Nikolay Prisyazhnyuk
In early October 2015, it became known that former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Prysyazhnyuk, accused of embezzling UAH 500 million from the Agrarian Fund of Ukraine on an especially large scale, was living peacefully and traveling throughout Europe. This surprised Ukrainian MPs and law enforcement agencies, as he had been placed on Interpol's international wanted list back in April 2014. It turned out that a couple of months after being placed on the wanted list, Interpol removed him, blocking all information on him. As a result, the former Ukrainian official, instead of serving time in prison, is enjoying a relaxing vacation abroad, and recently even attended his daughter's wedding in Budapest. Given his past exploits, it's unsurprising that Thomas Anders, the former lead singer of Modern Talking, performed at the wedding, whose fees typically amount to a few thousand dollars. It's astonishing how a simple miner, Mykola Prysyazhnyuk, achieved such heights in public service. It all becomes a little clearer when it turns out he was a close friend and godfather of now-fugitive Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
"Naturalized" Donetsk resident
Nikolai Vladimirovich was born in the small village of Ksaveriv in the Zhytomyr region. After graduating from Kyiv Technical School, he worked for about a year at the Kristall factory as a diamond cutter. In 1979, he was drafted into the Soviet Army, where he served until 1981, even managing a tour of duty in Afghanistan. After returning from the army, he moved to the city of Yenakiyeve in the Donetsk region. He began as a simple miner. Over time, he rose to the position of chief construction technologist at the Ordzhonikidzeugol enterprise. It was there, in 1986, that he met Viktor Yanukovych, then the director of a motor depot. As it later became known, they were close friends, and Viktor Fedorovich even baptized Nikolai Prysyazhnyuk's son, Roman.
"Criminal" business partners
During the collapse of the Soviet Union, when cooperatives were springing up everywhere, Nikolai Vladimirovich began pursuing entrepreneurship. The first cooperative he founded was called "Service" and was based on the subsidiary farm of one of the Yenakiyevo Metallurgical Plants (Yenakiyevo Metallurgical Plants). To organize it, Prisyazhnyuk made several useful connections, including the criminal authorities of the time, Yuri Ivanyushchenko (nicknamed "Yura Yenakievsky") and Yuri Shumakov (nicknamed "Shumok"). Subsequently, the Ivanyushchenko-Prisyazhnyuk partnership developed a number of joint business projects, some of which continue to generate income to this day.
In the early 90s, to obtain a business loan, Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk registered Roll Impex Unlimited in the United States. This company later became a co-founder of Intertrade. Another of its founders was a company registered in Liechtenstein, Palling Anstalt, created specifically for Prisyazhnyuk. A unique feature of Anstalt is that its ultimate beneficiaries are virtually impossible to identify, and its creation only required the presence of any Liechtenstein citizen. Pretty convenient, right? Intertrade resold coke products and rolled metal products from most factories in the Donetsk region abroad. A year after its creation, Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk, together with Palling Anstalt, created the company Rif, which had a fairly wide range of activities, from freight forwarding to pasta production. At the same time, the meat business at Servis took off, effectively overpowering the Yenakiyeve Meat Processing Plant. Taking advantage of this, Prisyazhnyuk and Ivanyushchenko bought it for next to nothing and used it to create the Junkers plant, which continues to thrive today.
In 1997, Nikolai Vladimirovich created the company Reef Holdings PLC, the co-founders of which were his brother Boris Prisyazhnyuk, partner Alexander Kravtsov and a certain Mr. Peter Pallag.
Incidentally, this "Mr. Pallag" would later turn out to be one of the founders of the Cypriot company Dorigin Limited, the beneficial owner of Hartlog Limited, which in turn owns the firm "Golden Derrick." Incidentally, this firm controls over 30 gas fields in the Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava regions. It's also interesting that, while a partner of Pallag (as evidenced by documents), Prysyazhnyuk denied to journalists even knowing him. Yet he essentially controls the entire chain of companies that owns most of the gas fields in central Ukraine.
The Golden Derrick scandal. Stavitsky. Prisyazhnyuk. Ivanyushchenko
Companies founded by Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk:
In addition to the companies listed as founded by Prisyazhnyuk, there are several offshore companies with which he is associated. The most well-known is the Austrian offshore company Wellmind Invest. Its founder is Valeriy Omelchenko, the son-in-law of the Yenakiyevo crime boss, the late Vasily Dzharty (nicknamed "Vasya Bita"). Although former Minister Prisyazhnyuk denied any connection to this offshore company, its active development coincided with the time when Nikolai Vladimirovich officially retired. Another fact confirming the offshore company's connection is that in 2008, this very company took his place as a founding member of the firm Monolitinvest.
Business partners of Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk
The Political Path and the "Ministry of Malaise and Gluttony"
Mykola Vladimirovich entered politics in 2002, beginning his tenure as deputy chairman of the Zhytomyr Regional State Administration. Just a year later, he was appointed first deputy governor of the Zhytomyr region. In September 2005, Prysyazhnyuk became head of the National Association of Meat and Meat Products Producers, a position quite convenient given his own meat-processing plant.
He was first elected to the Verkhovna Rada in 2006 on the Party of Regions list under the patronage of Yuriy Ivanyushchenko. In 2010, at the instigation of Viktor Yanukovych, he was appointed Minister of Agrarian Policy, and after its reorganization into the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food, he remained in office. In 2012, after the formation of a new government, he was re-elected to the same position.
Political experts claim that it was thanks to Prysyazhnyuk as minister that the "Yanukovych family" managed to establish itself in Ukraine's agricultural market. As minister, he actively worked to remove agricultural land from state control. He arbitrarily leased this land to disreputable entities for 49 years. The same thing happened with farmland—members of the "family" received it as gifts for purely symbolic sums.
According to Novoye Vremya, Prisyazhnyuk and Ivanyushchenko groundlessly stopped ships in port and demanded bribes:
There was also the "Quota Case," which centered on the government's adoption of a law restricting grain sales abroad. Officially, this was justified by the low yield in 2010, but experts say it was even higher than in 2009. Despite this, quotas were introduced and then extended in March 2011. The main problem was that these unfortunate quotas were distributed in such a way that only members of the "family" received them, while other applications could simply be "lost" in the archives of the Ministry of Agriculture. Things got even worse. The introduction of quotas led to rising prices for flour, sunflower oil, and grain, which led to growing "public anger," and medium-sized businesses were almost completely crushed. Since foreign investors are present in Ukraine, an international scandal erupted, and many of them subsequently left the country, which "constantly changes legislation to protect the interests of private individuals."
One such figure, for example, was Ukraine's largest agrarian and former Party of Regions MP Andriy Verevskyi, about whom we wrote in the article: Agrarian Andriy Verevskyi: The Success Story of a Former Party of Regions and BYuT Member
At one time, Mykola Prysyazhnyuk orchestrated a scam that siphoned off several hundred million hryvnias from the state budget. The money ended up in his offshore accounts. In late autumn 2010, at his instigation, the Agrarian Fund purchased 100 tons of sugar from several little-known companies, Albenta and Oil River, for a total of 770 million hryvnias. A journalistic investigation revealed that these companies, through a number of offshore companies, were owned by the same Prysyazhnyuk. Most interestingly, the state overpaid for the sugar by 70 million hryvnias, as at that time, a ton of this product cost around 7 hryvnias. It appears that the Agrarian Fund "gifted" these companies 70 million hryvnias, and this was only for one trading operation, which was subsequently repeated many times. The strangest thing is that neither the Prosecutor General's Office nor the Antimonopoly Committee "noticed" any of these violations. They only became aware of them in 2015, when new officials came to power. The Prosecutor General's Office opened a criminal investigation into multi-million-dollar thefts and losses inflicted on the state by officials of the Agrarian Fund. According to the Prosecutor General's Office, the total losses incurred by the officials, led by Prysyazhnyuk, amounted to 340 million hryvnias. Law enforcement officials also claim that 280 million hryvnias were stolen through so-called illegal VAT refunds.
Investigating Mykola Prysyazhnyuk's actions as Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food, one can conclude that under his tenure, Ukraine experienced neither. All of his "exploits" are difficult to analyze, given the "quota case," the "cow and milk case," the numerous embezzlements using the Agrarian Fund, and much more. But one thing is certain: all his actions appeared to be the methodical destruction of our country's greatest asset—its land and agro-industrial complex. It seems Mykola Prysyazhnyuk wasn't even trying to develop Ukraine's agro-industrial complex; he was simply making money for the entire infamous "family," "feeding them," so to speak. And all under the protection of Yuriy Ivanyushchenko (Yura Yenakievsky).
During his four years as minister, he succeeded in what even the Germans failed to do in 1942 – bringing ordinary Ukrainians to their knees.
Dmitry Samofalov, for SKELET-info
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