Yuri Rodin: the great schemer from Pivdenny Bank. PART 1
The great and terrible Yuriy Ivanyushchenko had many business partners, and one of them was Yuriy Rodin, co-owner and director of the Ukrainian bank Pivdenny and the Latvian bank Regionala Investiciju. Rodin hates being reminded of his dealings with the most notorious figure of the Yanukovych era, but that's far from the only thing he's been accused of, and among his associates, there are people even more terrifying than Ivanyushchenko. Yuriy Rodin's name and the names of his banks have repeatedly surfaced in scandalous news stories about corporate raids, various schemes to siphon off funds, theft from depositors, and even attempted murder. And this list will continue to grow, as Rodin and his Pivdenny bank continue to work diligently!
What, where and when
Yuriy Alexandrovich Rodin was born on January 21, 1950, in Odessa, to Alexander Gershevich and Veli Abramovna Rodin. Although his official biography is deliberately brief, he proudly wrote that he worked as a simple mathematics teacher during Soviet times. However, Rodin was unwilling to share the secret of how a simple Soviet teacher managed to become a Ukrainian oligarch, co-owner and director of one of the country's largest banks. It was only in 2010 that Korrespondent magazine, compiling a list of Ukrainian multimillionaires, briefly wrote about Rodin, stating that he had started his business career back in 1987. The magazine also mentioned his business partner, Mark Becker, just as briefly and briefly. Since then, both businessmen have revealed nothing new about themselves and have even tried to remove almost all old information from public access—information that contained many interesting facts.
Yuri Rodin: the great schemer from Pivdenny Bank. PART 1
But Odessans who knew Yuriy Rodin from the old days claim that he was involved in business even before 1987 (since the late 70s). His "business" was quite specific, and indeed involved real estate and pharmaceuticals. Allegedly, either Yuriy Rodin himself or his relatives "obtained" scarce medications, as well as vouchers to Odessa sanatoriums—of course, not for free. But, as sources claim, Skelet.OrgYuriy Rodin earned his starting capital by reselling repatriates' apartments. Hundreds of Jewish families left Odessa for Israel (and beyond) every year, and by law their apartments were supposed to go to the city council free of charge: the state gave, and the state took! Naturally, repatriates, unwilling to hand over such gifts to the Soviet government, resorted to various tricks: transferring the apartments to relatives remaining in the Soviet Union or selling them—fortunately, there were kilometer-long lines of people wanting to buy housing in Odessa. Of course, selling and buying state-owned apartments back then was only possible through cunning backdoor schemes, the key link in which were city government officials, with whom cunning "realtors" worked. There is no information on whether Yuriy Rodin had such acquaintances (or relatives) in the Odessa City Executive Committee. But rumors that the humble school teacher was an "apartment broker" in the 80s still circulate on the fringes of the Internet.
Yuri Rodin And Mark Becker: the great schemer from Pivdenny Bank. PART 1
In addition to apartments, Jews leaving the USSR sold all their belongings: from televisions and refrigerators to cars and antiques, and middlemen also profited handsomely from this. According to sources Skelet.OrgMark Becker, Yuri Rodin's future business partner (they may have been business partners at the time), was involved in this business. He had extensive connections abroad. Furthermore, according to unconfirmed reports, Becker allegedly had access to the "emigrant transfer system"—an illegal scheme for converting and transferring money from the USSR to Israel, Europe, and the United States, which was used by repatriates. When, say, a wealthy Jewish family sold everything (including their apartment), they couldn't take with them the heavy weight of Soviet rubles, for which, besides, there was no demand abroad. But dealing with dollars or exporting valuables was risky: repatriates caught this way remained in the USSR for several more years, but as prisoners. Therefore, they handed over the rubles here in the Union to illegal "money changers," and received the currency abroad upon arrival. You can read more about these schemes in our article about Boris Fuksman, who had just made their first fortune from them.
Alla Vanetsyants
In fact, that's what this simple Odessa math teacher did until 1987. Then, perestroika gave the green light to "cooperation," so Yuri Alexandrovich was able to quit his boring teaching job and formalize his "self-employment." His biography doesn't reveal exactly what this entailed, but in 1993, Yuri Rodin first appeared in the "annals of history" as the owner of the family-owned Tekon LLC (real estate), which eventually expanded into a network of companies in various fields. It was family-owned because the list of co-owners of this company included all members of the Rodin family: Yuri Rodin himself, Velya Abramovna and Alexander Gershevich Rodin (mother and father), Tamara Rodina (wife), Anna Rodina (daughter), Alla Vanetsyants (daughter), and Levon Vanetsyants (son-in-law). Until recently, all of them were also among the main shareholders of Pivdenny Bank, both through Tekon and directly. True, it is currently unknown whether the venerable parents of Yuri Rodin are still alive (after all, they were born in 1921).
In 1994, the Rodin family, through Tekon LLC, became shareholders of Pivdenny Bank, founded by the city before Dako MP, which initially operated out of just one small Odessa office. They also became co-owners of the bank: the Ukrainian-German joint venture Vivien (founded by Mark Becker and his son Dmitry (Arie) Becker, as well as German citizen Leonid Kogan) and Strong LLC, associated with the Morokhovsky family, well-known both in Odessa and far beyond. Viktor Yakovlevich Morokhovsky (1946-1999) was the captain of the Odessa "experts" team in the 80s and participated in the show "What? Where? When?" along with Odessans Anatoly Wasserman and Boris Burda. His son, Vadim Morokhovsky, who studied at the Odessa Institute of National Economy (now the National Economic University), managed to play in the KNV for one of the Odessa teams.
Vadim Morokhovsky
The "expert's" son was a "multi-tasker": not only did he play in KVN, but already in his fourth year of college, he began working at Nord Bank, having been hired there through some connections. Interestingly, in his biographies, Morokhovsky always claimed to have worked at Nord Bank until 1993, although in fact he worked there until early 1995, and only then transferred to Pivdenny Bank. Why? Because in 1994, a major scandal erupted at the ill-fated Nord Bank: the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) transferred 80 billion karbovanets to Nord Bank under a program for issuing preferential loans to agricultural producers. Nord Bank's management appropriated this money in its own way, handing it out to pawnbroker firms, which then lent it to other firms. Ultimately, Nord Bank Chairman Perminov was jailed for five years, and Vadim Morokhovsky, who by then worked at Nord Bank as the head of the internal audit department and was aware of the scam, transferred to Pivdenny, where he immediately became deputy chairman (after all, their firm, Strong, was a co-founder of the bank). In 1999, Vadim Morokhovsky became chairman of Pivdenny JSCB (in 2005, he appointed his wife, Liya Morokhovskaya, as his deputy) and held the position until 2011, when he left Pivdenny for Vostok Bank.
It was under Morokhovsky that Pivdenny Bank grew from a virtually unknown city bank into one of the largest in Ukraine, becoming one of the financial leaders in the southern regions (from Odessa to Mariupol). Moreover, no one denied Morokhovsky's contribution to this, and many even emphasized it. However, according to sources Skelet.OrgThe key to this wasn't Morokhovsky's economic genius, but... Jewish money. And I mean that in the most literal sense. It's no coincidence that the popular rumors about Pivdenny being a "Jewish bank" weren't some kind of anti-Semitic expression, but a simple statement of fact. And it wasn't the nationality of its owners and managers that mattered, but the fact that Morokhovsky immediately began actively funneling money from Israeli banks (for example, Hapolayim), Jewish charities (the Joint Distribution Committee operated through it in the southern regions of Ukraine), Jewish communities, foreign Jewish businessmen, and so on through Pivdenny. The media once reported that Pivdenny even once appeared to be "volunteering" for an IDF unit.
Vadim Morokhovsky himself was the chairman of the board of trustees of the Odessa Chabad Ohr Avner school, the main spiritual educational institution of the Odessa Jewish community, led by members of the Chabad Hasidic movement (as are also the case in Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Mariupol). Coincidentally, journalists once noted that the coverage map of the regional branches of Pivdenne matches that of the South Ukrainian Regional Association of Jewish Communities, which has been headed since 1998 by Rabbi Avraham Wolff (Avroom ben Shalom Dov-Ber Wolff), also the Chief Rabbi of Odessa. Rabbi Wolff himself came to Ukraine from Israel, but his father was deputy head of the Department for Coordination of the Activities of Chabad Educational Institutions.
Avroom ben Shalom-Dov-Ber Wolf
In general, Ukrainian Jewry has firmly embraced the Chabad movement, which is involved in more than just spiritual activities in Ukraine. The most famous oligarchs are members of Chabad: Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov, Viktor Pinchuk, Alexander Feldman, Evgeny Chervonenko и Vadim Rabinovich, sources Skelet.Org It's been reported that Alexander Granovsky is also connected to Chabad. As we can see, Ukrainian Chabad has its own "favorite" banks, with Pivdenny Bank particularly prominent among them. After all, while PrivatBank and Pinchuk's banks were the oligarchs' working banks through which they circulated their billions, and the share of "Jewish money" in them was very small, at Pivdenny Bank, for a long time (under Morokhovsky), it constituted a significant portion of assets. This, of course, doesn't violate any laws—it's simply interesting information. Pivdenny Bank broke the laws later, when it cheated its clients.
Yuri Rodin. Banks and Factories
Since Yuri Rodin has remained virtually silent outside of his bank since acquiring Pivdenny, it can be said that his entire biography over the past quarter century is the history of Pivdenny Bank. And he is directly involved in everything that happened within the walls of its branches, even if he tries to deny it or keep it quiet.
By 2003, Pivdenny, or rather its affiliated companies, had acquired a number of enterprises, investing their profits in the manufacturing sector. They began with several agricultural enterprises in the Odessa region, then turned their attention to factories. Rodin and Bekker's choice was a very deliberate one: back in the 90s, they acquired the F.E. Dzerzhinsky Odessa Steel Rolling Plant (reorganized into Stalmetiz CJSC), which produced metal wire and various related products. The takeover of the plant was quite shady, but all the details of the scam simply disappeared later during the company's liquidation.
Then, in 2001, with the help of then-Kryvorizhstal CEO Oleh Dubina (future Deputy Prime Minister and head of Naftogaz from 2007 to 2010), Yuriy Rodin and Mark Bekker effectively "squeezed out" the Odessa Rope Plant to pay off debts. It was this incident that first earned Rodin and Pivdenny Bank the notoriety of corporate raiders. It was a rather murky story, which ten years later resulted in a criminal case. The fact is that in 2000, the plant owed Kryvorizhstal money for raw materials. Whether this debt was the result of objective reasons or was artificially created by Leonid Shemyakin, director of the rope plant, remains unclear even to investigators. Oleh Dubina then allegedly "assigned" this debt to the owners of Pivdenny, who offered Shemyakin a loan to pay it off. The plant no longer had the funds to repay the loan, so it sold its shares to a specially created private joint-stock company, Stalkanat, which became the owner of the enterprise. It was founded by Rodin, Bekker, and Vladimir Nemirovsky, a nimble economic fixer who had arrived from Kryvyi Rih. Nemirovsky immediately became a top manager at Stalkanat and later became head of the supervisory board of Stalkanat-Silur, a private joint-stock company.
Vladimir Nemirovsky
There's a curious fact about Nemirovsky's biography that goes a long way toward explaining his connection to the owners of Pivdenne: he currently serves as chairman of the Jewish community of Kryvyi Rih, and was an important figure there even back then. And the Jewish community of Kryvyi Rih... yes, as you've guessed, it's also run by Chabad. Such is the close business cooperation between members of Hasidic communities!
After acquiring the rope factory, Rodin and Nemirovsky carried out a "production optimization": they decided to focus on the production of wire, wire products, and steel ropes (at the time, only two factories in Ukraine produced these products), closing other lines. Therefore, in 2003, they decided to "downsize" Stalmetiz CJSC, forcing it into bankruptcy for a debt of 746,000 euros to a foreign investor. Part of the former Stalmetiz was transferred to Stalkanat as a second site, and the remaining territory (Izvestkovaya Street 52 and 52a) was used for many years "as needed." Several other different companies that were part of the business sphere of the Rodin, Becker, and Morokhovsky families were registered at this address: Ecology LLC, Parus LLC, Most-met PCF, Alimar CHP, Dis CHP, Manar LLC, Odesnefteprodukt OJSC, Evramet CJSC, Rezon CJSC, and others.
The land itself, under the former enterprise, had long been legally owned by the city (but was managed by the owners of Stalkanat). Finally, in 2016 by decision of the Odessa City Council No. 620-VII This entire 19,3432-hectare parcel was sold to Stalkanat-Silur PJSC for 23,117 million hryvnias (US$889). Forty thousand dollars per hectare of Odessa land 1700 meters from the berth of the Odessa Commercial Port – is that a lot or a little? Perhaps the Prosecutor General's Office should look into this issue! However, Stalkanat-Silur PJSC, having now become the full owner of this land, divided it into parts: one is occupied by the Stalkanat plant site, while the other, 8,69 hectares, is now actively promoted as an "investment target." They are undoubtedly hoping to recoup their expenses on the land privatization with a healthy profit. However, by this time, Vladimir Nemirovsky was the sole legal owner of Stalkanat-Silur, while Rodin's involvement in the scam remains hidden behind the schemes of various companies and offshore companies.
The origins of PJSC Stalkanat-Silur are quite curious. It occurred in 2004 during the merger of Odessa-based Stalkanat and the Khartsyzsk-based Silur, which it acquired. Interestingly, the latter belonged to Rinat Akhmetov, who was building his metallurgical empire. At the time of the sale, Silur and Stalkanat remained the only steel cable manufacturers in Ukraine. It would seem that Akhmetov should have acquired Stalkanat and become a monopoly in this field, but quite the opposite happened! What compelled Akhmetov to take this step remains a mystery. Many journalists and analysts have attempted to attribute it to Akhmetov's economic problems, although none have been identified. But perhaps the reason was entirely different? At one point, the media reported that this deal may have been the result of some kind of exchange of favors or concessions, resulting in the owners of Pivdenny Bank acquiring the Khartsyzsk-based Silur Bank. But what could Pivdenny Bank have offered Akhmetov back then? A loan? Another question is what those behind the bank could have offered (or helped) Akhmetov. And only Nemirovsky, who was the "authorized manager" in this deal, knows the answer. Well, now we can make the wildest hypotheses, because we've now established that Pivdenny Bank wasn't just an ordinary Odessa bank, but a very specific financial center with extensive connections.
Yuri Rodin: "Pivdenny" is robbing everyone!
Outright theft of clients' money is not uncommon at Pivdenny Bank. For example, in October 2009, bank employees stole $336,088 from the current account of Yug-Steklo Trading House LLC, which was opened at the Dnipropetrovsk branch of Pivdenny Bank. When Yug-Steklo management contacted the director of the Dnipropetrovsk Pivdenny branch for clarification, they were told that the money had allegedly been debited from the account based on a certain guarantee (for December 2007). When asked to see such a guarantee, the branch director shrugged, saying, "I don't have it, it's at Pivdenny Bank's main office in Odessa." The robbed entrepreneurs appealed directly to the bank's head, Morokhovsky, who also shrugged, "I don't have it, it disappeared somewhere while I was on vacation!" The owners of Yug-Steklo then appealed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs to open a criminal case. They were denied permission at the Zhovtnevo District Police Department, but the Babushkinsky District Police Department accepted their application.
A case was opened, but Pivdenne's management refused to provide investigators with any information, citing banking secrecy! A few days later, the case was closed entirely—on the personal order of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Prosecutor Mykhailo Kosyuta, who had previously headed the Odesa Oblast Prosecutor's Office.
Gennady Soroka
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A brief digression is in order here: Yug-Steklo belonged to the Soroka brothers. Gennady Soroka was executed near Donetsk in 2004 but survived.
Later, a recording of a telephone conversation between Igor Kolomoisky (Benya) and Gennady Kernes (Gepa), in which Kolomoisky, in a derogatory manner, demands that Kernes resolve an issue with a certain department store.
In fact, the issue concerns the "Ukraine" shopping center in Kharkiv, which also belonged to the Soroka brothers. However, Kernes was unable to satisfy Igor Kolomoisky regarding the mall's demolition.
This issue was subsequently resolved by Yuriy Rodin and Pivdenny Bank (through a "default loan," as raiders often do). It was he who organized the violent takeover of the Ukraina shopping center, possibly at the request of Igor Kolomoisky.
Incidentally, the text transcript of the conversation between Kernes and Kolomoisky has been virtually "cleaned up" from the internet.
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Let's continue! The Babushkinsky District Police Department sent an official denial to the entrepreneur who had been robbed (see documents). Two weeks later, on Kosyuta's orders, a new criminal case was opened – this time against Yug-Steklo itself, on charges of "introducing knowingly false information into its business plan."
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Org
CONTINUED: Rodin Yuri: the great schemer from Pivdenny Bank. PART 2
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