Sergey Trigubenko: Figaro of Ukrainian corruption
Those who robbed the state and businesspeople during Yanukovych's rule continue to do so under Poroshenko, and on a far greater scale. One such virtuoso is former BPP MP Serhiy Tryhubenko, who has no time to pore over laws in the parliamentary chamber, as he has so many important matters to attend to in various regions of Ukraine. Therefore, he is rarely seen in parliament, but he often becomes the focus of corruption scandals and investigations. These investigations, however, cause him no inconvenience.
It's become a tradition that school physical education and labor teachers, or "gym teachers" and "labor teachers," often become the butt of jokes and dirty stories. However, some of them have managed to build brilliant careers and even learn to govern the state—with seats as members of parliament or deputy ministers. Skelet.Org I have already published a fascinating life story of a simple Odessa "gym teacher" Anton Kisse (read more about him in the article Anton Kisse: How a gym teacher became the Bulgarian baron of Bessarabia), who became a prominent businessman, president of the Association of Bulgarians in Ukraine, and a strong supporter of President Poroshenko in the Our Land party. Now you'll learn how former Labor Party member Sergei Trigubenko has become another strong supporter of the current president, this time in the coal industry.
The missing link between the "Labor" worker and the deputy minister
It's difficult to discover all the details of this meteoric rise, as Trigubenko's biography is largely obscured, with virtually no information about his turbulent youth. It is only known that Sergei Nikolaevich Trigubenko was born on March 6, 1972, in the urban-type settlement of Kegichevka in the Kharkiv region, to Zoya Ivanovna and Nikolai Fedorovich Trigubenko. He also has a younger brother, Vitaliy (born 1981), who is now the prosecutor of the Kherson region.
Vitaly Trigubenko
In 1994, Sergei Trigubenko graduated from the Slavyansk Pedagogical Institute with a degree in labor and career guidance. With all due respect to this educational institution and an understanding of the importance of this specialty (which is becoming increasingly rare in Ukrainian pedagogical colleges), it's worth noting that at the time, this was the least prestigious university and the least prestigious profession. Simply put, it was the lowest level of higher education, available to untalented graduates of provincial high schools.
After working in his field for a year, Trigubenko concluded his chosen profession had no future: it was the 90s, teachers were paid in food parcels, and students were thinking not about work but about commerce and racketeering. But their teacher apparently didn't have the talent for business or crime either, so Sergei Trigubenko decided to pursue a degree in economics. And in 1995, he headed to a place where anyone could afford it: the International Institute of Management, Business, and Law, founded in Slavyansk in the former aviation school by Fyodor Poddubny, who promised to turn his private university into a "Ukrainian Harvard." However, it later turned out that "academician" Poddubny himself lacked a higher education, while his university had no license, and that his diplomas were only fit to be hung on the walls of a toilet. In 1996, Poddubny fled to Russia, was then arrested, extradited, spent two years in pretrial detention, and was then released under an amnesty – but during this time, Slavic law enforcement officers simply stole his savings and property (worth a total of about one million hryvnia).
Ultimately, Sergei Trigubenko's second higher education somehow didn't work out. Nevertheless, despite the obvious sham of a diploma from the "Ukrainian Harvard," in 1997, Trigubenko returned to his homeland and found a job with the Tax Police. He worked there for the next eight years and built his first successful career. It's worth noting that it was a very rapid career: already in 2000, Trigubenko enrolled in absentia at the Kharkiv Law Institute (now the Yaroslav the Wise National Law Academy), and a year later, he received his third and most important higher education degree in jurisprudence. Along with it, he secured his first leadership positions in the Kharkiv Oblast Tax Police. Moreover, he simultaneously encouraged his younger brother, Vitaly, who also graduated from the Kharkiv Law Institute, to follow this path.
Sergey Trigubenko
There is no information available about who caused such a sharp turn in the fate of Sergei Trigubenko (and his brother). It is possible that Trigubenko's secret patron was his father-in-law, Alexei Romanovich Kulichkovsky (born 1951), the father of Larisa Kulichkovskaya (Trigubenko), whom he married upon returning to his native Kegichevka. However, there is no publicly available information about Alexei Romanovich's work and activities in the 90s. Even now, he appears only as a "simple" Ukrainian pensioner, albeit one who owns an elite five-room apartment of 322 square meters in Kyiv in a building at 30 Peredslavinskaya Street, the approximate value of which is estimated at $850-$950. However, it is known that between 2009 and 2012... Alexey Kulichkovsky was one of the founders of the housing cooperative "Atlant Service," which was involved in land embezzlement schemes in Kharkiv and the Kharkiv region. Thus, he had very good connections in the city and regional government. Moreover, Kulichkovsky resigned from the cooperative's founding, which subsequently liquidated itself, just a few months before a major criminal case was opened for land fraud, suggesting he also had strong connections in law enforcement. However, by that time, his son-in-law was already a prominent figure.
Sergey Trigubenko: Master of Schemes
Unexpectedly, in the summer of 2005, Kharkiv tax official Serhiy Trigubenko was transferred to Kyiv, to the position of deputy chairman of the board of the National Joint-Stock Company (NAK) "Nadra Ukrainy" ("Nadra Ukrainy"). Thus began the second stage of his meteoric career. This time, the connecting link was his immediate superior—the new chairman of the board of NAK "Nadra Ukrainy," Igor Ivanovych Romanenko, a man of many talents and a turbulent biography. In the 90s, the former military man (a radio engineer) had gone into business: from 1998 to 2002, he served as director of Naftogazinvest CJSC in the city of Dergachi in the Kharkiv region, where he might have met Trigubenko, a tax police officer.
Igor Romanenko
Subsequently, in 2008-2010, Igor Romanenko worked as the head of the Kharkiv regional branch of the State Enterprise "Center for State Land Cadastre", and at the same time, Oleksiy Kulichkovsky (Trigubenko's father-in-law) created his own construction cooperative. In 2006-2010, being a deputy of the Kharkiv City Council from the Party of Regions, in the spring of 2013, Romanenko joined the ranks of the UDAR party, becoming the chairman of the Kharkiv regional organization. Since 2014, he has been an advisor to the chairman of the regional state administration on work with law enforcement agencies (perhaps this is why the case of land fraud in the region ended in nothing). Since 2015, Romanenko has been a member of the Solidarity party and a deputy of the Kharkiv City Council, where he oversees construction and land relations. According to available Skelet.Org According to information, it was Romanenko who attracted Trigubenko to the presidential party.
But back then, in the 2000s, Romanenko didn't last long as chairman of the board of the National Joint-Stock Company "Nadra of Ukraine": in March 2006, he "fell ill" to avoid scandalous accusations of corruptly awarding gas and oil production licenses to private companies, and in April, he was dismissed. Trigubenko, however, stayed on for another year—after which he was finally ousted, but also avoided charges and even received a position as... deputy head of the Kyiv Metropolitan Municipal Enterprise. Apparently, there was nothing to gain there, so a year later, Trigubenko returned from underground to the post of Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection to Georgiy Filipchuk—the same one who was convicted in 2012 under Article 365-2 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code in the case of the development of the Black Sea shelf by Vanco International Ltd. According to available information, Trigubenko then returned to the old practice of selling licenses (or rather, permits from the Ministry of Ecology), which he had been doing at the NAK "Nedra of Ukraine".
A year later, Sergei Trigubenko made another leap: this time to the post of Deputy Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food, first replacing Yuriy Melnyk and then Mykola Prisyazhnyuk. A truly versatile leader emerged from a simple provincial "Labor" worker: Figaro here, Figaro there! But this appointment was already tainted with corruption: it was reported that Yuriy Ivanyushchenko (Yura Yenakievsky) himself lobbied for the position, and allegedly they even held an interview during which Trigubenko was explained the scope of his responsibilities in the interests of the "family." Specifically, the main task was collecting "black taxes," that is, levies on agricultural exporters: from $17-20 per ton in 2010 to $25-35 in 2011, which then went into the "family's" coffers.
Then things went south between Trigubenko and Prisyazhnyuk: according to some sources, one of them began pocketing excess profits without sharing with his "partner," while others claim Trigubenko began undermining Prisyazhnyuk—ultimately, they came to blows. But the most likely cause of the conflict was the so-called "sugar case." This involved fraudulent government procurement of raw sugar for the Agrarian Fund, as well as loans secured by the allegedly purchased sugar. The companies involved were Prodinvest and Agromarketinvest, owned by brothers Valery and Yuriy Kelestin, and Olga LLC, owned by Igor Ignatov. They all met through Sergei Trigubenko to pursue a profitable business venture, and with his help, they won the sugar tender in 2011. However, the scams, which caused damage to the state amounting to several hundred million hryvnias, were too brazen – and Prisyazhnyuk did not want to clean it all up himself.
And then, in November 2011, again with the patronage of Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, Serhiy Trihubenko was appointed head of the State Agricultural Inspectorate of Ukraine. There, he was reportedly making a good living issuing certificates, but this time through a legal system: the documents were officially processed through a number of private firms (including Etalon-B), whose services were not cheap.
Sergey Trigubenko
Sergey Trigubenko - Coal "Overseer"
After the "sugar case," Sergei Trigubenko disappeared for a long time; two years were a complete blank in his biography; there were even rumors that he had fled abroad. Meanwhile, his brother, Vitaly Trigubenko, found himself a new patron: the former assistant district prosecutor was invited to Kyiv, where in 2013 he became head of the legal compliance department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Not a particularly impressive position, but Vitaly Nikolaevich began to develop numerous connections within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—the traditional bastion of national patriots, "democratic forces," and other politicians from the former "orange" camp. So, immediately after the second Maidan, his career began to soar. Under the Prosecutor General Vitaly Yarem Vitaliy Tryhubenko was first appointed Deputy Head of the Department for the Protection of Citizens' Rights and Interests of Ukraine in the Temporarily Occupied Crimea, and then Deputy Head of the Department for Supervision of Law Compliance in Combating Crime and Corruption at the Prosecutor General's Office. Finally, under Prosecutor General Lutsenko, he was appointed Prosecutor of the Kherson Oblast, where he currently serves, preparing for further promotions.
Meanwhile, Sergei Trigubenko materialized in the autumn 2014 elections to the Verkhovna Rada, where the former member of the government Azarov He was elected on the Poroshenko Bloc list under No. 46. What merits did he have that practically guaranteed him a spot on the ballot? It was reported that Trigubenko was assisted by his old friend and business partner, Igor Romanenko, with whom they had worked together to ensure the Poroshenko Bloc's success in the Kharkiv region. Moreover, Romanenko almost gave up his place on the list in favor of Trigubenko, preferring to remain in Kharkiv. Thus, Serhiy Trigubenko was actively integrating into the new system of power, so much so that he began to increasingly attract the attention of journalists, who even filmed a short documentary about him. It was in this documentary that Serhiy Trigubenko was named the "overseer" of Ukraine's coal industry, now on behalf of the current president's "family," and that he worked directly for Igor Kononenko.
The subject was the Krasnolimanskaya mine. It is the largest of the remaining state-owned Ukrainian mines, around which successive protégés of the "families" have been plotting schemes since the 90s. Specifically, a company of the same name, Krasnolimanskaya LLC, was created at the mine, which then leased its coal seams (!), effectively stripping the mine of its status as a state-owned enterprise. Then came the second Maidan, the conflict in Donbass began, and fighters from the Donbass Battalion, led by Yuriy Bereza, arrived at the mine in jeeps with machine guns, ostensibly to return it to the state. But in the end, the mine merely fell into the hands of other swindlers. Since 2015, Krasnolimanskaya, along with the last major state-owned enterprise, Centrenergo, has become part of the presidential "family's" corruption scheme, handed over to the control of "overseer" Sergei Trigubenko.
It was Trihubenko who lobbied for the appointment of Vitaliy Zyusko as mine director, and then former Party of Regions member Oleksandr Dubovik, who was even reprimanded by the Azarov government for "using state property as his own." These appointments sparked a conflict with the miners' collective, who supported the previous director, Konstantin Kisilev (who was arrested during this standoff). The miners were outraged that Zyusko, who had briefly served as director, attempted to purchase two diesel locomotives (used) for the mine at a cost of 20 million hryvnias each—even though the market price for such machines barely exceeded one million hryvnias!
Having appointed his own people to the mine's management, and also having invited his business partner, a scandalous businessman, into the scheme Igor SaloTrigubenko, known as the "overseer" of the company Centerenergo, launched one of the largest scams of post-Maidan Ukraine. A company called "Trading House Resource" was established at the mine, whose director was Igor Tupikov, Trigubenko's former parliamentary aide. Incidentally, Trigubenko publicly denied this, but an official report from the Verkhovna Rada Office eloquently demonstrated that the MP was simply a liar. Trigubenko also appointed another of his former aides, Igor Balabanov, as director of Centerenergo (with the help of Igor Salo).
So, TD Resurs, as well as another Trihubenko firm, Dantrade LTD, entered into a series of contracts with the Krasnolimanskaya mine granting them subcontracting and seam lease rights, allowing them to purchase coal at a very low price. Furthermore, it was reported that this coal contained excessive amounts of waste rock—and that it was intentionally placed there. Then, in September 2015, these firms entered into a contract with Centrenergo for the sale of coal to the enterprise for 520 million hryvnias. There's one point here that journalists overlooked: when referring to the contract, they cited only one document for the sale of 100 tons of coal, and it appears there are simply no others. This means that Trihubenko's firms sold coal to Centrenergo for 5200 hryvnias per ton! To understand the scale and brazenness of this scam, let's compare the cost of coal in Rinat Akhmetov's schemes: he obtains coal from his mines and pits at a cost of 500-700 hryvnias per ton and sells it to power plants at 2500-2700 hryvnias per ton—considered very expensive, and Akhmetov is called a fraudster for it. But the scheme of the presidential "family's overseer" sold coal to the state-owned enterprise Centrenergo at twice the price! And let's not forget that coal mixed with rock has an even lower cost than the slurry from Akhmetov's pits.
Such a thing seemed unthinkable: everyone in the country cursed Akhmetov's "Rotterdam formula," but no one noticed a far more vile fraud. But the story never developed beyond a simple scandal involving an intermediary firm that had won a tender; apparently, no one paid attention to the resulting price of the coal after examining the documents. However, having hushed up the public scandal, the authorities nevertheless decided to slap the knuckles of their overly arrogant "overseer": in the fall of 2016, NABU conducted searches of the Kyiv offices of Resource Trading House LLC and Dantrade LTD LLC (on the 20th floor of the Parus shopping center in the capital). Rumors even circulated that Trigubenko had fallen out of favor with Kononenko and had even been removed from his post as coal "overseer," ceding the position to the Torez oligarch. To Vitaly Kropachev — the founder of the notorious Tornado Battalion and a protégé of Anton Gerashchenko. Trigubenko, however, was allegedly transferred to oversee grain exports, given his experience in the field. However, this had no impact on his position. For example, after the searches, the NABU never mentioned Trigubenko again.
The "labor teacher" lives well in this world!
The Krasnolimanskaya mine wasn't the only source of income for Serhiy Trigubenko, who rose to new heights of corruption after the second Maidan. Moreover, he even continues business relations with fugitive representatives of the ousted regime. In this case, we're talking about Tarkom Service LLC (Obukhov), a company that disposes of hydrocarbon waste (oils). Moreover, it doesn't so much destroy (incinerate) it as take money from the treasury to supposedly dispose of waste that doesn't even exist. However, this isn't the worst-case scenario: it's good that they're not simply dumping it in the nearest river. However, another company connected to Trigubenko, Ukrainian Waste Management Center LLC, was almost engaged in this very same activity, burning counterfeit products in the open air, filling the sky with acrid fumes.
Both of these companies, as well as two others (Ecocenter and Ecosvit), are owned by the Cypriot firm Kostinia Trading Ltd. This, in turn, is owned by two companies: the Belizean firm Eco Business Directions Inc. and the Cypriot Grotelisa Holdings Ltd. The former is a company affiliated with the Yanukovych "family," while the latter is co-owned (through shell companies) by Serhiy Trihubenko and the fugitive former Minister of Ecology. Nikolay Zlochevsky.
Among the high-ranking officials aiding their corrupt businesses is Andriy Zaika, head of the Environmental Inspectorate of Ukraine. He orders regional environmental inspectorates to work only with "their own" companies, including Trihubenko's. This was reported, for example, by media outlets citing complaints from entrepreneurs operating in the Odessa region.
It's no surprise that a former "Labor" worker, who struggled to make ends meet, is now a multimillionaire—at least in hryvnia terms. The Trigubenko couple's fortune is impressive: two apartments plus a huge attic, three houses, almost 2 square meters of commercial space, and three foreign cars. Journalists believe that Sergey Trigubenko saved most of his "earned" wealth for his wife, but some believe she's quite wealthy even without her husband. Besides having a mysterious wealthy father, Larisa Trigubenko owns three companies: two travel agencies and MD-Alliance LLC, a wholesale fuel supplier.
However, the greater question is not about Sergei Trigubenko's declared assets, but rather about his undeclared arsenal. It is quite impressive: in addition to shotguns, it includes two high-powered rifles (effectively sniper weapons) and a Vulcan semi-automatic carbine (a non-automatic version of the AKS), as well as two pistols (a Makarov and a Walther-99). The latter should raise questions not only from the public but also from law enforcement agencies, as there is no information that Sergei Trigubenko has received any awards for impeccable service or valiant defense of the Fatherland. But this arsenal interests them no more than his shady dealings, which have cost the state millions in losses.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Org
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