When President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his inauguration speech, promised “new faces in government,” one would hardly have expected Serhiy Tigipko to be among them.
The Kyiv Post reported on Feb. 25 that Zelensky was considering Tigipko as prime minister. Several government sources who weren’t authorized to speak on the record told the Kyiv Post that Tigipko was in negotiations with Zelensky’s office.
On Feb. 26, Zelensky confirmed that he met with Tigipko as a candidate for a job in the government, but didn’t specify whether it was for prime minister.
“Indeed, I interview many people, and I also met with Tigipko,” he said.
Reactions to Tigipko’s candidacy have been mixed.
Tigipko, 60, is a business mogul and veteran politician. He has served in four governments and had business ties with two oligarchs and one former president.
He is anything but a “new face,” but he boasts one of the most versatile biographies in Ukrainian politics.
Tigipko the politician
Tigipko’s political career began shortly before Ukraine proclaimed its independence. After serving the mandatory two years in the Soviet army, the young Tigipko took charge of the Soviet youth organization, the Komsomol, in his native Dnipro (then Dnipropetrovsk), a city of 1 million people 450 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
In the early 1990s, Dnipro gave several top politicians and businessmen their start, including oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky, Gennady Bogolyubov and Victor Pinchuk; Ukraine’s second president, Leonid Kuchma; ex-prime ministers Yulia Tymoshenko and Pavlo Lazarenko and former Speaker of the Parliament Oleksandr Turchynov.
In 1994, Kuchma became president and made Tigipko his advisor on monetary issues. At that time, the hryvna was being introduced as independent Ukraine’s new currency.
In 1997, Tigipko took his first full-time job in the government, becoming deputy prime minister under Lazarenko. Their cooperation didn’t last long: Lazarenko left the post the same year and was arrested in Switzerland in 1998 on embezzlement charges.
After Lazarenko, Valeriy Pustovoytenko became prime minister, and Tigipko stayed in the government for two more years. In 1999, Viktor Yushchenko succeeded Pustovoytenko and made Tigipko economy minister. He left less than a year later, but didn’t stay out of a job for long.
Tigipko was elected to parliament in 2000, and served as the head of the National Bank in 2002-2004.
In 2004, he made an unsuccessful bet during the presidential election. He ran the headquarters of the top candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, who lost the election amid protests known as the Orange Revolution.
After Yanukovych’s opponent, Yushchenko, became president, Tigipko left politics and focused on business.
He reappeared during the next presidential election running against Yanukovych and Tymoshenko. He came in third during the January 2010 vote, receiving some 3 million votes.
Serhiy Tigipko’s ads are shown next to ads of then Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, during the 2010 presidential elections. Tigipko received over 13% of the popular vote and finished in third, behind Tymoshenko and the eventual winner Viktor Yanukovych. (Courtesy)
In the second round, Tigipko didn’t officially support either of the two candidates, yet his silence benefited Yanukovych, who narrowly won the election.
It was the peak of Tigipko’s popularity. In December 2009, during the presidential campaign, he even appeared on the cover of the Ukrainian version of Men’s Health magazine.
Tigipko’s presidential campaign was led by Dmytro Razumkov, now the parliamentary speaker. Razumkov used to work in Tigipko’s bank, and Ukrainian media have reported that his father, political scientist and official Oleksandr Razumkov, helped jumpstart Tigipko’s political career, recommending him for the government of Prime Minister Lazarenko.
Soon after Yanukovych won the presidency, Tigipko was appointed deputy prime minister and minister of social policy in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov.
Prior to the 2012 parliamentary election, Tigipko made a deal with Yanukovych’s Party of Regions: He became its deputy head, dissolved his own party Strong Ukraine and recommended that its members to join the Party of Regions. He was elected to parliament and stayed there through 2014.
In 2014, pro-government forces killed over 100 people during the EuroMaidan Revolution, leading to the ousting of Yanukovych, who escaped to Russia. Tigipko remained a member of the Party of Regions, yet was expelled a few months later amid internal conflicts, and the party soon dissolved.
Views on Russia
In April 2014, when Russian-led militants began occupying city councils in Luhansk Oblast, Tigipko, who was popular in eastern Ukraine, tried to insert himself into the events.
He took a trip to Luhansk to talk to the Russian proxies leading the protests. After that, he echoed the Kremlin’s position, denying that Russians were behind the unrest, despite evidence to the contrary.
“All of the talk that Russians are there is fiction,” he said after meeting the militants. “There are only residents of Luhansk Oblast.”
“The government doesn’t hear the demands (of eastern Ukraine), they are accused of separatism, but they are ordinary people who are not heard,” he added, again echoing Russia’s propaganda narratives.
Tigipko added that the militants are well-equipped and have military training, contradicting his own statements. His intervention in the conflict ended with that.
But in June 2014, when Russia had already occupied Crimea and Russian tanks started killing Ukrainians in Donbas, Tigipko said that it was important to maintain economic ties with Russia. In August 2014, when Russia’s military was butchering Ukrainian forces, Tigipko said that Ukraine’s desire to join NATO was a big mistake.
“It will anger Russia and will hurt the negotiations,” Tigipko wrote on Facebook.
Tigipko revived his Strong Ukraine party and ran in the May 2014 presidential elections, yet came fifth. In October, his party competed in the snap parliamentary elections, yet failed to pass the 5% threshold.
After that, his political career came to a halt.
Family conflict
In April 2019, the BBC reported that Scotland Yard had opened an investigation against Tigipko, accusing him of taking part in the abduction of his grandchildren. In 2015, Tigipko’s daughter violated a shared custody agreement with her ex-husband by moving their children from London to Kyiv.
The London High Court ruled that Tigipko’s daughter must return her two children to her ex-husband, who is a British citizen. She failed to comply. The court also ruled that Tigipko played an active role in the abduction.
Tigipko the businessman
Tigipko the politician and Tigipko the businessman always existed in parallel, benefitting from one another.
In 1992, Tigipko, who worked in a bank in Dnipro, pitched wealthy local businessmen Kolomoisky and Boholyubov the idea to open their own bank. They invested the money, and Tigipko ran the bank and got a share in it. That was the start of PrivatBank, which went on to become the largest private bank in Ukraine.
In 2016, PrivatBank was nationalized after authorities uncovered largescale fraud. Soon, the bank’s new management filed a lawsuit against Kolomoisky and Boholyubov, seeking to retrieve $5.5 billion they allegedly siphoned from the bank. Kolomoisky denied the accusations and filed a countersuit to challenge the nationalization and get PrivatBank back.
Tigipko quit PrivatBank in 1997 to join the government of Lazarenko as deputy prime minister. But he didn’t quit business for long.
In 1998, while serving in the government, Tigipko founded Group TAS. Today, the holding includes steelworks, railway car building plants, banks, an insurance company and a chain of pharmacies.
Tigipko is a business partner of Dmytro Dubilet, the current cabinet minister. Dubilet created and runs Monobank, a popular internet banking tool that uses Tigipko’s Universal Bank as its platform.
Both Universal Bank and Taskombank, Tigipko’s other bank, are ranked among the top 20 largest banks in Ukraine and together had around Hr 1 billion ($41 million) in profits in 2019.
In 2018, Tigipko bought the Kuznya on Rybalsky plant for $300 million from then-President Petro Poroshenko and his political ally and business partner Ihor Kononenko. The plant is situated on a desirable peninsula on Kyiv’s Dnipro River and produces military equipment. Tigipko said that he bought it for the land: He wanted to build a residential complex.
But he ran into trouble.
Scandalous lawyer and Poroshenko opponent Andriy Portnov, a former deputy head of Yanukovych’s administration known for his pro-Russian stance, claimed that the purchase aimed to launder money that Poroshenko allegedly received through corrupt schemes. Poroshenko and Tigipko denied it, but the State Investigations Bureau opened an investigation into the purchase and froze the plant’s assets in September for two months. The investigation is ongoing.
Two years to go
There is one major obstacle to Tigipko’s comeback as Zelensky’s prime minister.
According to the country’s law on lustration, adopted in 2014, those who served in government under Yanukovych for over a year cannot be appointed to top government offices for 10 years after they left their last post. Tigipko has two years to go.
It’s not clear how Zelensky’s administration would go around this law, but they have ignored it once in the past: The president’s former chief of staff, Andriy Bohdan, is also an alumnus of the government of Yanukovych, but that didn’t stop Zelensky from appointing him.
Interestingly, exactly one year before he became a candidate for prime minister, Tigipko claimed he was done with politics.
“For me, entering politics is like serving in the army,” he told Novoe Vremya magazine in February 2019. “I served my time, that’s why I’m not going again.”
