WASHINGTON, D.C. – Opposition politician and businessman Arkadiy Kornatsky says he was forced to flee Ukraine under threat of arrest after alleging that he was cheated out of a parliamentary seat in the Oct. 28 parliamentary elections.
Kornatsky has vowed to return to Ukraine if the Central Election
Commission-ordered repeat election in his district goes ahead and, if
necessary, to campaign furtively to avoid being arrested by the authorities.
Hundreds of his supporters clashed with paramilitary police in Mykolayiv
Oblast’s Pervomaisk in one of the fiercest disputes over a vote count on the
elections last fall. Election observers say Kornatsky was deprived of victory in
the election district there against a pro-government Party of the Regions
candidate.
On a visit in March to Washington, D.C., Ottawa and Brussels, Kornatsky
outlined a grim Ukrainian political and business landscape to U.S., Canadian
and European Union officials.
Kornatsky, 54, tall, powerfully built and with a shock of white hair, says some
in the Ukrainian government want to steal his agricultural business and prevent
him from standing in the unscheduled repeat election.
He claims the authorities have frozen around $4 million in bank accounts in
a bid to ruin his business. Several criminal cases have been brought against
his company, his chief accountant is jail and the CEO is hiding.
Kornatsky’s roots are in Ukraine’s southern Mykolaiv Oblast where he and
his family have operated an agricultural company that farms 16,000 hectares of
land near Pervomaysk.
Kornatsky lived in Moscow from 1988 where he had worked as a lawyer and
started a variety of businesses. He moved to Ukraine in 2005, when he started developing
his agricultural business and setting it on a firmly profitable track with
production of some 50,000 tons of grains and vegetables. Rents, seasonal and
part-time work and 300 permanent jobs mean around 15,000 people in the area
derive benefit from the company.
Kornatsky served as an adviser to then President Viktor Yushchenko’s
administration and honed his political skills as acting head of the Mykolaiv
Regional Administration from 2007-2008. But after Viktor Yanukovych became
president in 2010, Kornatsky came into conflict with local elites. He said he
became the target of what Ukrainians called “raider methods” – a vicious
onslaught to seize a business away from its legal owners.
Kornatsky claimed that a myriad of government agencies have conducted
countless searches of his business premises, asked repeated questions of staff
and leveled numerous trumped-up charges.
“They operate together as an organized crime group which is, in essence,
what they are,” Kornatsky said. “At (the) central government level the
repression against me and my business is being personally directed by Prosecutor
General Viktor Pshonka.” Kornatsky said that Pshonka and his son, Artem, have
close links to Yanukovych loyalists, commonly known as “The Family,” which he
suspects ultimately wants his business.
In an e-mailed response to the Kyiv Post, the Prosecution General’s Office on
March 28 denied harassing Kornatsky’s business, saying that no criminal
investigations have been opened against him. “We cannot comment on the alleged personal
conflict between Viktor Pshonka and Kornatsky,” the prosecutor’s office added.
But authorities have opened a criminal probe against Oleg Kyryliuk, CEO of
Kornatsky’s firm, who is currently in hiding. Lyudmilla Nikitkina, Kornatsky’s
chief accountant and close friend, has been imprisoned while a trial on her
case is currently developing in a Kyiv court.
Both have been accused of fraud with state budget donations for agricultural
development and of tax evasion. Several other criminal probes have been opened
against Kornatsky’s firm, including the suspects being investigated for theft of
budget funds, fraud with value-added tax refunds and illegal excavation of
minerals, a Kyiv Post law enforcement source said.
Kornatsky believes the desire to acquire his business is fueled not only by
anticipation of huge profits when laws permitting Ukrainian agricultural land
sales are introduced, but because geological surveys estimate $200 million
worth of building-quality granite lies below the surface.
But Kornatsky’s opponents claim that the businessman illegally acquired and
registered on his parents a lion’s share of his farmland.
“When (the) law allowed buying certificates for no more than 50 hectares (per
person), his parents could buy (a) maximum (of) 100 hectares this way. But it
was 1,700 hectares acquired!” exclaimed Mykola Kruglov, head of the Mykolayiv Oblast
Administration, on a local TV channel that was posted on Youtube on May 4.
Kruglov added that Kornatsky hadn’t registered at all 5,000 hectares of his
land, and so avoided paying taxes this way.
The conflict between Kornatsky and Mykolayiv authorities aggravated after
the businessman declared he was going to stand for parliament in the October
2012 elections as an opposition candidate against Kruglov’s deputy Vitaliy
Travianko.
The Central Election Commission initially
said Kornatsky had beaten Travianko by over 4,000 votes, but later it claimed
the pro-government candidate won with a margin of 0.31 percent, the result
contested by many.
Then a real battle started.
A key election commission member and his all-important
seal went missing for a while. Computerized results were altered in front of
amazed witnesses. Scores of armed “Berkut” paramilitary police came to carry ballot
papers to Kyiv but clashed with hundreds of Kornatsky’s supporters. Journalists
at the scene reported seeing blood splattered in the entrance of the local
district election commission following the clash.
“The Party of Regions couldn’t bear a loss to the opposition in the southern
Ukrainian Mykolayiv Oblast, which it traditionally considered as its zone of influence,”
said Oleksandr Chernenko, chairman of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, an
influential election watchdog. Chernenko also believed that business troubles
were the major reason why Kornatsky decided to join the opposition camp.
Those dramatic events coupled with criticism of the elections by Western
monitors forced Ukrainian authorities to say that fresh elections would be held
in Kornatsky’s and four other single-mandate districts later this year. The
five seats are vital to Yanukovych in a rebellious parliament he is already
finding hard to control.
Kornatsky is confident he would win a repeat election “which might trigger
an uprising of sorts against the criminal dictatorship if they tried to falsify
the results again.”
But Chernenko said Ukrainian legislation lacks a provision for the CEC to
set a revote. With the lack of interest from the pro-government party in holding
new elections, there is a low chance the repeat vote in Kornatsky’s district will
be held in near future, the observer added.
Askold Krushelnycky is a
former Kyiv Post chief editor. Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be
reached at [email protected]..
