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56 I Eastern Europe bne May 2017
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in fighting corruption and organ- ised crime, alongside responsi- blities for counter-intelligence and national security.
Much of the money coursing through the accounts was paid through to importers, for apparel and electron-
ics from China, textiles from Turkey, flowers from Ecuador, watches from Italy, iPhones from Poland. At the same
large local construction company, a suspicious sign.
Customs records show that both these firms import mostly minivans of the sort used throughout Ukraine by pri- vate operators for public transport, the so-called marshrutki. The only trading partner of both VVK and its successor company in the business, Skif Ukraine, is a UK shell firm called Madison Motor
“There could be nothing with offshores there [in UK] – the laws are very strict”
time, officials and politicians used the offshores to buy foreign real estate, pay fees for elite schools and universities for their children, and pay for travel. Payments flowed to numerous other offshore accounts, the owners of which could not be identified.
Amongst the one gigabyte of documents was an ownership document for one
of the four core offshores, a Seychelles company called Berly Trade. The docu- ment included the owner’s date of birth, enabling his precise identification. No ownership information was available for the three sister companies.
Tracing the man who owned one of the core businesses establishes the name Yury Chabanyuk, an obscure lawyer and businessman in Ukraine’s Vinnyt- sia region, the stronghold of President Petro Poroshenko and his current prime minister Volodymyr Groysman. Groys- man was mayor of Vinnitsya from 2006 until joining the government in 2014 as regional development and construction minister, and then serving as speaker
of parliament until he was appointed premier in April 2016.
Examination of corporate registers shows Chabanyuk, besides owning the offshore, to have been director of local firms Vinnitsya Budivilna Kampaniya (VVK) and Skif-Ukraina, both of which are involved in the import of used vehicles from the EU. The name VVK dif- fers only in one letter from the name of a
Factor Limited, which is owned by another Seychelles offshore, and has an account at Latvia’s Norvik bank.
According to a criminal case opened
in 2014 against VVK, the company
was part of a contraband scheme for evading import tariffs on vehicles. Customs records show that the declared value of the second-hand vans acquired from Madison Motor is often as low as $2,000, while a used Mercedes Sprinter retails in Ukraine for over $10,000.
This means that Chabanyuk’s onshore activities in Ukraine are alleged to be linked to contraband just as much as his offshore presence in the Seychelles.
But Chabanyuk denies any relationship to offshores – despite the fact that the UK partner firm Madison is owned by such. “There could be nothing with off- shores there [in UK] – the laws are very strict,” he says in an interview (photo- graph by Vinnytsia Agency of Investiga- tive Journalism).
Chabanyuk denies anything illegal about his business. “We are one of
the largest importers of used vehicles, second largest in Ukraine,” he said. “We are the biggest tax payers in Vinnytsia region in the automotive branch after [President Petro] Poroshenko,” he adds, saying the business had an annual turn- over of around $12mn.
According to Chabanyuk, all criminal