A familiar face will soon become President Viktor Yanukovych’s new neighbor on the 138-hectare estate to which his residence is attached.
Serhiy Kliuyev, a pro-presidential Party of Regions lawmaker, said that in late August he signed a deal to purchase Tantalit LLC, the lessee of 127 hectares, or 93 percent of the land area, where the Mezhyhirya palatial compound is located, some 25 kilometers north of Kyiv.
The close presidential ally will now take the place of a bewildering number of proxy companies and individuals for a price tag of $18 million, or $141,000 per hectare, according to Kliuyev. But the company might have other assets, too.
The obvious speculation is that the ownership change is motivated by the desire of the compound’s actual owners to safeguard the property, since the previous director of Tantalit’s parent company has been imprisoned in Austria. An Austrian court on April 5 sentenced Johann Wanovits, 54, the former director of Tantalit’s mother company, to five years in prison for his role in manipulating the share price of Telekom Austria.
Yanukovych has never explained to the satisfaction of much of the public or his political critics how he was able to gain control of a valuable former state residence and who paid for the multimillion-dollar improvements. Mezhyhyria has come to symbolize what critics say is deeply embedded corruption in the Yanukovych administration, accusations that the president has consistently denied.
According to Yanukovych’s income declaration for 2012, he merely owns a 619-square meter home on 1.76 hectares of land inside the 138-hectare estate. Yanukovych has never said how much in 2010 he paid for the 1.76 hectares of land. Ukrainska Pravda deputy chief editor Serhiy Leshchenko has even filed a lawsuit against the Vyshgorod District Administration – which sold the land to Yanukovych – to the European Court of Human Rights for its unwillingness to disclose the amount, following unsuccessful litigation in Ukraine that lasted from August 2011 to November 2012.
Yanukovych, furthermore, has repeatedly said he doesn’t know who owns the rest of the grand compound which includes a horse stable, a five-story mansion, man-made ponds, an extravagant boathouse, an 18-hole golf course, a helicopter landing pad, as well as other amenities that are enclosed behind a 6.5-meter-high perimeter wall.
The suspicion is that Tantalit is a front for Yanukovych’s close family circle, an accusation also repeatedly denied by the president.
At the end of August, Kliuyev asked Ukraine’s anti-trust body for permission to buy 100 percent of Tantalit LLC. Regulators aren’t expected to refuse.
According to Kliuyev, he has known details of the Mezhyhirya project since 2007. He says that Tantalit’s previous beneficiary was Ihor Humeniuk, a Donetsk-born businessman, who recently bought Donbasenergo power company with the help of the newly created EnergoInvest Holding. However, its official owner is a Netherlands-based offshore company with the same name. This year Humeniuk quit Tantalit so Kliuyev decided to buy the company.
“I met with Viktor Fedorovych (Yanukovych) and said that there was a desire to sell from one side, and a desire to buy from another side. There was no negative reaction (from Yanukovych) and he said he would be happy to have such a neighbor,” Kliuyev said.
The contract was inked on Aug. 22.
In the year 2007, in his waning weeks as prime minister, Yanukovych’s government privatized the Mezhyhirya estate. The state received no money for the compound’s sale. Instead, two dilapidated buildings in Kyiv were exchanged for the compound where 100 square meters of land costs up to $3,000 given its riverside location and close proximity to Kyiv. A company in Donetsk took ownership of the estate, but immediately re-sold it, subsequently filing for bankruptcy a few years later.
In 2009, after an unsuccessful bid to forge a political alliance with Yanukovych, ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko tried returning Mezhyhirya to state ownership, but nothing came of it.
Kliuyev said the $18 million he paid for Tantalit was mostly his own money and partially covered with a loan from Ukrpidshypnyk enterprise. In Mezhyhirya, he plans to develop the infrastructure, build houses and then sell them.
Kliuyev, with his older brother Andriy – the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council – once controlled Ukrpidshypnyk. Now the company is owned by Austrian SLAV Handel, Vertretung und Beteiligung Aktiengesellshaft. Serhiy Klyuev sat on the firm’s board of directors twice in between 1997-2005.
Some also believe that the Kliuyevs control the biggest Ukrainian alternative energy producer Activ Solar, charges they deny. In 2008, SLAV was Activ Solar’s owner. In 2009, it was replaced by Liechtenstein-based P & A Corporate Trust.
The purchase of Tantalit is not the first real estate deal that reportedly involves Serhiy Kliuyev and Yanukovych. According to a Ukrainska Pravda investigation, Serhiy Kliuyev in 2008 bought a flat from Yanukovych in Kyiv for an inflated price of $7 million.
At the time, observers interpreted the deal as a way to legalize some of Yanukovych’s income that would otherwise be difficult to explain.
Tantalit, however, is a more attractive acquisition. According to Forbes Ukraine, in 2011 the company’s revenue increased by 19,000 percent – from Hr 9 million to Hr 1.7 billion. It is unknown how exactly the mysterious company makes money.
According to media reports, Tantalit belongs to Austrian Euro East Beteiligungs GmbH. The Austrian firm is owned by UK-based Blythe (Europe) Ltd.
One of the last companies in this offshore chain is P&A Corporate Services Trust from Liechtenstein –the same company that owns Activ Solar, linked to the Kliuyevs in media reports.
There’s also one another detail that connects Mezhyhirya’s owners and the Kliuyevs. The director of Euro East Beteiligungs GmbH is Wanovits, the Austrian who was sentenced to five years in prison this year. He prepared Kliuyevs’s Slav AG for listing on the Vienna Stock Exchange in 2001.
“Apart from the reputational losses for Yanukovych, Wanovits’s further participation in the scheme was problematic – he physically would not be able to send reports to Austrian regulatory authorities about Tantalit’s owner,” Ukrainska Pravda’s Leshchenko wrote in his blog, following the news of the company’s sale to Serhiy Kliuyev.
Kyiv Post staff writer Kateryna Kapliuk can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych contributed to this article.
