Energy workers did not accept Zhevago

Ukrainian billionaire Konstantin Zhevago has lost his long-running battle for Odesaoblenergo shares.

The Finance and Credit Group has become alien to the domestic fuel and energy complex.

Recently, Ukrainian billionaire Konstantin Zhevago suffered a crushing defeat in his long-running battle for Odesaoblenergo shares. This fiasco capped a series of failures for the businessman in his battle for energy assets and put an end to his plans to join the inner circle of fuel and energy oligarchs.
Circles of the court
On September 15, the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine (SEC) concluded a thirteen-year dispute between Konstantin Zhevago's Finance and Credit group and its Russian opponent, Mikhail Voevodin's Luzhniki business group. On that day, the SEC upheld the decision of the Starokyivskyi Local Court of Kyiv, which terminated the purchase of a 35% stake in Odesaoblenergo by Zhevago's FS Trading Limited LLC from the State Property Fund.
All these years, the Ukrainian oligarch's lawyers have been trying to restore the status quo, arguing that their opponents illegally transferred ownership of the disputed shares of the Odessa regional power company to their firm, Overcon Enterprises Limited. In this case, representatives of the Finance and Credit group relied primarily on the fact that at the time of the unfavorable decision, FS Trading Limited LLC no longer owned Odessaoblenergo (the shares were dispersed among a group of related offshore companies to make their return to the State Property Fund irreversible). But this argument was only sufficient to enable Zhevago to fight for the return of his shares for an unprecedentedly long time.
Restarting this process (for example, based on newly discovered circumstances) makes no sense now. Technically, this is because the aforementioned verdict by the Supreme Commercial Court was rendered during the second round of the dispute, after which initiating a new review is extremely difficult legally. But far more importantly, the Finance and Credit group lost the dispute under extremely favorable political conditions for its owner, a longtime member of the Batkivshchyna party.
Dangerous extrapolation
This conclusion is important because the experience of the Finance and Credit group's loss to a weak opponent is practically guaranteed to be transferred from the "Odesa field" to other fields. For example, to Luhansk. There, Zhevago has been trying for several years to halt the liquidation of Luhanskoblenergo, in which his companies are the largest private shareholders. The Luhansk company found itself in such an unenviable situation because, during the first wave of privatization, all its major assets were transferred to the private Luhansk Energy Association LLC, which was then controlled by Viktor Pinchuk's companies. In an attempt to stop the liquidation of this energy company, Zhevago's lawyers are now seeking to create conditions for the return of its assets. The irony is that virtually no one objects to this, yet even despite the lack of a clear opponent, Konstantin Valentinovich is unable to achieve his goal.
If the liquidation of the Luhansk distributor is carried through to its logical conclusion, the Finance and Credit group will be left without a single significant energy asset. The only possible exception is the Belotserkovskaya Thermal Power Plant, which the businessman had previously removed from the Rosava plant. However, this asset may offer scant consolation to Zhevago. Not so much because of its small production capacity, but because it will serve as a reminder of the relatively recent, inglorious defeat to Rinat Akhmetov's DTEK group in the battle for the right to export Ukrainian electricity abroad.

Yuri Savchenko, Comments

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