Open party lists for the snap parliamentary elections were declared mandatory by President Petro Poroshenko. Political forces running for the Verkhovna Rada are striving to comply with the president's directive—their open lists have been published. Thanks to this, journalists have even managed to study them and expose the controversial biographies of such nominees of Serhiy Tihipko's "Strong Ukraine," such as political detective Leonid Pyata, Mykola Dzhyha, implicated in the Mezhyhirya legalization scheme, and the "eternal prosecutor" Svyatoslav Piskun.
The Petro Poroshenko Bloc's list is much more pleasing to the eye – the top twenty includes politicians whose civic position and desire to serve Ukraine are beyond doubt: Olga Bogomolets, Mustafa Dzhemilev, Iryna Gerashchenko, and Yuriy Lutsenko. However, the Poroshenko Bloc doesn't have 20 eligible seats; according to various experts, it has between 100 and 140, and among them are some dark horses. Thus, the candidate with the 58th eligible seat, Oleksandr Granovsky, a double namesake of another Granovsky, a partner of the scandalous Odesa businessman, has sparked heated discussion on forums and in the media. businessman Kaufman, known for shady schemes involving the airports of Boryspil, Simferopol and Odessa.
Number 58 on the Petro Doroshenko Bloc list is Oleksandr Granovsky, a Kyiv City Council member representing the UDAR party. His name as a politician isn't yet widely known, and within the Kyiv City Council, he holds an inconspicuous position on the budget committee and hasn't distinguished himself in any significant way. However, a quick search through open sources reveals that Kyiv City Council member Granovsky, like his Odesa namesake, also has a partner. This partner's name is Andrey Adamovsky, a representative of the Forbes list.
Adamovsky is much more widely known, and not only for his much-publicized passion for collecting art. Based on the few media publications and influential business sources, it seems that none of Adamovsky's businesses ended without conflict with partners. The only project that didn't involve any obvious backlash was the sale of the Farlep telecom company to the future Donetsk oligarch Rinat Akhmetov in the early 90s. After that, Adamovsky, by his own admission, switched to less flamboyant but no less lucrative projects. Although he admits to being a Russian citizen, Adamovsky also holds Ukrainian citizenship and residency permits in Israel and Canada, allowing him to travel the world with relative freedom and handle a variety of matters.
Some of these questions then receive follow-up answers – business projects in Ukraine, many of which, unfortunately, have an unfortunate outcome.
The old story with VikOil
Recently, according to market sources, a British Virgin Islands court settled a long-running $35 million dispute between the former co-owners of the VikOil gas station chain. The background to the case is as follows.
In 2010, Andrey Adamovsky and Alexander Granovsky, along with their partners Andrey Malitsky and Igor Filippenko, sold their VikOil gas station chain to TNK. The deal was worth $71 million. According to available information, the money was deposited into the account of Oledo, a company owned by all four partners.
But within just a few days, Adamovsky and Granovsky, exercising their unilateral signature rights, transferred $71 million to the account of their newly created company, Stockman—a firm that would later serve their partners in their cunning schemes. Attempts to resolve the conflict amicably ended in failure, and the aggrieved Malitsky and Filippenko began legal proceedings in the British Virgin Islands.
According to legal representatives, this court decision will become public as early as October 1. And the court's decision is clear and simple: Adamovsky and Granovsky must return $35 million to their former partners.
$35 million in another project with consequences
But those $35 million were long ago spent on another project. There's a persistent rumor in the development community that this money was invested in the SkyMall shopping center, whose main investor is Estonian entrepreneur Teder Hillar. The SkyMall story has been covered extensively, so we'll only touch on a few aspects.
Taking advantage of the opportunity, Adamovsky and Granovsky terminated the shareholders' agreement with Teder Hillar. Afterward, despite a London court ruling on the fiduciary relationship between the partners, they threw Hillar out of the business. This was accomplished in several steps.
In the SkyMall project, Teder Hillar was represented by Arricano, while Granovsky and Adamovsky were represented by Stoсkman. In February 2012, Stoсkman, a company already familiar to us, violated all agreements and the London High Court ruling by firing the CEO of Prisma Beta, Arricano's representative in the project. A month later, at a dubious (from a legal standpoint) shareholders' meeting, Stoсkman dismissed all Arricano representatives from the board of directors. Following these actions, Teder, who owned almost half of the company, lost not only his influence over the company but also his profits from the SkyMall shopping center.
Thus, Adamovsky and Granovsky not only pocketed a project created by an Estonian investor worth over $200 million, but also diverted all the profits from it to themselves. Since then, Stockman has been pocketing approximately $2 million per month from the project (this is confirmed by Stockman's official annual net operating income (NOI) declaration for the project, which is over $25 million).
Furthermore, there is reason to believe that Stoсkman has been evading taxes all this time by siphoning funds from Prizma Beta through fictitious companies and financial assistance agreements, as reported in Izvestia on August 29, 2014, and which are under investigation by law enforcement agencies. The police and tax authorities have similar cases.
Moreover, there's an interesting detail in the case: in addition to the simple "withdrawal" of funds from the project, there's also the 81 million hryvnias that went to Limaxo Innovation LLC, which Adamovsky spent on the construction of the Art Mall shopping center. In total, according to indirect estimates, Adamovsky and Granovsky, through various schemes, "withdrew" more than $60 million from the project over two and a half years.
According to available information, even third-tier insurance companies were involved in these schemes. For example, the SkyMall shopping center was insured by a little-known insurance company for 13 million hryvnias, which is tens of times higher than the market value of such insurance.
At a September press conference, Arricano representatives revealed that, as supposed "confirmation" of the fairness of this price, Adamovsky and Granovsky presented a fictitious letter from the international insurance company Uniqa with a similar insurance price. When the story became public, the Ukrainian company Uniqa officially declared the letter a fake: everything in it, from the signatures to the letterhead, had been forged.
Besides their insurance operations, Adamovsky and Granovsky made money by stealing from the Kyiv budget, little by little. Prizma Beta, controlled by their partners, failed to pay land lease taxes for two years, resulting in Kyiv losing approximately 5 million hryvnias. Therefore, the prosecutor's office initiated legal proceedings to terminate the land lease agreement with Dniprovska Prystan PJSC, where the shopping center is located. Not bad for a budget committee employee, huh?
And what about Hillar Teder? For now, let's note that Teder Hillar's total losses from this scam involving local partners have already reached $200 million and became the subject of a separate discussion between the presidents of Ukraine and Estonia during the latter's visit to Ukraine for the YES summit. Furthermore, according to available information, Estonia's leadership also wrote to Ukraine's top officials, asking them to intervene in the conflict. Otherwise, it's possible that European international arbitration courts will be involved, which, according to investment analysts, would have an extremely negative impact on Ukraine's already shaky investment image.
But this doesn't stop either Adamovsky, a businessman with Russian roots, or his partner, Granovsky. A few days after YES, Granovsky became the candidate of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc.
Games with courts and banks
ZN.UA has previously written about the so-called "ponyatiyki"—informal agreements between judges and businessmen, according to which, for a bribe, judges in robes would resolve matters "the right way." That article raised the issue of Adamovsky's "collaboration" with the head of the Supreme Commercial Court of Ukraine, Tatkov, which may explain the hopelessness experienced by all of Adamovsky and Granovsky's opponents when their cases reached the courts.
But London's courts are incorruptible. Just recently, Arricano officially announced through the London Stock Exchange's messaging system that in August 2014, the London Court of International Arbitration ruled that Teder's attempt to exercise the call option in 2010 was entirely legal and reinstated the 2010 agreement. This, in turn, allows Teder to repurchase the property at the originally agreed upon price of $51,4 million.
But here, too, Adamovsky and Granovsky showed their ingenuity. In early September 2014, with the help of employees of the State Property Rights Registry, they found a way to transfer ownership of SkyMall to Pivdenny Bank—the very same bank persistently attributed to Yuriy Ivanyushchenko (Yenakievsky).
Meanwhile, Adamovsky and Granovsky changed the founder of the Ukrainian company, re-registering it… to Luhansk. After this, victory in the London court was meaningless for the foreign investor.
And a little more French history
Moreover, the SkyMall story is not the first or second scam in the practice of experienced businessmen Granovsky and Adamovsky.
Earlier, in 2008, they put out a call to potential future tenants to invest in the construction of the Gorky Park Shopping Center (Kyiv, Gorky Street) with first-priority leasing rights. A waiting list formed. Adamovsky and Granovsky collected tens of thousands of dollars from each prospective tenant, arguing that each tenant would have two locations in Gorky Park and two locations in the Sevastopol shopping center.
Some tenants, speaking anonymously, said that within just a year, their money had vanished, and despite court orders, no one had returned anything. The rationale was simple: there was a crisis, and all the money had already been spent.
However, after some time, the land for development and the shopping center project, despite a number of questionable legal issues regarding ownership, were sold to the French group SCC for a record $80 million. The French paid the first half of the sum immediately. The investors refused to pay the second tranche due to delays in Adamovsky fulfilling some of the conditions. But then, legal "concepts" came to the rescue – SCC was forced to pay Granovsky and Adamovsky the entire amount to stop the attacks on their asset.
The French now own a substantial plot of land, on which they still cannot begin construction, and third parties continue to challenge their ownership. Granovsky, according to market players, even boasts of how skillfully he pulled off this shady deal.
It seems Adamovsky, too, is confident of his impunity. This is thanks to his connections within the presidential administration and, as he himself claims, to Boris Lozhkin, the head of the presidential administration. But in doing so, he casts a shadow not only on the chancery but also on the president himself. Furthermore, the presence of Oleksandr Granovsky on the presidential list further denigrates the president. Words are words, but actions are far more telling.
Vasily Kruglov, Mirror of the week
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