A beekeeper, a Cossack, and a Kuchma-Yanukovych insider. The little-known past of the new head of the State Property Fund: the latest wave of large-scale privatization in Ukraine will be led by the head of the Cossack headquarters, "Leonid Kuchma's personnel reserve," and a figure who welcomed Viktor Yanukovych's presidential ambitions.
Published in the publication Glavcom (Translation: Argument)
Who is Vitaly Trubarov?
The new head of the State Property Fund, Vitaliy Nikolaevich Trubarov, is a paragon of mercantilism: last year, his mother gave him 250 hryvnias, and was forced to pay her son another 70 as rent. But what's more striking is not the official's family financial relationships, but his checkered past. The final wave of large-scale privatization in Ukraine will be led by the head of the Cossack headquarters, "Leonid Kuchma's cadre reserve," and a figure who welcomed Viktor Yanukovych's presidential ambitions.
Over the next five years, the State Property Fund of Ukraine (SPFU) plans to sell off approximately a thousand assets, with the most attractive ones expected to go under the hammer as early as 2017-18. Among the most lucrative pieces are Centrenergo, Turboatom, the Agrarian Fund, the State Food and Grain Corporation, and the United Mining and Chemical Company. The state's revenue from the sale of these heavyweights is expected to exceed 10 billion hryvnias. Since last Wednesday, Vitaliy Trubarov, acting chairman of the State Property Fund, has been responsible for preparations for the final major wave of privatization. He is a "dark horse" appointed under pressure from Volodymyr Groysman at the last government meeting.
According to Glavkom, some members of the Cabinet, most notably Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko, strongly opposed this personnel decision. They claimed the appointment was illegal. This is indeed the case. According to the Law on the State Property Fund, in the absence of the State Property Fund's chairman, one of the deputy chairs performs his duties, in accordance with the distribution of duties. Instead, the government entrusted this task to Trubarov, the Fund's chief of staff. According to former SPF head Oleksandr Bondar, the consequences will be far-reaching: all contracts signed by Trubarov will be deemed illegitimate and null and void. "Large-scale privatization can be put to rest, since every contract (in the future) can be cancelled," the former official explains.
Of course, the government had alternatives: today, the Fund has three deputies: Vladimir Derzhavin, Yuri Nikitin, and Yevgeny Astashev. According to the law, they could have applied for the "acting" role. So, despite the risk described above, what aspects of Trubarov's biography gave him this preference?
The chairman of the State Property Fund is appointed and dismissed by the president with the consent of the Verkhovna Rada. Apparently, in five months, Petro Poroshenko has failed to find a candidate who would satisfy and gain parliamentary support. From the dismissal of Ihor Bilous, the chairman of the Fund, in April of this year until recently, Dmytro Parfenenko held the acting position.
The new head of the State Property Fund's resume is enviable. As of 2003, when the 30-year-old Trubarov became head of the State Property Fund's Donetsk Oblast office, he had barely three years of work experience. Of that, less than a year was spent at the Fund. In the late 2000s, he tried his hand as deputy head of the Donetsk Regional Council's property department and head of the tax office in Donetsk's Voroshilovsky district. During Viktor Yanukovych's presidency, he moved to the capital, where he became deputy head and then head of the Kyiv State Property Fund. Under the current government, Trubarov serves as assistant to the head of the State Property Fund and chief of staff.
What's not on Trubarov's official resume on the State Property Fund website, but should be known? Political ambitions and a "Cossack" past.
His autobiography contains a large gap, indicating a period during which the new head of the State Property Fund was neither employed nor studying: from 1997 to early 2000. This gap is helped by another description of the official's career, found on the website of the Donetsk National Technical University. It states that from 1998 to 2003, Trubarov was a member of the People's Democratic Party and rose through the ranks from a member of its youth organization (the People's Democratic Youth League) to chairman of the regional party organization. He was also a member of the party's political council. The YouControl analytics system indicates that in the 90s, he led the Donetsk branch of the People's Democratic Party and its youth wing.
In the 2002 elections, Trubarov received the 214th spot on the "For a United Ukraine!" electoral bloc list as a member of the People's Democratic Party. Volodymyr Lytvyn, the list's number one candidate and then-head of the presidential administration, declared his team to be "the guarantor's personnel reserve," Leonid Kuchma. And in the year of the Orange Revolution, Trubarov supported the pro-government forces' candidacy for president of Viktor Yanukovych.
The young politician's ambitions weren't limited to Ukraine. In 2003, a meeting of the "Permanent Interstate Coordination Council of Cossacks of the three countries—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—was held in Moscow. Ukraine was represented by two dozen people. Among them was Vitaly Trubarov, chief of staff of the Union of Cossack Organizations of Ukraine. He arrived in the Russian capital after having already been appointed head of the Donetsk branch of the State Property Fund of Ukraine. Several other Ukrainian representatives at that Cossack meeting are now known as ideological champions of "Novorossiya," such as Vladimir Cherkashin, ataman of the "Crimean Cossack Union."
Another participant in the aforementioned Cossack meeting in Moscow is also noteworthy: Sergei Lazarenko, the representative of the Permanent Interstate Coordination Council of Cossacks from Ukraine. According to his biography, it was Lazarenko who organized the Union of Cossack Organizations of Ukraine in the 90s (a purely intelligence agency of the Russian secret services – A). From 2000 to 2003, he headed the Donetsk branch of the State Property Fund. When Viktor Yanukovych left his post as governor to head the government, Lazarenko followed suit – in 2003, he was appointed deputy chairman of the State Property Fund. Thus, Trubarov, having received the vacant position in Donetsk, became Lazarenko's successor both in the "Cossack" position and in the government.
In 2005, Lazarenko was released along with his boss, Mikhail Chechetov, the head of the Foundation (he died under mysterious circumstances in February 2015). Law enforcement then arrested the former official on charges of orchestrating an assassination attempt on his wife, Erika (Lazarenko and his wife denied this).
In the second half of the 2000s, Lazarenko served as the head of the legal department at the Ministry of Coal Industry. In 2010, the media reported on the kidnapping of his daughter, a student at the Institute of International Relations, and a ransom demand for her return.
According to Trubarov's asset declaration, he and his wife acquired their main material assets over the past three years. In 2015, they acquired a 107-square-meter apartment worth almost 2 million hryvnias, a parking space worth 130 hryvnias, and two plots of land in the Rivne region (his wife's inheritance).
Last year, the car Hyundai GrandStarex, 2014 (for 300 thousand hryvnia) and Nissan X-Trail, 2014 (for 240 thousand hryvnia) became the property.
A possible explanation for the official's source of funds for his large-scale purchases may be provided by information that Vitaliy Trubarov received a gift of 250,000 hryvnias from his mother (Lyudmila Trubarova). He also received another 70,000 hryvnias from property leases. Meanwhile, according to his income declaration, beekeeping brought in almost 137,000 hryvnias. The family keeps $27,000, 77,000 hryvnias, and 10,000 euros in cash.
FULL DOSSIER: State Property Fund Head Vitaly Trubarov: Cossack, Beekeeper, or Lackey? Part 1
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