VIENNA – The Austrian capital has both luxury and a favorable corporate environment for business, a combination that has proved irresistible for many of Ukraine's rich. A handful of Ukrainian oligarchs own homes and set up business headquarters in the city, and I decided to pay a visit to some of them on a recent morning.
I kick off my trip in the village of
Tulbingerkogel, a 30-minute bus ride outside of Vienna. This village
is the official Austrian home of Serhiy Klyuev, a parliament member
and brother of Andriy Klyuev, one of the key figures in ex-President
Viktor Yanukovych’s inner circle.
Andriy Klyuev, the former chief of the
National Security and Defense Council, is on the list of 22
individuals sanctioned by the European Union, with assets frozen and travel bans
imposed, but not his brother Serhiy, despite having served as a front
in many real estate operations related to Yanukovych. He
was the proxy owner of Tantalit, Yanukovych’s main company behind his
Mezhyhirya estate.
Andriy Klyuev’s whereabouts are not
known, but Serhiy has been spotted in Ukraine’s parliament, where he
was elected on the party list of the Opposition Bloc.
The house I am visiting is owned by
the wife of Serhiy Klyuev, Iryna, though a complex chain of
offshores. She also features in official records as co-owner of some
of the Klyuev brothers’ Austrian-based businesses.
The property is located in a beautiful,
hilly countryside southwest of Vienna. This suburb town has a
distinctive appearance of an East European mountain village, with
crisp air and a mishmash of architectural styles that reflect its
evolution.
The buses that go there are almost
completely empty because the village is remote and its residents rely
on cars more than public transport. You pass by picturesque little
lakes, mini-hotels and well-kept mature forests along the way, with
lumberjacks in bright orange vests pottering in the snow amid freshly
cut tree branches.
The house itself, located at Groissaustrase, 12,
looks abandoned.
There is a single track cleaned off snow, but the rest of the garden
is untouched, and no tracks are visible on the side porch. There
aren’t even bins in the designated fenced-off area, a sign that there
has been no human activity here for a long time.
A local village caretaker driving by
stops his car to check out two nosey strangers. He says the house
still belongs to the Kyuev family, they have not sold. But they have
not been here for a long time either, and he checks up on the
property and cleans snow in front of the gates.
Bernhard Odehnal, my Austrian guide
who works for a Swiss newspaper, says it’s quite unusual for
caretakers to pay such close attention to private estates –
especially in a middle-class, regular village like this. “You
wonder why a Ukrainian oligarch would buy a property here if they
were buying in Austria,” he says.
It may have been for the view. Klyuev’s
house is perched at quite a high altitude, overlooking rolling hills
across the valley, and even gets a glimpse of sunset in the evening.
We settle for that explanation for now, and head back to the bus
stop.
There is a single lady waiting for the
bus there, and I am struck by the image of this lonely figure who
looks exactly like many women her age I had seen in a similar
landscape in western Ukraine waiting for their rides at a bus stop.
By a strange coincidence, the lady turns out to be a Ukrainian from
Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, a locality with an identical vibe and hills.
Her name is Maria, and she works in a
house on the same street, owned by a Russian. She says there are a
handful of Russians in this village. She also says she has not seen
the Klyuevs since last spring in the house, though. “There is a
girl that goes inside occasionally, I think she cleans the house,”
says Mariya, who did not want to give her last name because of fear
of losing her job.
Austria’s official property records
obtained by the Kyiv Post say that the house has not changed hands
since 1998, and is still owned by GBM Handels und Vertretungs GmbH, a
company that has been traced to Iryna Klyueva by Ukraine’s
anti-corruption watchdogs. It’s also used as a collateral for a
581,000 euro mortgage.
We head back to Vienna’s more up-scale
area to visit the house of Oleksiy Azarov, the son of former Prime
Minister Mykola Azarov. Both the father and the son ran to Moscow
almost a year ago, after the EuroMaidan Revolution.
Oleksiy Azarov’s address in Austria is
Potzleinsdorfer Strasse 152-156. This is a location in District 18, a
much more prestigious area close to the Vienna Woods that gets the
benefit of fresh air all around the year and a cool breeze in the
summer.
There are a lot of large mansions, with
well-tended, landscaped gardens and impressive-looking security video
systems embedded in the front gates. Some of the houses are very
modern, others are historic buildings, decorated with lovely
embellishments or lacy wooden elements.
Azarov’s property is part of a compound
of 10 large flats, which sits across the path from Poetzleinsdorfer
Schlosspark, a beautiful public garden with ancient trees, statues
and a duck pond.
You can locate Azarov’s H3 flat on a
large map outside the house, but this flat has no name plate on the mailbox or elsewhere around. This is the only anonymous flat in the
compound.
A neighbor says the name plate was
taken down recently. He also says he had not seen the Azarovs for
months in this house. But we’re lucky with cleaning ladies today,
there is one in H3 flat, vaccuuming the floor right inside. The bell
does not work, so we knock and she opens. She looks surprised, even
scared, but says there are no Azarovs living here. She says the
family is called Paul, but she is not telling the truth.
The Austrian property records show that
this property has not changed hands since 2010. Moreover, it
indicates that the property is frozen under European sanctions. Both
Mykola Azarov and his son Oleksiy are on the EU sanctions list.
Oleksiy Azarov is also under
investigation by Austrian authorities on money-laundering suspicions,
according to Bloomberg’s April
15 report. Thomas Vecsey, a spokesman for Vienna prosecutors,
told the agency that Austrian banks reported suspicious capital flows
in early 2014, which became basis for investigation.
At the time of the report
Bloomberg said that Austrian company register lists Oleksiy Azarov as
former managing director of a Viennese company called Sustainable
Ukraine gemeinnuetzige Forschung GmbH. His wife, Lilya Azarova, is
listed as the 50 percent-owner of Publishing Deluxe Holding GmbH. The
family’s new home was
discovered in Moscow recently.
Next stop is Am Hof, 13, in the very
central District 1. This is an office building, but you feel like
you’re about to hit the jackpot here. There are four companies that
used to be registered at this address, all with ties to the Klyuev
brothers, according to Anti-Corruption Action Center, a Ukrainian
watchdog. They are CEE Sunpower GmbH, CEE Windpower GmbH, Black Sea
Renewable Energies GmbH and CEE Clean Economic Energy AG.
All these four firms are a part of a
complex
web of offshores that own Andriy and Serhiy Klyuev’s solar power
giant in Crimea. The company, which was best known by its corporate
umbrella name Activ Solar, ran into trouble soon after the annexation
of Crimea.
Sergey Aksyonov, the Russia-backed
leader of Crimea, said in May that Activ Solar was a “scam which
allowed top leaders of Ukraine to earn, putting a billion dollars in
their pockets.” Then he said in August that the assets of Activ
Solar will be taken over by the Crimean banks for alleged debts of
$300 million.
Activ Solar had built six solar power
plants in Crimea, with a total capacity of 400 Megawatt, four of
which had been hooked to the electricity grid. The project was marred
with controversy from the very start as it appeared that Andriy
Klyuev allegedly
used his various jobs in the government to acquire financing and high
energy tariffs for his firm. He always denied wrongdoing.
It’s clear that Crimean troubles
reflected on the activity of the Vienna offices Activ Solar’s various
corporate elements. The company name plates have been taken off the
wall of the office building at 13 Am Hof. Business letters continue
to arrive to this address, though. The mail box is stuffed to the
brink, it’s clear that nobody has cleaned it out for days.
The Austrian company database shows
that all four businesses have been moving a lot recently, and landed
just a block away, at the official address of GBM Handels und
Vertretungs GmbH, the firm that owns Iryna Klyueva’s home outside
Vienna.
My next destination is
Wipplingerstrasse 35, the Vienna headquarters of Activ Solar, but I
discover that this office has also been standing empty. The lights
are on in the office, but nobody answers the door bell. It does not
look like business in Vienna is good for Ukraine’s oligarchs – at
least for now.
Katya Gorchinskaya is the deputy chief editor of the Kyiv Post. She is currently a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
