25 Tales Of Corruption: From Docs Found At Abandoned Palace Of Ukraine’s Ousted President

Remember Viktor Yanukovych? Just six weeks ago, he was the president of Ukraine.
He lived in this big house on Mezhyhirya, a palatial 340-acre estate outside Kiev.


Yanukovych murkily privatized the residence in 2007 through a mysterious Ukrainian firm, Tantalit, whose paper trail stretches through Austrian and British front companies to an offshore entity in Lichtenstein. Little is known about Tantalit’s director, Pavel Litovchenko, other than that he used to work for Yanukovych’s eldest son, Alexander, and then served as the family’s lawyer. Lawmaker Sergei Kluyev, whose brother Andrei was Yanukovych’s right-hand man, took over the estate in August 2013. Activists now want the state to turn it into the world’s first museum of corruption.

2. In June 2008, Yanukovych spent 700,000 euros ($965,000) on wooden furniture and doors bought through a Spanish offshore company. It actually says “bought through a Spanish offshore company” in the documents.
The same document also shows Yanukovych spent 16 million hryvnias (nearly $2 million) on a complex called “Ukrainian Renaissance” and 9,340,000 hryvnias ($1.1 million) on assorted construction on his house, hunting lodge, and Kiev apartment. That takes his spending for June 2008 to at least $4 million.


5. Yanukovych also had his own personal mini-church at the estate. The ornaments cost 2.5 million rubles (about $80,000) from a firm near Moscow.


16. Other documents show that Yanukovych’s family secretly controlled Ukraine’s largest government coal trader, despite repeated denials.
Documents found in Mezhyhirya show that Yanukovych’s eldest son Oleksandr owned DRFTs, a coal trading company set up by a Yanukovych family associate in the 1990s and controlled by an offshore firm in the British Virgin Islands. Letters from Oleksandr Yanukovych’s MAKO Holdings in 2010 instruct Tantalit, the company operating Mezhyhirya, to help transfer five coal enrichment plants to DRFTs. Two years later, Viktor Yanukovych made a change in state property law that allowed DRFTs to legally own for free the state share in the assets that it already effectively owned.


It’s hard to build a vast palatial estate worth far in excess of your officially declared income without attracting attention. As word of Yanukovych’s opulent lifestyle spread, Ukraine’s top investigative journalists worked to expose it.

19. They didn’t know that Yanukovych’s agents were investigating them too. This is from a dossier Yanukovych’s chief bodyguard, Konstantin Kobzar, kept on Stop Censorship, a movement that includes several of Ukraine’s top reporters.


All of that and he never earned more than about $2,000 per month.

The other 22 examples including pics of the attack on the journalist, and the journal from his thugs who carried it out.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/25-tales-of-corruption-and-control-from-documents-found-at-t