Vladimir Zubik
Although he is one of the hundred richest people in the country, his name means absolutely nothing to most Ukrainians. But Vladimir Zubik himself also does not at all strive for national fame. He has had enough of the curses of the buyers of apartments in his residential complex who were deceived by him, which are often simply unsuitable for normal living. And he wouldn’t want everyone to remember where he got the money for his scandalous developments that destroy architectural monuments or violate all safety standards. Or that for a significant part of his life he was a “native” of distant offshore islands, and having received Ukrainian citizenship and having bought the mandate of a people’s deputy, he immediately became the first “migratory carcass” of the Verkhovna Rada…
Auditor from Cape Verde
The future oligarch Vladimir Vladimirovich Zubik was born on February 28, 1958 in Lvov, into a family of Soviet specialists. However, he never spoke about his parents, and even more so about the relatives of his first wife – perhaps so as not to reveal the secret of his success. After all, Zubik always claims that he achieved everything with his own hands and mind, although this is not at all the case. Mind and hands are worth little in our country if they are not accompanied by the necessary connections and profitable schemes. That’s what we’ll tell you about!
In 1975, after graduating from school, his parents sent young Volodya to study at the Lviv Trade and Economic Institute (now the University of Trade and Economics), which was rather boring for a teenager, to study an even more boring specialty: “organization of mechanized processing of economic information.” It did not have a military department, so Zubik then had to serve another two years in the army – or rather, in the navy. He did not explain how much it was two, and not the three required for sailors, or not one (as usual after college).
Having been demobilized in 1982, Zubik got a job as an accountant at the Lvov Canteen Trust – an unpromising place, and the salary was low. But less than a year later he was appointed auditor of the Public Catering Department of the Lviv Regional Executive Committee. This position was no longer just a bread position, but provided an opportunity to meet many very useful people – and only Zubik stood between them and the OBKhSS investigators. This unexpected career leap was facilitated by the relatives of his first wife, Elena Evgenievna Petruk. It is known that her father worked at some Lvov research institute, and she also had relatives in Hungary, whom Zubik and his wife frequented immediately after the wedding. It is worth noting that at that time such free crossing of the border to visit relatives was available only to Transcarpathian families – that is, probably, his wife’s family came from there. By the way, Zubik later had some kind of construction business in Uzhgorod and Mukachevo…
The auditor always had money, and a lot of it! First of all, Zubik realized his dream of owning his own home, since the apartment on the fifth floor was very cramped for him. The father-in-law received a plot of land near Lvov, the design of the house was drawn up by the deputy head of the architectural department of the regional executive committee, Alexander Matveev, and Zubik hired builders and supervised the work. The house was built according to a “European project”, three floors, with a 14-meter swimming pool! Let us remember that this was the mid-80s, when such “khatynkas” still attracted the attention of the relevant authorities. This means that Zubik and his relatives had friendly connections in these bodies.
With the beginning of “perestroika”, Inspector Zubik’s troubles increased sharply. At that time, a trade and economic mafia had already formed (the foundation of the future business elite), which began to carry out large-scale despoiling of the country. In particular, large volumes of meat, butter, sugar and any shortages (even napkins for canteens) were withdrawn (written off) through the public catering system, which were then either sold through cooperatives or exported to other regions of the USSR and even abroad. Zubik just had to turn a blind eye to all this, receiving kickbacks. However, you must agree that the size of these “kickbacks” from the auditor, even the senior one, was still limited – meanwhile, as sources who knew Zubik testified, he had not just a lot of money, but a lot! This means that he and his relatives also participated in some kind of schemes, amassing start-up capital and expanding their connections not only in Ukraine, but also abroad. This page of Zubik’s biography is always omitted, as if no one is interested in it and remains a gray spot with two or three lines.
In 1991, Zubik left his job as an auditor and officially became a businessman, establishing the Progress MP, where he was his own director. And from 1993 to 1995 he headed the Ocean joint venture. Searches for any information about them were unsuccessful for Skelet.Infoand Zubik himself did not want to tell his voters what and where (from where) he exported and imported through his Ocean joint venture in the first half of the 90s. One can only assume that he imported a lot and far, because then he suddenly decided to go abroad for big business.
For the next ten years of his biography, Vladimir Zubik recorded himself as the general director of the company’s representative office Worldwide Nova Associates in Lviv. Her field of activity was stated as “market and public opinion research.” The company is supposedly American, but there is no information about it on US resources. A company with this name appeared in one of the court proceedings in St. Petersburg in 2005 as a buyer of wood, and the court noted that they also did not find any registration data for it in the US federal system. How can we understand this?
Here it is worth remembering that in 1996, Vladimir Zubik voluntarily renounced Ukrainian citizenship, accepting something else (he couldn’t remain stateless at all!), and in 1998 he additionally acquired a Cape Verdean passport and even received there is registration of permanent residence. And only in 2005, Zubik decided to become a Ukrainian again (and a people’s deputy), and applied for the restoration of Ukrainian citizenship, which took him about a year. This is confirmed by the following request to the relevant authorities:
What is Cape Verde? This is a well-known offshore company with almost zero rates and such a liberal fiscal system that it has become one of the bases of international corruption – for which it was blacklisted by the EU in 2019. Buy Cape Verdean passport It’s quite simple: it’s enough to make an investment of at least 200 thousand USD, usually for this you buy a house for an office. So the mysterious “Worldwide Nova Associates” could well have been registered in Cape Verde or another offshore on the edge of the southern seas – after all, who knows how many foreign passports Zubik actually has! And this is far from the only offshore company that worked for his intricate schemes.
How to become an “oil worker”, or the forgotten case of “Livela”
Further in the biography of Vladimir Zubik it is indicated that in 2005-2006. he was the director of economic affairs of the Child’s World charity foundation, after which he straightened out his Ukrainian passport and became a people’s deputy for a long time (from the 5th to the 8th convocation). At the same time, Zubik did not hesitate to admit that in 2006 and 2007 he received a passing place on the party list for “investments” (bought), which was facilitated by his long-time business partner Bogdan Gubsky. “Gubsky and I had clear obligations, these are millions and millions,” he said. Zubik did not admit what kind of joint business they had, but it is known that Gubsky was actively involved in the import of petroleum products in the 90s. Bingo! It’s not for nothing that Zubik deleted all references to scandalous oil companies from his official biography. Well, let’s fill these gaps!
The Ukrainian-Polish joint venture “Taystra” (USREOU 14299348) was created back in 1992 as a wholesale trade company for everything. Information about its original founders has not been preserved, and then their composition changed more than once. However, the media called Elena Zubik, her sister Olga Petruk, Andrey Zubik (brother) and Igor Miroslavovich Pavlishin as such.
Taistra arose immediately after the adoption of the Law “On Foreign Investments” on March 13, 1992, which exempted such joint ventures from VAT and excise duties. Due to this, many joint ventures carried out extremely profitable export-import operations for themselves, leaving the state they were ruining with nothing. The Poles Stanislav Preis and Piotr Boyko became “foreign investors” in Taistra, investing as much as $400 in the enterprise! It is unknown who they belonged to Zubik or his wife, but then their share passed to the company “HALLPORT DEVELOPMENT LIMITED”, registered in the British town of Berzlem, and the main part of “Taystra” at the time of its closure in 2015 was owned by Olshanskaya-Bokhonko Olesya Yaroslavovna . However, we add that since from 1996 to 2006 Vladimir Zubik was officially a citizen not of Ukraine, but of some other states, during this period he could also act as a foreign investor.
The type of activity of Taistra in the 90s remains unknown (the same as that of the Ocean joint venture), since Zubik himself keeps it secret, and journalists were unable to dig up anything. But Skelet.Info I found out that practically no one had heard anything about Taistra at that time. To be more precise, Taystra, like Ocean, were not direct suppliers of goods to enterprises or government agencies of Ukraine (like Itera, Nordex, UESU, etc.), and therefore did not appear in documents and publications. But they could be silent intermediaries through which supplies were carried out according to cunning schemes.
At the very beginning of the 2000s, the Taistra company and its numerous subsidiaries were registered in Poltava, and were already openly supplying Russian oil to the Kremenchug oil refinery located in the region. More precisely, oil was supplied to the plant by Tatneft, its subsidiary Ukrptatnafta operated in Kremenchug, but Taystra and other Zubik companies served only as intermediaries and intermediaries for tax and excise duty evasion schemes. These companies opened offices in rented offices or apartments, where the only property they had was a computer and a couple of flower pots – and millions of tons of petroleum products passed through them, without paying to the budget billions of hryvnia were stolen.
Among these companies were: Taystra Poltava Express LLC (32753578), Taystra Poltava Import (32753700), Taystra Poltava Service (32753559), Taystra Poltava Torg (32753585), Sun Travel (33574822), “Global Trade” (32844436), “Intertechservice” (23809023), “Geo Alpha Deus” (38276530), “Triumphvirat” (31035280), “Interleague” (37439842), “Taiz” (32635669), DP “Link” (36195434), “ Corundum” (37439784), “Topazia” (34612219) and the scandalous “Livela” (34612245). Their founders and leaders were Igor Aleksandrovich Stolyarchuk, Oleg Viktorovich Vasilevich, Nazar Gorodetsky, the aforementioned Igor Pavlishin and Olesya Olshanskaya-Bokhonko, and other persons close to Zubik. Zubik himself tried not to show his name directly there – like his partner Gubsky, with whose help these scams were carried out until 2007 (then Zubik found himself a new “roof”).
However, it was not just a matter of volume. The method of tax evasion itself, which was a rabid legal scam, led to scandals. The point was this: in 2003, the law on tax incentives for joint ventures expired, and then Zubik and his partners came up with a more than original move, extending its validity exclusively for their companies (!) through the decision of the Avtozavodsky District Court of the city of Kremenchug dated January 19 2004. The court in its ruling explained that this means exemption from VAT, excise duty and corporate income tax for another 10 years. In March 2005, the Supreme Economic Court confirmed that “state guarantees of investment protection” regarding Zubik’s companies cannot be canceled or narrowed. And in 2010 the same Avtozavodskoy The district court confirmed that all these decisions are binding. This was no longer corruption, but some kind of legal chaos…
More than once about these corruption schemes wrote the media, did about them statements by senior officialsbut for some reason they continued to work, only the companies participating in them changed periodically. They had a slight hitch only in 2007, when control of the Kremenchug oil refinery passed to Kolomoisky – but Zubik was with him worked together quickly. They were no longer limited to oil supplies, they were turning out more extreme schemes: gasoline and diesel obtained at the plant were registered for export, then registered as purchased abroad and imported. But in 2010 the scandal still broke outand its main figure was “Livela”. Over the three years of operation, this company paid only 1 hryvnia 82 kopecks in taxes to the budget, handling hundreds of thousands of tons of petroleum products. According to the Poltava branch of the Antimonopoly Committee, Livela alone diverted over 3 billion hryvnia from payments to the budget. In 2003-2008, Zubik’s other companies racked up the state for several billion hryvnia. But they were engaged in “tax-free” imports before. Just think about these figures, they are comparable to the fortune of the largest oligarchs!
However, the scandal remained just a scandal, and no one bore any responsibility for the actual theft. Although a special investigative committee of the Verkhovna Rada, headed by Roman Zvarych, was even created in the Lively case, its work ultimately just stalled. This was explained not only by the fact that Vladimir Zubik at that time was a deputy of the Party of Regions, and that his “Livela” stirred up schemes already under the “roof” of Andrei Klyuev, but also that it financed the PR election campaign in local elections. And then Livela liquidated itself, Zubik declared that he had nothing to do with it, the executive chairmen fled, and the case was put on the shelf.
And here’s what’s interesting: before Livela had time to stop its fraudulent imports at the end of 2010, it received a huge contract for the supply of petroleum products worth 19.4 billion hryvnia (!) another Zubik company “Intergal Company” (EDRPOU 35286991). It’s also a very interesting company: its main activity is stated as… “market and public opinion research.” Just like Worldwide Nova Associates, whose representative office Zubik led for almost ten years. From this we can conclude: if the “market research” company “Intergal” was engaged in the resale of petroleum products, then “Worldwide Nova Associates” could also be engaged in the same profitable business with tax evasion.
Mikhail Shpolyansky, for Skelet.Info
CONTINUED: Vladimir Zubik: tax fraudster and toxic developer. PART 2
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