna, their first son Sergei Kaltsev was born. And on June 16, 1966, his younger brother Vladimir Kaltsev was born there. Soon Fyodor Alexandrovich was transferred to the “criminal” position of deputy director of the city department store, but he did not last long there. As his sons later claimed, he was a fantastically honest man who decided that trade went against moral principles, and therefore quit and went to work at the factory. However, if you believe the rumors, then their father simply got into a very bad story, either with a shortage or with the trade in “left” goods. But it is not a fact that he was guilty, since OBKhSS “dragged” almost the entire department store workforce. Fyodor Aleksandrovich seemed to get out of this story and stayed away from the trade sphere for several years (we hope not because an article of the Criminal Code prohibited it). Again, according to these rumors, he did not get a job at the plant as a simple machine operator, and therefore subsequently worked there until his old age. But in their biographies, the brothers stubbornly write that they were born and raised in a “working-class family.”

The eldest of the brothers was a worker: Sergei Kaltsev graduated from the Berdyansk Mechanical Engineering College in 1979, and after serving in the army, he worked for a year as a mechanic, and then until the early 90s as a mechanic at the Berdyansk Road Machinery Plant and an experimental lifting equipment plant. He graduated in absentia from the Rostov Institute of Agricultural Engineering and was preparing to become a production manager.

His younger brother Vladimir Kaltsev decided to lead a more interesting life. After graduating from Berdyansk secondary school No. 16 in 1983, he did not go to the factory to join his father and brother, but stayed at his native school for almost a year (until the spring conscription of 1984) to work as a senior pioneer leader. And then he conscientiously went to serve in the army, ending up, according to him, in some special forces – but he did not specify which one. Vladimir Kaltsev often emphasized that he served in Afghanistan during the hottest period of 1984-86, and in his biography one can find a statement about being awarded the medal “Internationalist Warrior, 2nd degree” and the Order of Merit. But in fact, the mentioned medal does not exist in nature! There is a commemorative (not award) medal “To the Internationalist Warrior from the grateful Afghan people” and a commemorative badge “to the Internationalist Warrior”, without degrees, which were awarded to all military personnel who served in Afghanistan. As for the Order of Merit, this is generally a Ukrainian award (established in the 90s), received by Vladimirov Kaltsev in 2010 on the Day of Unity “for the rise of the state.”

After the army, Vladimir Kaltsev entered Zaporozhye State University (now National University, ZNU), choosing the Faculty of History. And having received a diploma in the summer of 1991, he transferred to graduate school at the department of pedagogy and psychology. But Vladimir Kaltsev failed to become a carefree history teacher, since the “dashing 90s” began.

In the spring of 1992, Vladimir dropped out of the university, and Sergei plant, and the Kaltsev brothers became businessmen, establishing the KPF Iveco MP in Berdyansk. The eldest became its director, and the younger became the head of the advertising and marketing department (advertising at that time was advertisements in the newspaper). What their cooperative did remained unknown, but the Kaltsevs managed to “raise” a substantial amount in just six months, which allowed them to move to Zaporozhye and start a big business there.

The Kaltsev brothers are historians and businessmen from “Alexander”

So, two brothers, one of whom a year ago was wiping his pants at the university, and the other was a mechanic in a workshop, move to the regional center, successfully settle there and create Alexander LLC (EDRPOU 13639821). Vladimir Kaltsev is the director of the company, and his brother Sergei is the commercial director. All this can be read in the biography of the brothers and the history of the Alexander group of companies! However, if we look at an earlier version of the biography of Vladimir Kaltsev, we will read there that he:

“…in 1993, together with classmates, he organized a production and commercial enterprise and was appointed to the position of director of Alexander LTD LLC. In 2001, due to the expansion of the company’s activities, it was renamed LLC “Alexander Company” and Vladimir Kaltsev was elected chairman of the board of directors…”.

This already changes the essence of the matter somewhat: it turns out that “Alexander” is not the brainchild of the Kaltsev brothers, but a joint project of several graduates of the history department of ZNU, including Vladimir Kaltsev, and only then he invited his brother to “Alexander”. Who were these almost mysterious classmates that Vladimir Kaltsev never mentioned? Skelet.Info We managed to find only two, also brothers: Yuri Konovalenko (born 1964), who studied at the history department of ZNU at the same time as Kaltsev Jr., and Andrei Konovalenko (born 1969), who studied there a year later (he is in the army did not serve). At the same time, according to the registers, the co-founder of Alexander is still Andrei Konovalenko, and from 1993 to this day he has held positions there from senior manager and head of the sales department to director. But Yuriy Konovalenko, Kaltsev’s classmate, never worked at Alexander: until 1999, he headed educational institutions in the Pologovsky district of the Zaporozhye region, and then held senior positions in the Russian State Administration.

But how were these failed history teachers able to so quickly raise such a large international business in an industrial field completely alien to them? After all, “Alexander”, already in the first two years of its existence, was not engaged in some kind of buying and transportation of non-ferrous scrap to the port (although, maybe that too), but in intermediary activities between enterprises involved in the production of abrasives and cutting tools. Using coal, oil products, electricity, electrical cables, and mining equipment in barter schemes. By 1995, the Alexander company became the official representative of the Berdyansk Cable Plant, the Zaporozhye Abrasive Plant and five other similar enterprises in Ukraine and Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), and the Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Plant (Uzbekistan).

By the end of the 90s, the Alexander company was already a co-owner of the Volzhsky, Zlatoust and Luga abrasive plants (all in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism)), opened its branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and entered into cooperation with the German OSBORN International GmbH. At the beginning of the 2000s, it began to acquire subsidiaries of various types: trading, construction, agricultural. Among them: Alexander-Development LLC and Alexander-Stroy LLC, Alexander-Steel LLC, Alexander Trading House and Alexander-Market. In addition, in the first half of the 2000s, Sergei Kaltsev received a second higher education in absentia, but not at a Ukrainian university, but at the Moscow Academy of National Economy. But his brother Vladimir Kaltsev managed to defend his dissertation in 2002 and receive a PhD in economics, although the last time he was seen at the university was in 1992…

If you take the Kaltsevs at their word that they supposedly started from scratch, then this is similar to the well-known story about the “apple millionaire”! And if you look at this oil painting from the point of view of the typical development of a business in that very difficult time, then it is missing a number of very important details. The business energy and commercial talent of the “historians” alone would not be enough to successfully launch such schemes, and even with such speed. Here they still needed a lot of money and even greater connections, as well as a “roof” to protect them from those who would like to profit at the expense of these extremely successful businessmen. However, the Kaltsev brothers keep all their affairs and connections of the 90s secret! Perhaps because some of these secretions literally smelled like blood.

Sergey Kaltsev and his brother Vladimir: water utility, dumps and the “gang of bald people”

On the evening of April 28, 2006, in Zaporozhye, Vladimir Razgulyaev, commercial director of Alexander LLC, was attacked, who died from knife wounds on May 2 in the hospital. Vladimir Kaltsev, who at that time already headed the board of directors of Alexander, announced an unprecedented reward for the capture of the killer – a million hryvnia (200 thousand dollars). However, law enforcement officers seemed to be in no hurry to get this jackpot, since the investigation seemed to have reached a dead end. And only in June 2007 was it announced that the perpetrators had been caught, after which Kaltsev presented the promised prize, intricately dividing it into 4 parts: 600 thousand to the city police and prosecutor’s office, and 400 thousand to the regional Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the prosecutor’s office. “Official money,” the Cossacks said then, hinting that the transferred money was “appropriated” by the police and prosecutorial authorities without any reporting. In words they said that they allegedly bought cars for law enforcement officers, but who knows! However, it wasn’t all about the bonus.

The “disclosure” of the crime itself raised questions. As the local police department later rather clumsily reported, in February 2007, an employee of the security service of the Alexander company, who was in a pre-trial detention center for robbery (!), told his cellmate about his complicity in the murder of Razgulyaev. “Nestka” either forgot to immediately report this to his “godfather”, or the head of the operational unit had no time (and the bonus was not needed), but the “split” was interrogated only four months later! After which two more security guards of “Alexander” were detained, as well as a certain Roman Gordiyash, a former employee of “Berkut”, who was named the organizer of the murder. It is noteworthy that as soon as there was information released about the detention of the perpetrators, Sergei Kaltsev and his brother Vladimir tried very hard so that in the press they were called not employees of “Alexander’s” security, but simply employees of an unnamed private security company hired to guard … the election headquarters of the Party of Regions in Zaporozhye (headed by Kaltsev and Razgulyaev). And the regional police, represented by the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Alexander Shmitko, generally pretended to be a fool and put forward the following version of the assassination attempt:

“They tried to intimidate Vladimir Fedorovich Kaltsev through Razgulyaev. They didn’t want to kill Razgulyaev – they had to attack, stab him and stage a robbery, and take the purse. It’s just that the killer had two knives, missed once, and the second blow hit him in the back, hitting important organs.”

Did one of the attackers brandish two knives? Just some kind of Hong Kong action movie! The police were clearly trying to fool the public. However, a month later, the independent press trumpeted the truth: that the leadership of the local PR hired security from their own company at the party’s expense, and that among those accused of Razgulyaev’s murder were not just employees of his own private security company (“moonlighting” as a robbery), but also the head of Vladimir’s security Kaltsev, a certain Romanchuk (possibly Mikhail Romanchuk, whom People’s Deputy Sergei Kaltsev appointed as his assistant). Immediately after this, Vladimir Kaltsev fired Romanchuk “for dishonest attitude towards his duties” and he disappeared into thin air – no one heard anything about him again. Moreover, some media reported then that Romanchuk was allegedly also arrested at first, but Kaltsev “bought him out” for a large sum (in addition to the promised bonus). In particular, about the detained guards wrote the following:

“One of them was even imprisoned, although after that his family unexpectedly acquired new real estate – an apartment, a good car, in which the father of a convicted murderer drove around the city. A strange story happened with the second one: he was released from custody under the guarantee of an authoritative young politician, and soon the defendant disappeared from the vastness of his homeland, and moreover, no one was really looking for him.”

According to other publications, Kaltsev initially protected Romanchuk from arrestallegedly offering him a deal. He had to confess (receive a minimum sentence and then be released on parole) and name the Zaporozhye “supervisor” Yuri Sakvarelidze (aka Yura Gruzin), who was also killed, as the customer behind the murder of Razgulyaev – which means everything could be blamed on him anything. The killer shot Sakvarelidze on June 12, 2006, and his customers were called local Armenian organized crime groupalthough there were other unofficial versions, including those leading to the Kaltsevs. The fact is that Yura Gruzin supervised, among other things, the development of dumps of metallurgical plants in Zaporozhye, in which Alexander’s structures also participated.

But another local organized crime group fed from the dumps – the so-called “bald gang”created by former senior lieutenant of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Alexander Seredin (San Sanych) from the same former and still active employees of law enforcement agencies (including Berkut, Titan and Organized Crime Control Department). It was the “balds” who were called the customers and perpetrators of a series of high-profile murders that shook Zaporozhye in 2006: Vladimir Malyar, Razgulyaev and Sakvarelidze, Viktor Savkin and others. Or rather, they tried very hard to make the public think so. Actually, that’s why the official organizer of Razgulyaev’s murder was named “bald” Roman Gordiyash! However, this story had another trail that led straight to the city water utility.

In the 90s, Zaporozhye was served by two treatment plants, the oldest of which (TsOS-1) could not cope with the load and required reconstruction. In order to raise the necessary amount for major repairs, they decided to ask for money from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which, after 4 years of negotiations, in 1999 provided the city water utility with a loan of $28 million (for 15 years). At this moment, the general director of the water utility became its former chief engineer, Vladimir Razgulyaev, appointed by order of the Zaporozhye mayor Alexander Golovko, a great friend of the Kaltsev brothers. Moreover (according to Skelet.Info with the assistance of Mayor Golovko), the company “Alexander LTD” was appointed “guardian” of the water utility, whose employees became Razgulyaev’s deputies and headed the press center and security of the water utility. Part of this can be found in surviving press archivesbut, unfortunately, more detailed information was simply destroyed.

A $28 million loan plus budgetary allocations were received, some work began on paper, but in reality no reconstruction took place, and the fate of the money remained unknown (some of it was used for the purchase of foreign cars and a luxurious renovation of the management office, the rest disappeared). At the same time, a fierce struggle unfolded for them. When Golovko was forced into early retirement in 2000 and his main opponent, General of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Alexander Polyak, was elected mayor, the first thing the new head did was to fire Razgulyaev. And twice: Razgulyaev tried to recover through the court. As a result, Razgulyaev went to work at Alexander, Anatoly Shinkar began to manage the water utility, and in order to return the loan to the Cossacks, the water tariff was increased several times. The story with the money became more and more confusing, and at the beginning of 2006, people in Kyiv became interested in the fate of the loan. A big check was being prepared, and Razgulyaev, who signed for the money, became a very dangerous main witness. Therefore, the fact that the story of the stolen EBRD loan was closed by the death of Razgulyaev turned out to be very beneficial for Vladimir Kaltsev. Just as it was equally beneficial for him to pin this murder on Yura Gruzin or the “gang of bald men”…

The eternal battle for Zaporozhye

The brothers simultaneously moved into power in 1998: Vladimir Kaltsev was elected to the Zaporozhye City Council, where he formed a friendly duet with Mayor Golovko (who won thanks to administrative resources and falsifications), and Sergei Kaltsev was nominated to the regional council from the district in his native Berdyansk. From 1998 to 2006, the Regional Council was headed by Vladimir Berezovsky (former instructor of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine), he was also the chairman of the Regional State Administration in 2003-2004, holding both branches of power in his hands. It seemed that unprecedented luck was accompanying them, but then the unexpected happened: a big commotion began in the region, caused by the next redistribution. Those who wanted to push the openly snickering leadership of the region away from the trough were able to enlist the support of Kyiv.

It should be understood that the struggle for mastery of the pyramid of power in this region has always been very difficult: different groups fought for each “floor”, and rarely did anyone manage to be stunned by the entire building at once. At the same time, their party affiliation was always quite conditional; groups and clans simply joined the political force that was most beneficial for themselves, and then staged internal party squabbles. So it’s very difficult to understand who was for whom and against whom!

Mikhail Shpolyansky, for Skelet.Info

CONTINUED: Sergey and Vladimir Kaltsev: long-rotten pillars of the OPZZH in Zaporozhye. Part 2

On topic: Starukh Alexander: how a Zaporozhye schemer became governor twice. PART 2

Bogovin Vitaly: agricultural raider at the head of the Zaporozhye region. PART 2

Bloody Demos of Zaporozhye

Former “Regional” is building a shopping center in Zaporozhye

Evgeny Anisimov. The criminal “Observer” of Zaporozhye returns

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