According to the website Ekonomicheskie Izvestia, the Ministry of Agrarian Policy has completed the mid-stage competitive selection process for a position at one of the industry's key enterprises, the state-owned monopoly Ukrspirt. The commission selected only five candidates from 37. Voting, selection, and interviews were all completed, and the formalities were flawlessly executed. The jury remains to see if one of the candidates has any common sense or conflicts of interest: Grigoriy Tripulsky, a professor at the Odesa Law Academy, has reached the semi-finals. A lawyer and business consultant, as he calls himself, he presented a two-page development plan for a company with billions in turnover and the rights to a state monopoly on alcohol production.
At the end of his declaration of intent, Mr. Tripulsky admits that he has no experience, but is willing to try: "I have no experience in the civil service or state-owned enterprises, but I do have extensive experience managing large private structures; I can quickly create a normal management mechanism for the state-owned enterprise Ukrspirt."
And even that wouldn't be so bad, but there's a small untruth here: from Mr. Tripulsky's known management experience in more or less significant businesses, one can only find... Nevada LLC, a gaming business operator based in Odessa.
What's even more interesting is that about a half-hour Google search and a search of publicly available sources reveals that Grigoriy Tripulsky is a protégé of the well-known Odessa businessman Boris Kaufman. This includes joint work on the Odessa City Council, legal support for Kaufman's businesses, and much more—there are numerous publications.
Nowadays, only the most lazy website fails to mention that, during Yanukovych's tenure, Kaufman was a business partner of the president's eldest son, Oleksandr, and oversaw three airports—Boryspil, Odesa, and Simferopol. And Odesa media occasionally report that, even under Saakashvili as governor, Kaufman controls at least part of the financial flow from tobacco smuggling through ports near Odesa. Local journalists refer to Kaufman as nothing less than the "tobacco king." Profiting from illegal cigarettes is a topic for a separate investigation. What's important here is that both tobacco and alcohol are excisable goods, which, when traded illegally, can generate not just super-, but mega-profits.
And amid all this smuggling, maritime, aviation, hotel, and banking, journalists somehow overlooked Kaufman's rich past in the alcohol and spirits industry. From 1996 to 2008—for 12 years—Boris Kaufman successfully ran the sweet alcoholic beverages business at the Overline Corporation. The pinnacle of Kaufman's career came in 2002, when he became president of the Overline Corporation. It included the First Distillery, the Odessa Champagne Factory (Odessa and L'Odessika brands), the Izmail Winery (Izmail), GoldenLine Trading House, and the Izmail agricultural firm. In 2008, practically on the brink of the crisis, Boris Kaufman sold all of his legal alcohol businesses.
But, judging by the appearance of such a figure as Grigoriy Tripulsky in the semi-finals of the competition for the position of director of the State Enterprise "Ukrspirt", "old love never rusts."
The appointment of a protégé of a private alcohol operator to the helm of the state-owned alcohol monopoly is a brilliant chess move. It's a true breakthrough. Because the alcohol market in Ukraine is structured in such a way that all domestic alcoholic beverage producers are required to purchase alcohol exclusively from the state-owned alcohol monopoly (Ukrspirt). Whoever controls the state-owned concern essentially controls the entire market for both strong and soft drinks in the country, unofficially and informally, but quite profitably for themselves. This is essentially what the "family" successfully did until the spring of 2014.
So if Kaufman promotes his pawn, Tripulsky, to queen, he will win the game, in which the entire alcohol market in Ukraine is at stake.
And we haven't even touched on the prospects for privatization, its forms, character, and so on—something quite dizzying could happen there.
In legal and anti-corruption jargon, the situation surrounding Grigoriy Tripulskyi's semi-finalist run is called a conflict of interest. In such cases, the usual practice is, at a minimum, to withdraw one's candidacy—to avoid a more interesting scenario involving the Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.
And the feeble and truncated "reorganization and privatization program" put forward by Mr. Tripulsky isn't even particularly significant. Perhaps no effort was made to draft it because they were planning to implement entirely different plans.
Oleg Boyko, Bagnet
FILE: Grigory Tripulsky: Lawyer for Raiders and One-Armed Bandits. Part 2
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