Dmitry Svyatash: "Slightly Used" Cars from a Fraudster and Ukrainophobe. PART 1
Ukrainians who buy cars from AIS-Center dealerships and then have them repaired at auto repair shops under the same name have the right to know the truth. And not just about the possibility of them falling victim to the fraudulent schemes of dishonest car dealers or the clumsy hands of incompetent mechanics. They have the right to know the truth about Dmytro Svyatash, the owner of the Avtoinveststroy group of companies, who has been a member of the Verkhovna Rada for 16 years and a member of Kharkiv Mayor Kernes's closest circle of friends and associates for a quarter of a century. It's possible that Svyatash will soon be stripped of his parliamentary immunity and finally face the justice he's so skillfully evaded for so many years. And now you'll find out why.
Dmitry Svyatash: How a massage therapist and a swindler became friends
Dmitry Vladimirovich Svyatash was born on June 15, 1971, in Kharkiv, to Vladimir Nikolaevich Svyatash (born 1944), a sanitary doctor, and his wife, Larisa Nikolaevna (born 1947). They lived in the city center on Pushkinskaya Street. Even back then, Vladimir Svyatash's work was highly privileged, especially since immediately after graduating from the Kharkiv Medical Institute (1967), he was assigned to an internship at the Kievsky District Canteen Trust in Kharkiv—where the canteens themselves were not ordinary (this is an older district of the city with numerous institutes, institutions, and cafes). He then transferred to work for the Kharkiv Regional Sanitary and Epidemiological Station, where he specialized in monitoring public catering and food warehouses, and in the 80s, he was promoted to department head. This explains the persistent rumors that Vladimir Nikolaevich, like his son, Dmitry Vladimirovich, are not Ukrainian at all. Rumors supported by Svyatash's close ties to the family Dobkins и Gennady KernesHowever, the "Soviet mafia" of Kharkov at that time was not composed solely of Jews: trade workers, doctors, officials, law enforcement officers, and crooks established useful connections with each other, regardless of nationality.
Vladimir Svyatash
Born into such a wealthy and well-connected family, Dmitry Svyatash and his sister, Yuliana Svyatash (Yevtushenko after marriage), had a happy childhood, with everything they needed: fashionable imported clothes, trips to resorts, the prestigious Kharkiv School No. 1, and the best clubs and activities. Naturally, Dmitry Svyatash didn't have to spend two years of his life serving in the army. Instead, he followed in his father's footsteps, enrolling in Kharkiv Medical Institute—though not to become a sanitary doctor, but to become a pediatrician. He graduated in 1994, and a year earlier, his father had become the chief sanitary doctor of Kharkiv's Dzerzhinsky (now Shevchenkovsky) district. Against the backdrop of the city's burgeoning "free market," with its plethora of shops, bazaars, and eateries, it was a gold mine. However, Vladimir Svyatosh also earned a good income from his business, which he started in the late 80s, opening several "cooperatives." One of these was a massage course at the Institute of Occupational Diseases, where his son Dmitry "worked part-time." Whether massage was actually taught there is unknown, but those who completed the course received a certificate, which made it much easier to find a job or even open their own salon.
Dmitry Svyatash in his youth, with his head still curly
According to media reports, it was at a massage course that Dmitry Svyatash met the Kharkiv con man Gepa, who had just been released from a three-year stint in pretrial detention under Article 141 of the Criminal Code. Gepa wooed the young Svyatash just as he had done with Mark Dobkin's eldest son, Mikhail. No, don't get me wrong: Gepa simply had a great talent and charisma for seducing, charming, and exploiting young people. He was especially interested in the children of the right people, which is why Gepa chose his wife, Oksana Gaysinskaya, the daughter of the prosecutor who played a major role in transforming Gepa, a convicted fraudster, into the respected businessman Gennady Kernes.
Gennady Kernes and Oksana Gaisinskaya
After meeting Gepa, Dmitry Svyatash lost interest in medicine, although he diligently completed medical school and then completed an internship at City Hospital No. 30 from 1994 to 97. More accurately, he was only listed as an intern there, as he simply had no time to treat children. Together with his childhood friend Vasily Polyakov, he went into business. At first, they allegedly wanted to sell imported consumer goods—clothing, cosmetics, and electronic equipment—but then settled on the more profitable and prestigious automobile trade. Sources reported Skelet.OrgDmitry Svyatash was persuaded to do this by his new friend Gepa, who, since the mid-80s, had specialized in fraudulent “auto schemes.”
Vasily Polyakov
By the early 90s, after serving time behind bars for embezzling money from citizen Selin, to whom Gepin's gang had promised to sell a Volga, Gennady Kernes switched to a larger, less criminal enterprise. According to numerous sources, instead of swindling individual buyers, he entered into a large-scale scheme for the mass sale of cars of dubious origin. Many foreign cars were simply stolen from European countries, and the origins of Volgas and Zhiguli cars imported from Russia were also questionable. However, Kernes no longer wanted to personally pursue this business, so he put his new friend, Dmitry Svyatash, in charge, along with Vasily Polyakov, as his partner. Thus, in 1992, Avtoinveststroy LLC was established, which grew from a car sales operation into the AIS Group of Companies, which included dealerships and assembly plants, as well as various subsidiary LLCs and shell companies.
Dmitry Svyatash. Fraud, bribery, drugs.
There's no evidence of Gennady Kernes's direct involvement in Dmitry Svyatash's business, but it's worth emphasizing once again that Avtoinveststroy began as part of a complex, international-scale scheme. A simple pediatric massage therapist who suddenly decided to start selling foreign cars, even the son of an influential district sanitary and epidemiological station director, couldn't have created them on his own. But it's unlikely that Kernes himself was the mastermind, according to sources. Skelet.OrgIt was a shadowy business of a criminal organization with which he was merely associated. They tasked Gepa with organizing car sales in Kharkiv, and he did so through Avtoinveststroy, owned by Svyatash and Polyakov. The schemes and participants in this business changed over time, and at some point Avtoinveststroy broke away from them (the other co-founders then left AIS, leaving it entirely in the hands of Svyatash and Polyakov). However, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was still part of them, as evidenced by a number of charges and a criminal case against Avtoinveststroy.
Some of these materials were collected by Nikolai Cheremukhin, who, as an investigator, arrested Gepa for fraud and subsequently followed the dealings of Gennady Kernes throughout his career. In the 90s, he served as the head of the criminal investigation department of the Kharkiv Department of Internal Affairs, and in 1999, he was fired following scandalous accusations of involvement in a gang rape. It was then that his sworn "friend," Kernes, became a member of the Kharkiv City Council and began his rise through the ranks of power. Cheremukhin subsequently became close with Arsen Avakov, but even with his support, he was constantly attacked by "groups of deputies" accusing Cheremukhin of monstrous corruption, official misconduct, triple citizenship, ties to Yevgeny Zhilin (the founder of Oplot), and much more. Cheremukhin himself called these attacks revenge by Kernes and his accomplices and associates, including Dmitry Svyatash and Mikhail Dobkin. After Euromaidan, Avakov reinstated Cheremukhin in the Kharkiv Department of Internal Affairs and entrusted him with oversight of volunteer battalions. In 2015, Cheremukhin failed his re-certification, and new information attacks began against him, forcing him to resign. In December 2017, unknown persons blew up his car.
Nikolay Cheremukhin
According to independent sources, not all of the accusations against Cheremukhin were unfounded, but he is no more corrupt than other Kharkiv police chiefs. His main "crime" is that he is a personal enemy of the "Kernes group" and the bearer of compromising material on both the "outstanding" mayor of Kharkiv and the "prominent businessman" Dmitry Svyatash.
For example, in 1997, one of Dmitry Svyatash and Vasily Polyakov's firms, registered in Kharkiv at 22 Rymarska Street (the same address where AIS had its office), was used in a double fraudulent scheme. First, a fictitious business was registered in the names of certain young men (possibly "titushki"), using them as one-time intermediaries in fictitious car sales and purchase transactions. During this process, the bogus "entrepreneurs" received large sums of cash from Oschadbank, which was immediately confiscated by a certain Sergey Makoveichuk, Svyatash's designated overseer of the scheme. The men were given only a "bonus" of $50-$100, and all the cash was used by Svyatash, Polyakov, and the shadowy businessmen associated with them for illegal cash-outs. That is, under the roof of Avtoinveststroy, a conversion center was essentially operating at that time.
On December 11, 1998, the Investigative Department of the Dzerzhinsky District Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Kharkiv Region opened criminal case No. 6098203 against the management of Avtoinveststroy under Article 84-4 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Dmitry Svyatash, Vasily Polyakov, as well as executive director D. Pisany and chief accountant G. Kozlova were accused of “theft of collective property by misappropriation, abuse of office, committed on a large scale.” The theft was discovered during an audit conducted by the Kyiv firm Ukrauditlegprom. The amount in question was 894944,42 hryvnias and 2820707,0 dollars, issued outside of the company’s cash transactions and balance sheet, and not reflected in tax reporting. To “resolve” this problem, Dmitry Svyatash turned (possibly on Kernes’s recommendation) to the newly appointed to Kharkiv prosecutor Vasyl Sinchuk, known for his scandalous corruption. On Sinchuk's advice, Dmytro Svyatash bombarded the prosecutor's office with complaints about the misconduct of Ministry of Internal Affairs employees, after which the prosecutor's office took over case No. 6098203 and buried it, destroying and replacing its main materials. According to media reports, Svyatash's return "gratitude" consisted of $100, Sinchuk's stake in one of the AIS Group companies, and a nearly new Audi, which appeared in the parking lot outside the Kharkiv prosecutor's office.
It's worth noting that Vasyl Sinchuk later made a career for himself as the regional prosecutor of Kharkiv and Poltava, worked in the Prosecutor General's Office, and from 2014 to 2016, before retiring, held the position of "Prosecutor of Crimea"—a purely virtual one, but nevertheless well-paid from the Ukrainian budget.
Vasily Sinchuk
Svyatash's "almost new" cars are another well-hushed scandal! Since the late 1990s, Avtoinveststroy was part of another interesting scheme: the Washington, D.C.-based firm Autohaus Walter purchased one- to two-year-old cars from Audi warehouses, which the company sold wholesale at significant discounts (25-30%). These cars were then resold to the Latvian firm SIA DOC (a division of AIS, registered as a Ukrainian-Latvian joint-stock company), which then resold them to Avtoinveststroy, which sold them in its dealerships. Of course, no one transported the cars to America or Latvia; they arrived directly from Germany to Ukraine. However, the cargo was virtually sold through several companies that falsified documents and altered the year of manufacture, "rejuvenating" them and reselling them as brand new, without the discount. The scammers pocketed the difference (several thousand dollars per car). The scam was discovered by accident: one of the buyers of an Audi (serial number WAUZZZ4BZYN058738) was too knowledgeable about cars, so she doubted the "newest model" and wrote to the manufacturer in Germany. They sent an official letter stating that the car with that number was manufactured not in 2000, but in 1999, and was sold to the dealership at the appropriate discount. Once again, generous donations to the Kharkiv prosecutor's office helped Svyatosh hush up the matter.
In 2003, the media reported on yet another fraud committed by Avtoinveststroy. At the facility where it organized the "screwdriver" assembly of VAZ vehicles from components imported from Russia, new parts and components were substituted for used ones so cleverly that buyers didn't notice. This is how new cars became "slightly used," and, according to sources, later on. SKELET-infoAIS also pulled similar scams on European foreign cars. Their buyers were then surprised why the suspension of a new car bought from AIS-Center would break down prematurely, the brake pads would wear out, and rust would build up so quickly.
At the same time, information about another hushed-up scandal leaked to the press. This involved large-scale financial fraud perpetrated by Svyatash through the Ukrainian-Czech company Kontur-PK LLC and its subsidiaries Prometey and Pulse. As it turned out, Kontur-PK had received foreign investment of a whopping $20—the exact amount contributed by a fictitious investor from the Czech Republic. This allowed the company to enjoy legally mandated tax breaks, just like shell companies registered in the Chernobyl zone. These companies imported cars and components from Russia and Europe into Ukraine without paying the required duties and taxes. The sum involved was initially 70 million, and then 170 million hryvnia—almost $35 million at the time! This case began to be developed in 2001 with the support of Nikolai Cheremukhin, who, after being dismissed, continued his war with Kernes and Svyatash.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Org
CONTINUED: Svyatash Dmitry: "Slightly Used" Cars from a Fraudster and Ukrainophobe. PART 2
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