Could the former connections of the head of the State Financial Monitoring Service (SFI) influence his current work? To understand this, CRiME continues to investigate the past of Ihor Cherkassky, the head of Ukraine's financial intelligence service.
(This is a continuation of a series of publications devoted to financial intelligence. The beginning can be found here.)
Igor Borisovich took over the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine on March 3, 2014, and since then, he has been tirelessly fighting money laundering and terrorist financing. We'll discuss how he does this later, as five months is not a sufficient time to judge someone's effectiveness. Moreover, monitoring the flow of money in the country is a complex undertaking, requiring time and diligence, and it certainly doesn't tolerate fuss.
It's worth noting that Igor Cherkassky is no newcomer to this field. He has experience managing financial intelligence. From February 2008 to March 2010, he headed the State Committee for Financial Monitoring. Igor Borisovich's achievements during his first stint in financial intelligence deserve a separate article. And we'll write it next time. Let's just note that the State Financial Monitoring Service was unable to prevent either the seizure of Mezhyhirya by Yanukovych's gang or the looting of domestic banks by dishonest financiers. Or they didn't want to. Or they weren't allowed to. Or all of the above.
Igor Cherkassky
Igor Borysovych owes his current appointment, as he did seven years ago, to Yulia Tymoshenko's people. Last March, according to slander, Cherkassky was pushed through by MP Serhiy Pashinsky, the "grey cardinal" of the Batkivshchyna party. In 2008, according to political observers, our hero was helped to head financial intelligence by Oleksandr Abdullin, who at that time played the same role in the Tymoshenko Bloc as Pashinsky now plays in the party.
Ihor Cherkassky began his political career as a champion of Yulia Tymoshenko's ideals in 2006 as a member of the Kyiv Regional Council. The 2007 snap elections opened the door for him to big-time politics – he became a member of the Verkhovna Rada, from where a year later he was nominated by his party to the State Financial Monitoring Service.
But the initial impression that Cherkassky was a pure Tymoshenkoite minion is quite mistaken. Before the "orange" faction came to power, he worked quite successfully for the Kuchma regime. And made quite a good living doing it.
A simple biographical fact: from 2002 to 2003, Ihor Cherkassky worked in the Presidential Administration of Ukraine as deputy head of the Main Directorate for Judicial Reform, Military Formations, and Law Enforcement. And from 2003 to January 2005, he held the rank of First Deputy of the Main Directorate of Affairs. A curious biographical coincidence: the beginning of Cherkassky's meteoric rise as a government official coincided with the appointment of Serhiy Lyovochkin as President Kuchma's first aide. And with the appointment of Viktor Medvedchuk as head of the Presidential Administration. However, this is hardly a coincidence.
The author doesn't know for sure what exactly Igor Borisovich did in the positions mentioned, so we won't make things up. However, it's no secret that in 2002 (after the latest parliamentary elections), the country entered the darkest era of "Kuchmism." Through the efforts of the Presidential Administration, the courts and law enforcement agencies were rapidly being transformed into tame servants of the authorities and oligarchs. Meanwhile, the State Property Management Department was subject to widespread theft of state property.
But let's return to our hero. Those in the know claim that Igor Cherkassky first encountered the aforementioned figures not in the early 2000s in government offices, but much earlier. In the turbulent 1990s.
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An author whose name is not known for certain (although we have some guesses) wrote the following about five years ago (we quote with some abbreviations and other edits):
Cherkassky was invited to co-found the newly founded insurance company "Credo-Classic." The man was Yuriy Yefimov, who lived next door on Lyuteranskaya Street. Yefimov, in turn, was recruited by Igor Voronov, who had risen through Komsomol money. He was then the son-in-law of MP Valeriy Cherep, who had held high positions in the construction industry during the Soviet era and, during the era of the SDPU (o)'s favoritism, had served as head of the State Committee of Ukraine for Construction, Architecture, and Housing Policy. Voronov also brought in other friends, Yevhen Shalomeyev and Vladimir Symonchuk.
In fact, the mastermind behind Credo-Classic was Alexander Voitko. Without him, Voronov's motley crew of friends would have remained "rich kids" imitating "businessmen." Voitko taught the guys how to handle money, after which they successfully kicked him out of the business and divided up his share. That's just their style.
What could be insured in the 90s? Businesses, air travel, ship charters, hazardous facilities, power plants, nuclear reactors, and… weapons. For the first three items, his son-in-law's father-in-law provided insurance for his company's clients. But the second part of the business, related to weapons, was entirely the responsibility of Cherkassky, who became chairman of the board of directors of Credo-Classic.
It remains a big secret that the first structure established by Credo-Classic was the insurance company ZAO "Insurance Company of Law Enforcement Organs and Military Formations 'Ukraine.'" Besides Credo, this company, which laundered money from dubious weapons transactions (under the guise of insuring police officers, the Security Service of Ukraine, and military personnel), had three founders: Bank Ukraina (Satsyuk), the law firm Kairos, and the All-Ukrainian Fund of Law Enforcement Organs and Military Formations 'Ukraine.' The director of this Fund was Andriy Vasilishin, the Minister of Internal Affairs who resigned in 1994, and the founders (get ready to laugh your ass off) were the "Skazka" kindergarten from Chernivtsi Oblast and... the Security Service of Ukraine itself.
It was through this insurance company that Cherkassky contributed to the expansion and growth of Credo-Classic into a kind of feeding monster for the satisfaction of the oligarch Voronov's ambitions.
In early 2000, Cherkassky began his own movement, separate from "Credo...." Through Medvedchuk's circle, he aligned himself with the group of President Kuchma's aide, Sergei Lyovochkin.
Cherkassky had, however, crossed paths with Levochkin before, when they were both involved in money laundering for Avdyshev's gang. As the website Bagnet reported, Levochkin started out in the 1990s in a basement on Bolshaya Zhitomirskaya Street in the capital. The office of a certain joint-stock commercial bank, Bankirsky Dom, was located there, where he was listed as deputy chairman of the board. Bankirsky Dom's operations consisted of trivial currency conversion transactions: Levochkin's close-knit team worked, as they were then called, as "money changers." Moreover, according to eyewitnesses and participants in those distant events, Levochkin and his friends, as they used to say, "worked for Avdyshev." Younger people simply don't know about that "dawn of capitalism," with its tinge of gangster "romanticism," when almost every company was the fiefdom of a certain criminal group. At the time, Avdyshev was a respected gangster on a national scale. His "brothers" levied tribute on bazaars and shops, banks and law firms, and the cash "taxes"—in coupon-karbovanets, and later in hryvnia—flowed into the "Banker's House," where they were converted into hard dollars. The young Levochkin and Cherkassky were mentored by a certain Harry Gabovich, a patriarch of the Ukrainian gangster movement, who remains influential today.
Levochkin founded the "Bankersky Dom" and all subsequent businesses together with a group of fellow students: Ivan Fursin, Serhiy Svyatko, Vyacheslav Avramenko, and Rostislav Shiller. Fursin is known as the co-founder of RosUkrEnergo with Firtash. Svyatko stole state funds from the State Mortgage Institution. And Shiller stole from the Oschadny Bank, transferring its funds to a private defense bank, Ukrspetsimpexbank.
He implemented this bank project under the watchful patronage of the SDPU(o). To this end, in June 2000, Schiller won the parliamentary by-election and joined the SDPU(o) parliamentary faction.
And a few weeks later, such an enterprise as MK-Invest OJSC appears, with the founders represented by: Sergey Svyatko, Vyacheslav Avramenko, Rostislav Schiller, Exchange Investment Depository OJSC, Ukrainian Fund Group LLC, Oschad-Invest OJSC and... Igor Borisovich Cherkassky.
Working with the SDPU(o), Cherkassky attracted the positive attention of Viktor Medvedchuk. By then, the "grey cardinal" had decided to establish personal control over the country's arms business. He was assisted in this by Ihor Smeshko, then under the Social Democrats' leadership and head of the Committee on Military-Technical Cooperation and Export Control Policy.
At Medvedchuk's instigation, Leonid Kuchma signed a series of decrees and orders over the last two months of 2002 dedicated to reforming the arms trade system. In late October 2002, a decree was issued whose general idea was to transfer oversight of Ukraine's military-technical cooperation with foreign countries to the Presidential Administration. By decision of the head of state, a department was created within one of the Administration's departments, with responsibility for military-technical cooperation assigned to it. Igor Cherkassky was appointed to head the department, directly from his position as a top manager at Credo-Classic. Head of the Administration, Viktor Medvedchuk, was given the right to influence the selection of a candidate for the general director of the state-owned company Ukrspetsexport.
But Cherkassky didn't live up to the advances made to him. He proved to be a complete ignoramus when it came to the arms business. As a result, Kuchma quickly replaced Cherkassky with Viktor Gvozd.
Cherkassky is becoming increasingly close to Medvedchuk in business. For example, Igor Borisovich's father, Boris Ilyich, became a founding member of Farmed LLC in 2004, along with Volodymyr Pachkiv, the brother of Medvedchuk's chief of staff, Igor Pachkiv. Among the other founders was the firm Railon Trade Limited, which represented the interests of Maksym Kurochkin.
After the Orange Revolution and the flight of DUS head Igor Bakai, Cherkassky quietly returned to business, simultaneously creating the Foundation for Legal Initiatives, targeting Medvedchuk. He registered the foundation in the apartment of Vitaliy Sheludchenko, with whom he is connected through the automobile transport business.
To be continued ...
Prepared by Ivan Pomidorov, CRiME
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