Vladimir Zagrebelny
The investigation into the case of the director of a state research institute reveals the unexpected places in which Yanukovych's clan protégés continue to rob the country and its citizens.
The Prosecutor General's Office is investigating a corruption scheme in which Volodymyr Zagrebelny, director of the State Research Institute for Laboratory Diagnostics and Veterinary-Sanitary Expertise, is suspected of involvement. This was revealed in a ruling by Kyiv's Pechersky District Court dated July 26, 2016, posted in the Unified Register of Court Decisions, the First Instance newspaper reported.
As pre-trial investigation materials show, Zagrebelny effectively imposed tribute on Kyiv meat traders. His immediate subordinates were also involved in the extortion scheme as intermediaries and accomplices.
For example, the head of the department for organizing veterinary and sanitary inspection laboratories received 50 hryvnias from traders at the Darnitsky market for each meat quality report issued. The money was transferred to her twice a month, and since over a thousand such reports were issued at the market during this period, the total amount was approximately 50,000 hryvnias per month. She gave the collected funds to the head of the institute's legal work and document management department, who then forwarded them directly to the director. The investigation documented the director's receipt of over 200,000 hryvnias from this scheme.
The prosecution charged the official under Part 3 of Article 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Kyiv's Pechersky District Court ruled that the suspect should post bail of almost 300 hryvnias for release from pretrial detention, but he was required to appear at court hearings and was prohibited from leaving Kyiv.
However, the director, who was released from custody, twice ignored court hearings and was also spotted outside of Kyiv—at the Sebe Club country recreation complex and at other entertainment venues in the Kyiv and Vinnytsia regions.
The Prosecutor General's Office petitioned the court to change the suspect's pretrial detention and place him in pretrial detention pending the investigation. After reviewing the petition, the court ordered the director's arrest, and the bail he posted was transferred to a special fund of the State Budget of Ukraine.
According to the institute's website, its director is Vladimir Zagrebelny, appointed to the position in 2011. As Zagrebelny himself noted in his biography, in September 2012 he was "illegally dismissed from his position by the criminal regime of Yanukovych, Azarov, and Prysyazhnyuk," and in April 2013 he was reinstated by a court decision, assuming his duties in July 2014.
A native of the Vinnytsia region, Volodymyr Zahrebelnyy built his career in Yenakiyevo, the birthplace of former President Viktor Yanukovych, beginning in the early 90s. The fugitive former Minister of Agrarian Policy, Mykola Prysyazhnyuk, also began his career there, and it was during Prysyazhnyuk's tenure that Zahrebelnyy was appointed to this post. Given the well-known practice of the "Donetsk gang" of appointing loyalists to key positions with significant potential for corruption, it can be assumed that Zahrebelnyy was clearly being disingenuous in his autobiography.
And there was a reason for that. It turns out that Volodymyr Zahrebelny was, in fact, actively integrated into the very same "criminal regime of Yanukovych, Azarov, and Prysyazhnyuk" and was an active participant in and organizer of a number of criminal schemes, profiting from them and helping members of the "Family" and their close circle of government officials and businessmen profit from them. Here's what the online publication "ORD" reported about Zahrebelny in April 2015:
In July 2014, Mr. Zagrebelny found himself at the helm of the Veterinary Sanitary Expertise Research Institute in an unusual way: he challenged in court a long-standing decision, dating back to 2012, to dismiss him from this position under the Labor Code due to a long-term illness. The position had become vacant because the then-director of the institute, Viktor Baranov, had been caught red-handed accepting a bribe. Not firing him would have been even more inconvenient. Thus, Zagrebelny, a Yenakiyev native, returned to the post he had held since January 2011 (the moment the "Donetsk people" fully consolidated their power).
Before and during that career rise, Vladimir Zagrebelny was directly involved in the Family's meat business. He held senior positions at the Yenakiyeve Meat Processing Plant since 1992. He then worked at the structures that this business was "squeezed" and expanded into: YUNKERS Food Company (Znatna TM), Yenakiyeve Meat Processing Plant LLC, and others. Around that time, Zagrebelny's immediate supervisor, the director of Reef Holdings, the company that managed the meat processing plant, was future Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Prysyazhnyuk. In 2008, according to Radio Liberty, the Donetsk Regional Prosecutor's Office launched an investigation into the attempted smuggling of 25 tons of Brazilian beef by this meat processing plant, but the case soon fell apart.
Under Yanukovych, Zagrebelny's tenure as chief veterinary "inspector" was plagued by monthly scandals and criminal cases. As early as February 2011, the Kyiv office of the Finance Ministry's Control and Audit Office won a court ruling granting the right to an unscheduled inspection of the State Department of Laboratory Diagnostics and Veterinary-Sanitary Expertise (i.e., state veterinary experts simply barred state auditors).
In the fall of 2012, a scandal, followed by a lawsuit, erupted over a detained truck carrying 20 tons of genetically modified livestock feed. The cargo had a veterinary and sanitary laboratory certificate confirming the permissible level of the GMO component (soy) and the absence of pathogens causing plant diseases. However, experts from Ukrmetroteststandart, a state laboratory independent of the State Veterinary and Phytosanitary Service, found excessive GMO levels in samples from the truck, as well as viruses dangerous to plants. Shortly after the GMO scandal erupted, Vladimir Zagrebelny took a lengthy sick leave with bone tuberculosis (we hope it was fake), which is why he was later fired.
But scandals continued to haunt him even during his treatment. In September 2013, the capital's Organized Crime Control Department arrested four state veterinary sanitary experts and uncovered a system of "illegally collecting money from workers at thirty-five (!) Kyiv markets" (500 hryvnias for each daily certificate). According to the police, the bribes were funneled "upward" for "two years" (i.e., since 2011): to the "organizer, who held a senior position at the veterinary laboratory research institute." "The organizer's monthly income," according to the Organized Crime Control Department, "was then approximately 600 hryvnias."
Thus, at the institute of Mr. Zagrebelny (who was not yet a tuberculosis patient at the time), a multi-million dollar “fixer business” was operating, which clearly could not operate without the “blessing” of those close to Yanukovych.
In addition to collecting bribes from hundreds of thousands of people employed in the agribusiness, the State Veterinary and Phytosanitary Service under Yanukovych apparently had the task of overseeing the "Family's" shady food business. This aspect of V. Zahrebelny's activities recently surfaced in an international journalistic investigation into the supply of tainted meat to Ukraine.
German colleagues "picked up the trail" of a company called Trinity, which disposed of, but in reality exported, green minced meat, meat-packing plant waste, and other items from 2010 to 2013. An investigation in Ukraine revealed that this fake meat was not only suspiciously cheap but also often undocumented. In other words, it closely resembled the smuggling scheme common among Yanukovych's inner circle.
In that rotten, literally rotten, scheme, the current director of the Veterinary Research Institute, Zagrebelny, figured not only as the then director (until December 2012)—who recognized the mush as meat—but also as a former manager of "Semya." After all, according to numerous investigations, it is with this organization that the firms Ukrprodimport and Doninvest 2010 are linked, both of which were noted for importing suspiciously cheap Brazilian meat in 2013. Moreover, "meat" from these very shipments was later detained while being smuggled into Russia. Furthermore, Zagrebelny's successor as director of the state research institute (until March 2014), Nikolai Karpenko, is directly connected to another supplier of the mush, Imperial.
So what are the "Family" veterinary experts doing now, under the "new" government? Apparently, the State Veterinary and Phytosanitary Service's Research Institute, under the leadership of V. Zahrebelny, is continuing the extortion traditions established under Yanukovych. The same people are approaching food entrepreneurs with offers of paid "friendship." Only they're no longer citing the "Family" but Mr. Zahrebelny himself, hinting at his secure position "under any government and under any colors of the national flag."
We spoke with several victims in the wholesale meat market. The most striking case of extortion seems to us to be the story of the Kyiv company Tavr-Plus LLC, which came under attack by veterinary racketeers in the fall of 2014. Initially, there were persistent offers to "befriend" the new leadership of the State Fiscal Service. These "offers" came from V. Zagrebelny himself, as well as a certain Vladimir Bobkov, born in 1966, and Anatoly Kostin, born in 1961 (born in Yenakiyevo and Donetsk, respectively). Bobkov, in fact, turned out to be affiliated with several Donbas enterprises previously considered to be businesses of the Yanukovych "Family," specifically, the Eastern-Ukrainian Center for Reconstruction and Development LLC and the Bryankivskyi Ore Repair Plant LLC. And also, through a long chain of co-founders, with the Yenakiyevo meat-packing plant, where Vladimir Zagrebelny worked.
When the Tavr-Plus businessmen refused to "befriend" Zagrebelny and company, they expected the usual regulatory overreach from the State Veterinary and Phytosanitary Service. They prepared to fight it with lawyers and complaints to the prosecutor's office. But then came an unconventional move, in keeping with the spirit of the times: an appeal from MP Ihor Mosiychuk (Read more: Igor Mosiychuk: How one of Ukraine's leading "radicals" got his start) to the head of the State Fiscal Service (then V. Bashinsky) on February 26, 2015, demanding that this very lawlessness be implemented ("confiscate" documents for food, forcibly dispose of the products themselves, initiate a criminal case, etc.). What's interesting in the appeal isn't so much the confusing legal argumentation as the confidential information about the cargo of the Tavr-Plus company (down to the numbers of the refrigerated cars) and the identity of the MP himself.
According to the victims, the systematized data on rail transport and customs clearance of Tavr-Plus goods could only have reached MP Mosiychuk from the State Veterinary and Phytosanitary Service and its State Research Institute, headed by V. Zagrebelny. After all, they are the ones in charge of veterinary and sanitary control posts at the border. It appears that the attempt to "crack down" on the businessmen was followed by the "leakage" of their commercial information with a public demand to "investigate and punish" them (which is precisely what is happening).
Thus, Zagrebelny's State Research Institute can "tyrannize" entrepreneurs not just like that, "under the carpet," but at the request of a revolutionary MP. The public, so to speak. However, the MP in this case has proven to be a rather controversial figure. Mosiychuk, a member of the Radical Party faction (Lyashkivtsi), has been consistently accused of acting "on the edge of foul." Both during the Revolution and the war in Donbas, and now in the Kyiv City Council and the Verkhovna Rada.
Interestingly, to further garner victims' trust, Bobkov and Kostin sometimes appear with Zagrebelny at the Kyiv office of the Veterinary Sanitary Research Institute in Chokolivka, and even at public charity events. They claim that after handing over the envelopes, the "friendship" with the "killed" businessmen will be genuine, without any scams. We even managed to obtain a group photo of Zagrebelny, Bobkov, and Kostin (they are first, second, and last from the left, respectively). Incidentally, V. Bobkov and A. Kostin are not only "friendship messengers" for the veterinary sanitary inspection, but also... wholesale meat dealers themselves. But have there been any parliamentary appeals regarding their businesses?
In parallel with extortion in Ukraine, a close group of veterinary technicians maintains close ties with the occupied territories. For example, the director of the State Research Institute, Vladimir Zagrebelny, and his wife, Natalia, own and manage a pig farm in the village of Korsun, a suburb of Yenakiyeve. A professional, Vladimir Zagrebelny certainly didn't invest his own hard-earned money in this small pig farm. The Novyi Svit farm is a modern industrial pig farm. Rumor has it that Kyiv regularly sends money to the "rebels" for "protecting" this property from the hardships of war.
Now Kyiv-based entrepreneurs Vladimir Bobkov and Anatoly Kostin were co-founders of several trading and industrial enterprises in Yenakiyeve and Donetsk before the war. The fate of these businesses is currently unclear, but it is known that Bobkov and Kostin regularly visit the "special status" territories of Donbas. And the aforementioned colleague of Zagrebelny, the former director of the Veterinary and Sanitary Research Institute, Mr. Karpenko, according to the same international investigation, has now gone off to organize smuggling of Ukrainian meat to occupied Crimea.
"What conclusions can be drawn from this colorful, but generally familiar picture of bureaucratic lawlessness from the previous regime?" asks Andrei Fedotov, the author of this journalistic investigation conducted for ORD.
Firstly, the author is convinced, lustration in Ukraine is not only ineffective, it's also counterproductive. Even if "irreplaceable" second-tier officials like Zahrebelny are not formally covered by the Law on the Purification of Power, their very tenure in office is a demonstrative "anti-lustration," a mocking slap in the face of the citizens by the "new" government. The time and energy the Verkhovna Rada and the Cabinet of Ministers expend on lustration could be spent on the "regular" fight against corruption—a banal, but absolutely necessary and entirely legal, fight. This, of course, doesn't negate the very idea of lustration in its successful Czech-Polish form.
For now, the "cleansing of power" fits into a corruption strategy devised long before the Revolution. Permanent and non-public officials at the second and third levels (deputies, heads of state services, and expert assessments) collect bribes and "resolve issues." The frequently replaced, powerless "public figures" (ministers and deputy prime ministers) are held accountable for the results of their arbitrary actions.
Furthermore, elderly officials with little influence are being targeted, being purged wholesale for statistical purposes. Amid this circus, less-than-key witnesses to abuses (former MP Chechetov, Odessa prosecutor Melnyk, some of Akhmetov's managers, etc.) are falling out of windows. All of this is actively exploited by Putin's propaganda machine to promote the thesis that any change of power, any fight against corruption, is the Apocalypse and a Satanic conspiracy.
"Secondly, a terrible nightmare is unfolding in Ukraine's veterinary and sanitary sector. This is a different reality—an alternative to the noticeable trends toward transparency and deregulation. While citizens file European accident reports without a traffic police officer and apply for subsidies online, food entrepreneurs are being extorted by monopolistic clans, just like in the 90s. Will we see reform? Or will the food market simply retreat from this horror into a complete underground market—as it did at the dawn of independence?" the author of a journalistic investigation published by ORD asked over a year ago.
But there is still no answer to them...
Read more: Igor Mosiychuk: How one of Ukraine's leading "radicals" got his start
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