In connection with current events, we suggest recalling one of Mr. Kolomoisky’s most striking interviews with the newspaper "Mirror of the week", given in 2005
Igor Kolomoisky: "I told Pinchuk: 'Life is a supermarket, take what you want, but the checkout is in front.'"
All three Ukrainian billionaires—Akhmetov, Pinchuk, and Kolomoisky—are practically the same age. The most public of them is the former president's son-in-law. Rinat Akhmetov has become relatively accessible in the past year. 42-year-old Igor Kolomoisky is the most private figure in the Ukrainian business elite. Three months of negotiations of varying intensity preceded Igor Kolomoisky's agreement to an interview with ZN. After finishing the interview, we thought hard... and asked the leader of the Privat Group, after proofreading the material, to send us the text with his signature on every page. Kolomoisky agreed without hesitation: "I can back up every word I say with documents and witnesses."
Igor Kolomoisky was born in Dnipropetrovsk. He is a metallurgical engineer by training. He graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute. He has been involved in business since 1985. He is a member of the supervisory boards of the largest enterprises of the Privat Group: Moskomprivatbank, NPK Naftokhimikprikarpattya, and Ukrnafta. The group controls metallurgical and ferroalloy plants, and holds a monopoly position in the Ukrainian manganese ore market. Its assets include stakes in five mining and processing plants. The group owns metal and ferroalloy production facilities in Russia and Romania. The total value of the group's enterprises, of which Gennady Bogolyubov is also a major shareholder (Read more about it in the article Gennady Bogolyubov: What Privat's other half is keeping quiet about?) and Alexey Martynov, according to very rough estimates, is valued at one and a half billion dollars.
"A tough businessman who tries to defend his interests down to the last detail. He's often prone to revising the rules of the game while it's being played. Therefore, one should be especially careful when doing business with him. He's not public, but he's powerful and influential." This is how his competitors view Igor Kolomoisky. We'd like to add that, under both the previous and the new administration, Kolomoisky has never accepted dictatorship or authority.
When Viktor Pinchuk is angry, he adopts a quiet, deliberately polite tone that sends shivers down the spines of his interlocutors. When Akhmetov is angry, his light gray eyes darken. What does Kolomoisky do when he's angry? Now we know—he agrees to an interview…
— Igor Valerievich, to begin with, could you tell our readers what the Privat Group is? Everyone talks about Privat, Privat, a large financial-industrial group with interests in a multitude of sectors and enormous capital. What property does the group own, and what are its main areas of interest?
"I think the 'Privat Group' is a phantom, a journalistic term. The reality is Privatbank, which has shareholders. Each of the major shareholders has other businesses in addition to the banking sector. But all these businesses are not interconnected and are not linked by economic or corporate responsibility. What journalists call the Privat Group is neither a holding nor a corporation. It cannot be compared to Interpipe, ISD, or SCM.
— What do you personally own in Ukraine?
I own about 30 percent of the shares in PrivatBank. I own other assets through indirect, unaffiliated companies. Some of them are residents, some are not.
Gennady Bogolyubov owns 30 percent of PrivatBank's shares. The bank's owners include Alexey Martynov and PrivatBank's management.
Basically, there's a loose division of responsibility for business programs among Privat's shareholders. Martynov primarily focuses on ferroalloys, Bogolyubov is the president of Privatbank; that's his primary responsibility, although he has many other responsibilities. I'm more involved with corporate matters, the oil sector, and to some extent, metallurgy.
Some claim that Serhiy Tigipko left PrivatBank with a dowry that exceeded the amount formally due. Is this true?
"No, that's not true. If Sergey Leonidovich had carried out the divorce from the company a little later, rather than at the market development stage, he would have received much more. But what's done is done, and today he has no connection with Privat. In some small projects, where we have a small stake and he has a larger one, we have maintained cooperation. But these are not large-scale enterprises and are not even worth discussing.
We've received reports that at Igor Surkis's daughter's birthday party in Italy, an argument broke out between you and the former government's favorites. You said life was good under the new government, while they claimed it was bad. What were the arguments?
"It wasn't a serious discussion, and it wasn't me who participated, but my friend. And he actually countered his opponents, who claimed that life in Ukraine is very bad right now: 'We couldn't participate in the Kryvorizhstal tender before, but now we can.' And when they told him that people are now in prison, he remarked, 'There's a way out of prison, but you can't leave the forest with your head cut off.'"
— How do you assess the economic situation in the country and its prospects?
"The numbers look good. But the population's standard of living is very low, and that worries me. Although the reasons for this price increase are overwhelmingly not internal, but external: energy is becoming more expensive, and the external market situation is unfavorable for metallurgical products, which is causing a significant budget shortfall. Although there are signs that the fall in metal prices is related to seasonality."
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