You're reading: Ukrainska Pravda: How Lyovochkin’s French villa led to the deal with Ukrtelecom

An elite corner of the French Riviera in France. Near the villa/museum of Baroness Beatrice Rothschild, in a quiet bay on the Meditterranean Sea, there is the small town Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.

Here, two great beneficiaries of Ukrainian corruption, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Dmytro Firtash, settled a couple dozen meters from each other.

Firtash has never held public office, even though for many years he has closely cooperated with various presidents and prime ministers, while Lyovochkin, on the other hand, has been a state official for more than 10 years, though the villa belonging to him has not been registered in any of his declarations.

The rhythm of life and low payroll of state officials does not give Lyovochkin any legal possibility to earn enough for such a property.

That is probably why Lyovochkin’s mansion at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is registered through a chain of proxy companies in Denmark and Luxembourg with citizens from Cyprus as nominal directors. However, in the course of an investigation into Lyovochkin’s undeclared property near Nice, the author of this article came upon a much broader scope of inquiry.

Specifically, this was about his connections to the company that privatized Ukrtelecom in a corrupt manner during Yanukovych’s time as president and also to his connection to gas intermediary RosUkrEnergo, which appeared at the intersection of the corrupt interests of Ukraine and Russia.

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