Ivan Fursin
"What did Maidan stand for?" is a question that invariably arises among Ukrainians who believed the events of 2014 could change the country for the better, but now see with disappointment how odious figures from the "gangster regime" continue to cling to their posts and carry on their business dealings. Moreover, they are successfully merging with the new government, turning it into a replica of the "previous regime," returning everything to normal.
Banker Boys
Among the top hundred Ukrainian billionaires and multimillionaires, there's not a single one who honestly earned their start-up capital by "apple washing." Some inherited Komsomol funds or gangster "obshchaks," others were helped by influential relatives, and still others were lucky enough to marry well or attend the same university with the right people. The latter includes not only the Chernivtsi clan, formed from Arseniy Yatsenyuk's childhood friends and classmates, but also the team of student buddies of Serhiy Levochkin (Read more about it in the article Levochkin. "The Gray Cardinal" and his sister) of which Ivan Fursin is a member.
Ivan Gennadievich Fursin was born on September 16, 1971, in Kyiv. For unknown reasons, he keeps the identity of his parents private, stating only that his family included many scientists, doctors, and military personnel. There are rumors that his father, Gennady Fursin, served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs under General Vladimir Levochkin, the father of a famous oligarch, and that their sons knew each other from childhood. However, Ivan did not inherit his ancestors' talents: he became neither a doctor nor a scientist, and even dodged military service, like his friend Sergei Levochkin. He also graduated from high school at just over 18, making him an "old man" among his classmates. But while his peers were off to wear the boots of the army for 730 days, Ivan Fursin became a student at the Kyiv Institute of National Economy (today the Kyiv National University of Economics) in the fall of 1989, where Sergei Levochkin also enrolled. Thus, their close friendship began, at least from that moment.
During his student years, in addition to Ivan Fursin, Levochkin’s circle of close student friends included Artem Ershov, who also studied there (read more about him in the article Artemy Ershov: participant in financial fraud and set upLevochkin's nickname), Rostislav Schiller, and Sergei Svyatko. All of them possessed some kind of relevant talent or important family connections, since Levochkin always chose his circle of friends based on practical considerations. This further supports the theory that the "red-haired oaf" Fursin's acquaintance with Levochkin occurred much earlier and was a trusting relationship between childhood friends.
The 90s were a time of great change and great scams, when, as Ostap Bender put it, money was lying around on the streets, just waiting to be picked up. So, a simple student internship at the Kyiv branch of Lisbank (1992) didn't satisfy Ivan Fursin, nor his friend Levochkin. Immediately after graduating from university (1993), they decided to start their own banking business. In 1993, Askold Bank opened in Kyiv, and Levochkin's entire team, including Ivan Fursin, gathered in its basement office on Velyka Zhitomirska Street. The money these twenty-year-old bankers used to open the bank remains unknown: rumors suggest they received help from their parents, relatives, in-laws, and so on. Accordingly, Levochkin's father provided protection for his son's bank, without which the local "hooligans" would have seized it within days. He also found him his main clients, who became Avdyshev's capital-based organized crime group. Yes, a very specific client—but then, Levochkin's father also worked in the penal system, which is why he had such specific connections. From 1993 to 1995, Askold Bank was one of the largest currency conversion centers in Kyiv: essentially, it was a large gangster "exchange office," where the organized crime group converted the coupon-karbovanets they had "earned" into dollars and Deutschmarks. Ivan Fursin and Sergey Levochkin would later carefully erase these two years from their biographies.
In 1995, Ivan Fursin, Sergey Levochkin, Artem Ershov, Sergey Svyatko, Ivan Fursin, Rostislav Shiller, and Sergey Avramenko founded BIT Holding CJSC. This, together with the offshore company Transatlantic Trading Corporation, in turn re-registered Askold Bank under a new guise—JSCB Banking House. Rostislav Shiller became the chairman of the board of the rebranded bank, Ivan Fursin became his deputy, and Sergey Levochkin joined the supervisory board. The new bank ushered in a new era of financial scams involving privatization, insurance companies, and failed trusts. Some even resorted to outright ripping off depositors, which quickly taught ordinary Kyiv residents to avoid this bank, nicknamed the "Bandit House." Interestingly, in 1997-98... Fursin and Levochkin's Banking House JSCB collaborated fruitfully with Igor Cherkassky, vice president of the Credo-Classic Insurance Company CJSC, who is currently (ironically!) the chairman of the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine. The collaboration was so fruitful that by the end of 1998, Banking House had fallen into the same trap as Voronya Slobodka, mired in financial fraud and simple money theft.
The final end to its existence came with a criminal incident involving the theft of 80 million hryvnias by a "hacker" in October 1998 from the accounts of the Vinnytsia Regional Office of the National Bank. Part of the stolen sum was transferred to the Transservice company's account at Banking House, after which it was scattered among accounts at the bank belonging to fictitious companies. Investigators, searching for the stolen funds at Banking House, discovered astonishing double-entry bookkeeping and curious transactions involving enormous sums. Levochkin immediately disappeared, while Fursin and Schiller tried to come up with a plausible explanation. It was decided to dispatch a special audit committee to the bank for a thorough review of its activities, after which Banking House promptly… went up in flames. Literally: the guards showed all the inspectors, investigators, and angry, "swindled" depositors black ash and shrugged their shoulders. The bank's management was also nowhere to be found—it had all suddenly resigned. In fact, immediately after the fire, JSCB "Banking House" re-registered and became "Ukrspetsimpexbank" (Levochkin, Schiller), which also collapsed in 2003 after the scandalous disappearance of funds from NAK Spetsexport.
Odessa: cinema and Firtash
In 1999, after leaving the burned-out Banker's House, Ivan Fursin moved to Odessa, where he became chairman of the board of KB Misto Bank, which he founded together with Artem Yershov, with a small stake from local Odessans Sergey Kivalov and Sergey Grinivetsky. This was accomplished through a highly complex scheme of shell offshore companies, which became even more complex over the years.
As it became known SKELET-info According to reliable sources, the reason for this somewhat strange move to Odessa, which looked more like an escape from Kyiv, was another important event: the founding of East-West-Finance LLC by Ivan Fursin, Sergey Levochkin, and Artem Ershov, which played a huge role in their future business. And just before the collapse of the Banking House, through it, Levochkin received a stake in Basko CJSC, which opened the door for him to the oil and gas business and further cooperation with Dmitry Firtash (Read more about it in the article DMYTRO FIRTASH. THE STORY OF A TERNOPIL BILLIONAIRE). In particular, Basko worked with the State Enterprise Chernihivnaftogazgeologiya, the National Joint-Stock Company Nadra Ukrainy, the Oil and Gas Production Department Poltavaneftegas, and the OJSC Ukrnafta. Considering that Odessa was the route to the Black Sea shelf, the Odessa Oil Refinery, and the Odessa-Brody oil pipeline, the interest of Sergei Levochkin and his friends and associates in this city is understandable.
The next few years of Ivan Fursin's life are simply missing from his biography, although it is precisely this period that arouses the greatest interest: during this time, he transformed into a major businessman. Only through financial documents published in 2004 did it become known that Fursin somehow became a co-owner of AB Clearing House, holding 48,01% of the bank's shares. Moreover, another 9,6% of the bank's shares belonged to SK Ukrnaftotrans LLC, whose founders and co-owners were Ivan Fursin and Yulia Levochkina, the sister of his friend and business partner. Clearing House was a rather interesting bank: Vadym Hetman himself founded it in the 90s, Viktor Yushchenko was involved, and the Interbank Currency Exchange was its founder and co-owner. How the bank ended up in the hands of Levochkin's sister and best friend remains unknown. However, in 2003, it was through the money of the Clearing House that Dmitry Firtash privatized the Crimean Soda Plant OJSC, buying it for 346,69 million hryvnias – thereby beating the companies of Akhmetov and Taruta (Read more about it in the article Serhiy Taruta, the secret coordinator of Ukrainian oligarchs) and Kolomoisky. Thus, the connection between Ivan Fursin and Dmytro Firtash was revealed for the first time.
Dmitry Firtash, Yuri Boyko and Ivan Fursin
So, just as the first Maidan began in Kyiv, thundering into barrels and screaming "Yu-shchenko!", Clearing House Bank became the target of a rather cunning, if not scandalous, deal. The company Production Group Monier LLC (registered in Kyiv at 9-B Mala Zhitomirska Street) acquired 49,9% of Clearing House shares, buying out the entire stake of Ukrnaftotrans, half of Ivan Fursin's stake, and all the stakes of other shareholders. The trick was that the funds for this deal were transferred to Monier Production Group by the Austrian company Centragas Holding AG, whose founders and co-owners were Dmytro Firtash (90%) and Ivan Fursin (10%). Several years later, details of this financial movement were published on a TV show. Yulia TymoshenkoBut the most interesting thing is that Centragas Holding AG became a co-founder and co-owner of Raiffeisen Investment AG, which in turn became a co-founder and co-owner of the well-known company RosUkrEnergo, which monopolized the Ukrainian gas market in 2005.
This bizarre resale of Clearing House shares had a sequel: the bank became a co-founder of Zangas-NGS (the other founder was Dmitry Firtash's Group DF), which was awarded a contract to build gas pipelines in Turkmenistan. The company accepted payment in gas (3 billion cubic meters per year), which was then sold through internal schemes to RosUkrEnergo and then resold to Ukraine at a profit of up to 300%!
Of course, all this plentiful wealth didn't end up solely in the pockets of Firtash and Fursin. Even then, it was said that Firtash merely managed the capital of certain shadowy individuals, while Ivan Fursin clearly owed his success solely to his role as a member of Levochkin's team. Nevertheless, Fursin was considered one of the richest men in Odesa; he even founded two charitable foundations. The Fursin Foundation sponsors social projects and public events leading up to elections, while the Cinema Development Foundation was created in 2004 specifically for Odesa Film Studio CJSC, which Fursin co-owned in 2006 through Novaya Film Studio LLC, which acquired 49,9% of the shares. But immediately after this, the Odessa Film Studio, already on its last legs, completely stopped producing its own films and only leased out its facilities to visiting Russian filmmakers. It turned out that the "cinema buff" Fursin was only interested in the studio's real estate in the historic part of the city.
New times – old habits
While Firtash was busy transforming RosUkrEnergo into a gas monopoly, Ivan Fursin was also not idle. Back in 2003-2004, his Misto Bank became a generous creditor to the Kyiv Shoe Factory, which had been owned by the labor collective and subsequently suffered constant poverty. Misto Bank's generosity became understandable when 58% of the company's shares suddenly ended up in the hands of Fursin and Igor Tynny, a professional land raider who participated in the "privatization" and who, as they said, sought to squeeze out 6 hectares of the factory (near the Lavra) on the orders of Semyon Mogilevich. However, in 2005, David Zhvania, Konstantin Grigorishin (Read more about it in the article Konstantin Grigorishin, Distinguished Oligarch of Ukraine and Russia) and Petro Poroshenko (then Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council), who easily knocked Fursin and Tynny out of the saddle.
Fursin also suffered a setback in 2006, during his first attempt to become a member of parliament in Ukraine. He bought himself the number 33 spot on the Lytvyn Bloc list (Read more about it in the article Volodymyr Lytvyn: Does Ukraine need a professional Judas?), whose television advertising (remember that "Ukraine needs Lytvyn!") spent enormous amounts of money. However, the bloc failed to pass the electoral threshold, and in the 2007 elections, Fursin made an unsuccessful attempt to independently "push" in a single-member constituency. It was only at the end of 2012 that he became the proud owner of a parliamentary mandate, elected in the 138th constituency (Odesa Oblast) as a member of the Party of Regions with 57,65%. Fursin brazenly claimed credit for his work in the region, which was financed by the state budget:
The mandate was very useful for Fursin, since already then he became involved in the scandal surrounding the “Boyko towers” (Read more about it in the article Yuriy Boyko – "The Untouchable"). The case concerned a 2011 deal between state-owned Chornomornaftogaz JSC and the UK-registered company Highway Investment Processing LLP. The deal was valued at $400 million, of which over $150 million went to Britain as the contractor's profits. In 2012, the case became a public scandal, with allegations that millions of dollars in public funds had been stolen and funneled out of the country. It was established that the deal was carried out through the Latvian bank Trasta Komercbanka, co-owned by Charles Edward Treherne, who, prior to this fraudulent deal, had become chairman of the supervisory board of Firtash and Fursin's Centragas Holding AG. Digging deeper revealed that back in 2004, Mr. Treherne, together with Ivan Fursin, had registered a company in Cyprus called Arcadea Investment Fund Ltd. The scandal could not be hushed up even with the help of Levochkin, who by that time had taken the position of head of the Presidential Administration – after all, it turned out that he also had a direct connection to Mr. Treherne through a joint offshore business – the company “Oskaro Investments Limited”.
To neutralize the scandal, its participants took an original step: an additional agreement was signed with Highway Investments Limited, according to which the company "worked off" its excess profit of $150 million by providing additional services to Chornomornaftogaz at its own expense.
2011 was a particularly prosperous year for Ivan Fursin's business: Focus magazine listed him among Ukraine's richest men, estimating his net worth at $130 million. This, however, seemed modest compared to the $430 million of his friend, Sergei Levochkin. But since 2012, Levochkin's influence has declined significantly, and this has directly impacted his team's business: by 2013, Focus estimated Fursin's net worth at only $50,6 million. However, there was talk that Levochkin's team was simply shedding excess assets, moving money to offshore accounts—a practice many Ukrainian oligarchs were doing at the time, as if anticipating imminent cataclysms.
Euromaidan forced Firtash to flee the country, but Lyovochkin's team remained in Ukraine, despite the increasingly negative reputation it had earned during his tenure as Yanukovych's "grey cardinal." (According to SKELET-info, it was Lyovochkin who betrayed his boss, Yanukovych, by instructing his security forces on how to ensure a "successful" outcome for the Euromaidan.) Lyovochkin and Fursin were even elected to parliament in October 2014, albeit under different banners: Lyovochkin led the Opposition Bloc, while Fursin won the majoritarian contest in Odesa as an independent and then joined the "People's Will" parliamentary group. Fursin was also considered the richest of Odesa's MPs: in 2014, he declared an income of over 10 million hryvnias. This is unsurprising, as Levochkin's team is successfully doing business in post-Maidan Ukraine, continuing to milk the desiccated udder of its economy. Moreover, this is often accompanied by scandals: it seems that Levochkin and Fursin are continuing to operate in the same old way even in this new era.
Clearing House attempted to carry out a cunning real estate scam in Kyiv. Back in 2010, nine hectares of land on Zhukov Island were transferred to the Sovskie Stavki housing cooperative, but in the spring of 2014, the question of returning the land to Kyiv arose. Then, in August 2014, Sovskie Stavki acted as guarantor for the company Kwental Service, which took out a loan of 116 million hryvnias from Clearing House Bank, using those same nine hectares of land as collateral. And all would have been well, had it not been revealed that the founder of Quental Service was the offshore company Guerci Investments Limited, whose director, Merilen Mikhana, also manages the offshore company Banta Agricultural Investments Limited, which holds shares in the Nikolaev Bread Factory, whose supervisory board chair was Yulia Levochkina. Thus, a typical Levochkin-Fursin scheme was in place, whereby the circulated funds are kept within their group of companies. And if Quental Service had failed to repay the loan, which it clearly had no intention of doing, the nine hectares of land would have become the property of the Clearing House. The city community managed to retain the land through a court ruling in April 2015, declaring the mortgage illegal. Nevertheless, those associated with Fursin and Levochkin's companies continue their aggressive acquisition of Kyiv real estate. In October 2016, a scandal erupted around the park at 74/78 Gorky Street, where a company affiliated with Industrial Investments Management Company LLC, co-owned by the Fursin, Levochkin, and Dmitry Firtash, had begun construction on commercial housing.
Incidentally, a resale of Clearing House shares from PG Monier to East-West Finance LLC has recently been observed. As of August 2016, East-West Finance already owned 23% of the bank's shares, with Ivan Fursin owning 12,49% and Yulia Levochkina owning another 6,7%. According to the NBU, Clearing House's assets exceed 3 billion hryvnias and continue to grow, indicating that the Levochkin-Fursin team is preparing for new major deals and scams.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Org
Subscribe to our channels in Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, VC — Only new faces from the section CRYPT!