Igor Yakubovich
The former official is trying to recoup his criminal gains. Yanukovych's flight "cleansed" the ruling elite of corruption in a very specific way. Essentially, it was merely a change of guise, replacing the "Donetsk people" with "national-patriotic" management cadres.
But the corruption schemes, and even the main figures through which the state and people were robbed of billions of dollars, remained the same.
The escalating war in the east of the country, coupled with the loss of foreign exchange earnings from industrial sales, has brought the agro-industrial complex to the forefront of Ukraine's economy. The completion of the upcoming 2014 financial year, and with it the fulfillment of the state's basic social obligations, largely depends on the successful performance of Ukraine's agro-industrial complex. Moreover, the gross indicators for the year appear quite optimistic. Ukraine, for example, is harvesting record grain and sunflower crops in 2014. To a certain extent, this should inspire optimism... but it doesn't. Not least because a member of the Family and an accomplice of the fugitive former Minister of Agriculture, Prysyazhnyuk, still desperately wants to head the State Food and Grain Corporation of Ukraine. Igor Yakubovich.
Master of Schemes
Mr. Yakubovich has always been smart enough not to stick his neck out in big politics, for example, bypassing the post of minister (although he has his sights set on the same Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk Yakubovich had been in office since early 2010, immediately after Yanukovych's victory in the presidential election. The tongue-tied Yakubovich's talents lay elsewhere: he directly developed not-so-subtle but invariably practical corruption schemes to siphon money from the agro-industrial complex, which were then distributed to the accounts of Oleksandr Yanukovych, the aforementioned Mykola Prysyazhnyuk, and, of course, Ihor Yakubovich himself.
During Yakubovich's tenure at the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, and later at the Agrarian Fund (he was appointed its director in 2012), such corruption schemes accumulated in such numbers that it's possible to cite only the most glaring examples in a single article. For example, in 2010, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food held a tender for the lease of 120 combine harvesters. Yakubovich, through his trusted representative, Alexandra Radchenko For this "project," Yakubovich created the state-owned enterprise "Spetsagroleasing," which purchased a batch of combine harvesters from BelotserkovMAZ LLC. A total of 143 million hryvnias were paid from the state budget for the batch of combine harvesters, while the company's selling price for a combine harvester (outside of the tender) in 2010 was 870 hryvnias. This means the state overpaid by 39 million hryvnias. But that's not all! Yakubovich registered the Belarusian equipment as a "purchase from a domestic manufacturer," resulting in an additional 200 million hryvnias "compensated" from the state budget to agricultural producers.
Yakubovich orchestrated even more flamboyant schemes in the grain market. In May 2012, already serving as director of the Agrarian Fund, Yakubovich entered into a forward exchange contract with a certain LLC called Blagovest to supply the fund with over 6,000 tons of wheat. The contract was worth 10 million hryvnias, half of which Blagovest received as an advance payment. It received the payment and then disappeared, because Blagovest LLC was created literally on the eve of the deal and had no fields, crops, warehouses, or, consequently, any wheat. But this didn't stop Yakubovich. Already in June of that year, the Agrarian Fund, through a number of new LLCs (for example, Aviation Solution), re-registered 2007-grade third-grade wheat as 2010-grade second-grade wheat, which had been stored in warehouses of the state corporation Khlib Ukrainy. By 2011, the 2007 grain had rotted in warehouses, and Yakubovich blamed the fictitious losses on the State Food and Grain Corporation of Ukraine (SFGC), whose warehouses were where the "good" grain was stored. As a result, Yakubovich made two advance payments from the state budget for the purchase of non-existent grain, and then charged the state for the long-term liability for the fictitious grain.
It's especially worth noting that for Yakubovich, these weren't "schemes of the year," but simply the routine, daily work of laundering enormous sums of money. The family valued Yakubovich not so much for his sophistication—as we can see from the schemes described above, there wasn't much of it—but for his practicality. It was Yakubovich who became the de facto cashier through whom money was transferred to the titushki in Kyiv. In December-January 2013/14 alone, 170 million hryvnias were laundered and cashed out of the Agrarian Fund, and then this money was transferred to titushki foremen brought from Donbass, Crimea, Kharkov and Odessa.
Incidentally, the leakage of such enormous sums from the Agrarian Fund was too noticeable even by the standards of the overly greedy Family, and so, in early 2013, Yakubovich was transferred to the position of head of the State Food and Grain Corporation of Ukraine. His grain schemes proceeded more smoothly. The largest fraud of 2013 was forward foreign policy contract No. 328 between the State Food and Grain Corporation of Ukraine, headed by Yakubovich, and a certain company, Neslot Limited, for the sale of 75,000 metric tons of third-grade feed corn from the 2013 harvest. The price at issue was almost $10.5 million, which Neslot Limited, according to the contract, was supposed to transfer within a month. During that same month, the Ukrainian state, using its own resources, delivered the said corn to the Mykolaiv seaport, and then… neither the corn nor the money transferred to the State Food and Grain Corporation of Ukraine accounts disappeared.
Further investigation revealed that Neslot Limited was registered in Hong Kong with a statutory capital of—note—10 Hong Kong dollars, which at the 2013 exchange rate was approximately 10 hryvnia. The company itself was registered to a Cypriot woman. Niki Stilianov, who works as both the "director" and "secretary" at Neslot Limited, but resides in Nicosia, not Hong Kong. Essentially, Igor Yakubovich managed to "sell" (or, more simply, write off) the feed corn to a Cypriot secretary who founded the company immediately prior to the deal.
Prisyazhnyuk's call sign
However, the above-described activities of Yakubovich date back to the Family's heyday. But what's telling is that, six months into the new government, Igor Yakubovich not only hasn't passed the lustration process, but he's also seeking to return to a key management position at the State Food and Grain Corporation of Ukraine, and is even attempting to implement yet more shady schemes. This is largely due to the extremely difficult political situation in the country and the obvious attempts by the minister. Igor Shvaika to eliminate at least the most egregious schemes toteams of predecessors, i.e. the Prisyazhnyuk-Yakubovich team.
What's telling is that over the past six months, Yakubovich has steadily developed new schemes to funnel funds to the Family, which, even outside Ukraine's borders, continues to actively "milk" the domestic economy. In particular, the fugitive former Minister of Agriculture, Mykola Prysyazhnyuk, has stepped up his efforts in this direction. He has now settled in Bulgaria and is developing projects to build new pig farms there. In this regard, the Family views Yakubovich in the following ways:
1) lobbying for the sale of livestock products in the Ukrainian markets and, if possible, their re-export to the territory of the Customs Union;
2) delivery of feed to Bulgaria through private structures according to the traditional Yakubovich scheme “the state pays – the family receives”;
3) the formation of new “legal” financial accounts for the Family that the EU will not be able to block.
In all these areas, Yakubovich's role remains central to the Family's plans to develop new areas of the domestic agro-industrial complex. Moreover, given the difficult political situation and the difficult legacy inherited by Minister Shvaika, the Administration and Cabinet of Ministers are already pushing for Ihor Yakubovich to assume a key management position in the agro-industrial complex. The potential consequences are generally clear. Ukraine will continue to conduct very strange tenders, selling products without payment or purchasing at monstrously inflated prices. Meanwhile, Yakubovich personally and those he serves will continue to grow rich. Incredibly so.
There is no power
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