You're reading: New director registered for Ukraina mall, fight for control continues

An Irish bank fighting for control of the lucrative Ukraina shopping mall has won the right to install the director of its choice. However, the former management still won’t let the director in.

Rostyslav Levinzon said he is now
legally in charge of the estimated $78 million shopping mall in downtown Kyiv, more than a year
after he was first appointed to the post by a company affiliated with the
state-owned Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, which laid claim to the mall as
part of a debt recovery plan. The bank has nearly 93 percent ownership in Ukraina
mall.

However, the mall has been the subject
of a drawn-out ownership dispute and litigation between the bank and, ultimately,
the mall’s former owner, the bankrupted former billionaire Irishman Sean
Quinn Sr. and his family. 

Levinzon told Kommersant Ukraina that he
has yet to gain access to the management office of the mall despite being officially registered as the director by a government company registrar agency on
Feb. 4 after several court injunctions initially were made in January to remove pre-existing legal obstacles.

Volodymyr Hurtovy, the mall’s deputy
director, told the Kyiv Post that the mall’s former management team, including
himself, plans to appeal Levinzon’s registration by the Shevchenko District
State Administration Company Registrar office.

The Irish Bank Resolution Corporation has
since April 2011 been unable to wrest control over Ukraina mall in a bid to
recover debt owed by Quinn Sr. and his family.

Quinn Sr.’s family once owned the
property as part of a $500 million global property portfolio, but he, his son Sean
Quinn Jr. and his nephew Peter Darragh were found in contempt of court in Ireland last year and subsequently
sentenced to prison terms for shifting the property assets, including Ukraina,
beyond the reach of IBRC.

The drawn-out dispute has deprived the
Irish bank of accessing the estimated $10 million yearly rent roll at the
shopping center.

Instead, Laryssa Yanez Puga, who was the
mall’s director and who worked for the Quinns, is suspected of thwarting the
bank’s efforts on their behalf together with Russian and Ukrainian lawyers, affidavits from
Irish courts have shown.

Yanez Puga has failed to respond to
numerous Kyiv Post requests for comments over the phone and via visits to
Ukraina’s management office located inside the shopping center.



Shown in this Oct. 27, 2011 picture taken at Kyiv’s Byblos restaurant is Laryssa Yanez Puga, the former general director of the capital’s Ukraina shopping mall’s management company.

Separately, IBRC has appealed to Prime
Minister Mykola Azarov to resolve the dispute over the mall in an open letter.
Even former First Deputy Prime Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, who headed the
inter-governmental committee of company takeovers and mergers, had stepped into
the fight. The government committee has recognized the mall as being under a
raider attack.

On May 29, 2012, Khoroshkovsky ordered
law enforcement bodies to investigate the alleged illegal takeover of the mall,
as well as the actions of judges and courts involved in legal proceedings
surrounding the property.

And in 2011, Irish Prime Minister Enda
Kenny raised the difficulties the bank was having in asserting its rights
through the Ukrainian court system when he met with President Viktor Yanukovych
in Warsaw. “It was referenced, not discussed, and with a full expression of
respect for the independence of the Ukrainian judicial process,” Kenny’s
spokesperson said in November 2011 to the Irish Times.

A
Ukrainian company, Elegant Invest, currently has a $45 million debt claim over
the Kyiv shopping center that originates at a Quinn firm based in Northern
Ireland. The right to the debt was subsequently transferred to Lyndhurst Development
Trading in the British Virgin Islands that involved Ukrainian Dmytro Zaitsev.  

Zaitsev was allegedly present at Fellini
restaurant on Jan. 21, 2012 in a meeting with Quinn Jr. and Darragh, together
with Yanez Puga and Hurtovy, when the Quinn family decided to put its $500
million foreign properties portfolio beyond the Irish bank’s grasp.

Two videos of the meeting released by
the Irish Daily Mail, most recently on Jan. 20, showed Quinn Jr. and Darragh
allegedly demanding $5 million from their Ukrainian partners in exchange for
handing control over the mall to their Ukrainian partners.

In the video clip, which the Irish Daily
Mai
l said it had verified by the FBI, the fate of the lucrative Ukraina
shopping mall was discussed between its former Irish owners and their alleged
Ukrainian associates who apparently helped them strip the asset.

Next, the $45 million debt was
transferred to Elegant Invest using another Ukrainian firm, Zenit, as a
conduit, whose right to the debt was recognized by Kyiv courts last summer.

And Zenit, the Ukrainian conduit company
that transferred the debt claim from Lyndhurst to Elegant Invest, is headed by Artem
Basmadzhan who in 2009 headed Ukraine’s only gold producer, state-owned
Zakarpatopolymetally, when the company was heading into bankruptcy, reported
Business News Europe
.

Zaitsev headed the creditors’ committee
for the gold producer back then, BNE reported. A Northern Ireland court ruled in
January that “Zaitsev, and another business partner ignored, frustrated and
jeopardized an injunction against any transfer of debts surrounding the
shopping mall in Kyiv,” the Irish Mail reported.

The judge said their defiance of court
orders was flagrant.

Moreover, Hurtovy was the administrator
of the creditors’ committee of the gold producer in 2009.

Kyiv
Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].