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50 I Eastern Europe bne October 2018
A battle is raging for control of lucrative airports in Ukraine.
Dodgy dealings in the VIP terminal – The battle for Ukraine's airports
Graham Stack in Kyiv
It was nearly a catastrophe. A Bravo Airways flight arriving back from Anatolia and packed with Ukrainian holidaymakers careered off the runway in Kyiv in the midst of a torrential rainstorm and slid to standstill on the skirt of the runway, propped up on one wing. With 4 tonnes of fuel on board, it was a miracle nothing worse happened as the drenched passengers slid down emergency slides to safety. The plane was badly damaged but the 169 passengers were okay.
The investigation is continuing into the near tragedy at Kyiv‘s Sikorsky Airport
– formerly known as Zhuliany - where the accident happened. Apart from the combination of heavy rain and squalls, aviation experts believe the blame is most likely to end up with the charter air company Bravo, which has a controver- sial reputation. Its predecessor, run by the same owners UMM, closed after it came under US sanctions for having too close links to Iran and was deemed to be guilty by the US authorities of busting
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sanctions. Bravo was built on the ruins of UMM and is still operating today.
Things are not well with Ukraine’s avia- tion sector. Dodgy charter companies are the lesser problem for investors who are also looking into a chilling acid attack on a top manager at Ukraine’s largest air- port, Kyiv Boryspol that shows that rule of law in Ukraine is still elusive.
Denis Kostrzhevsky, chairman of the board at Sikorsky Airport, has a different culprit in his sights: Ukraine’s acclaimed
Unfortunately for NABU, the near tragedy on June 14 coincided with an armed NABU search of Kostrzhevsky’s offices at the airport. Kostrzhevsky is co-owner of Master Avia, the private firm operating the state-owned airport since 2010 under the terms of an investment agreement.
This gave Kostrzhevsky plenty of ammuni- tion to fire back at NABU. “The airport’s management, (...) hostage to the security forces, was not able to take measures that are appropriate to that weather condition.” As a result, “there was a threat
“There was a threat to the lives and health of the passengers”
National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), probably the most successful new institu- tion to emerge from Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan revolution – a bright star
in a dark sky.
to the lives and health of the passengers,” Master Avia said in a statement on July 24.
NABU however disputes that the raid could have had any impact on the air-