Can the old connections of the Head of the State Financial Monitoring Service affect his work now?
In trying to figure this out, journalists continue to investigate the past of Ukraine’s financial intelligence head, Ihor Cherkaskyi.
Ihor Borysovych headed the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine on March 3, 2014, and since then, without sparing himself, he has been fighting money laundering and terrorism financing. How successful he is, we will discuss later, as five months is not enough time to judge a person’s effectiveness. Moreover, monitoring the flow of money in the country is a meticulous task, requiring time and diligence and does not tolerate haste.
It is worth noting that Ihor Cherkaskyi is not a newcomer in this field. He has experience in managing financial intelligence. From February 2008 to March 2010, he headed the State Financial Monitoring Committee. Ihor Borysovych’s achievements during his first "term" in financial intelligence deserve a separate article. And we will write it next time. We will only note that the State Financial Monitoring Service could not prevent the "requisitioning" of Mezhyhirya by Yanukovych’s gang nor the robbing of domestic banks by unscrupulous financiers at that time. Or they did not want to. Or they were not allowed. Or all of the above.
His current appointment, as well as seven years ago, Ihor owes to people of Yuliya Tymoshenko. In March last year, it is rumored that Cherkaskyi was pushed forward by Serhiy Pashynskyi, a "gray cardinal" of the "Batkivshchyna" party. In 2008, according to political analysts, Oleksandr Abdullin helped our hero to head the financial intelligence, playing the same role in Tymoshenko’s Bloc as Pashynskyi does now in the party.
Ihor Cherkaskyi started his political career as a fighter for the ideals of Yuliya Tymoshenko in 2006 as a deputy of the Kyiv Regional Council. The snap elections of 2007 opened his way into big politics - he became a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, from where a year later he was delegated by the party to the State Financial Monitoring Service.
However, the initially formed opinion that Cherkaskyi is purely a "Tymoshenko’s creature" is quite erroneous. Before the "orange" came to power, he worked successfully under Kuchma’s regime. And he did quite well financially.
A simple biographical fact: from 2002 to 2003, Ihor Cherkaskyi worked in the Administration of the President of Ukraine as a deputy head of the Main Department for judicial reform, the activities of military formations, and law enforcement agencies. And from 2003 until January 2005, he was in the rank of the first deputy of the Main Directorate for Affairs. An interesting biographical coincidence: the beginning of Cherkaskyi’s dizzying career rise coincides with the appointment of Serhiy Lyovochkin as the first assistant to President Kuchma and Viktor Medvedchuk’s appointment as the head of the Presidential Administration. However, it is unlikely a mere coincidence.
The author does not know for sure what exactly Ihor did in the positions mentioned, so we won’t make up anything. However, it’s no secret that in 2002 (after another parliamentary election), the country entered the gloomiest era of "Kuchmism." Through the efforts of the Presidential Administration, courts and law enforcement agencies were rapidly becoming hand-controlled monkeys of the authorities and oligarchs. And in the State Affairs Management Agency, state property was being pilfered intensively...
But let’s return to our hero. Informed sources claim that Ihor Cherkaskyi first crossed paths with the aforementioned figures not in the early 2000s in government offices but much earlier, in the turbulent 1990s.
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An author, whose name is not precisely known (although we have some guesses), wrote the following about five years ago (quoted with some cuts and other edits):
Cherkaskyi was invited as a co-founder to the newly created insurance company "Credo-Classic". The invitation came from Yuriy Yefimov, who lived nearby, on Luteranska Street. Yefimov, in turn, was invited into the business by Ihor Voronov, raised on Komsomol money, at that time the son-in-law of a national deputy Valeriy Cherep, who held high positions in the construction field in Soviet times and during the favoritism of the SDPU(o) was the head of the State Committee of Ukraine for Construction, Architecture, and Housing Policy. Voronov pulled in other friends as well - Yevheniy Shalomyeyev and Volodymyr Simonychuk.
The actual ideologist of creating "Credo-Classic" was Oleksandr Voytko. Without him, Voronov’s diverse gathering of friends would have remained "majors" who only imitated "business people". Voytko taught the guys to work with money, after which they successfully ousted him from the business and split his share. That was their style.
What could be insured in the 90s? Enterprises, air flights, ship freight, dangerous facilities, power plants, nuclear reactors, and... weapons. For the first points, clients were provided to the company by the son-in-law’s father-in-law. But the second part of the business, related to weapons, was entirely on Cherkaskyi, who became the chairman of the board of directors of "Credo-Classic".
The fact remains a big mystery that the first structure established by "Credo-Classic" was the insurance company JSC "Insurance Society of Law Enforcement Agencies and Military Formations ’Ukraine’". Besides "Credo...", this money-laundering firm from dubious weapons operations (under the cover of insuring police, SSU officers, and military personnel) had three founders: "Ukraine" bank (of Satsyuk), the law firm "Kairos", and the "All-Ukrainian Fund of Law Enforcement Agencies and Military Formations ’Ukraine’". The director in this Fund was the former Minister of Interior dismissed in 1994, Andriy Vasylyshyn, and the founders included a children’s kindergarten "Kazka" from the Chernivtsi region and... the Security Service of Ukraine itself.
With this insurance company, Cherkaskyi contributed to the expansion and growth of "Credo-Classic" into such a nourishing monster to satisfy the ambitions of oligarch Voronov.
At the beginning of 2000, Cherkaskyi began his vector of movement separate from "Credo...". Through Medvedchuk’s entourage, he converged with the group of the assistant to President Kuchma, Serhiy Lyovochkin.
Nevertheless, Cherkaskyi crossed paths with Lyovochkin earlier when they both were engaged in laundering the gang of Avdyshev’s money. As the "Bagnet" website wrote, Lyovochkin started in the 1990s in the basement on Velyka Zhytomyrska Street in Kyiv. There was the office of a certain JSC "Bankirskyi Dim", where he was listed as the deputy chairman of the board. The essence of "Bankirskyi Dim’s" work was trivial conversion operations: Lyovochkin’s friendly team worked, as was then said, "as moneychangers". And, according to eyewitnesses and participants in those distant events, Lyovochkin and his friends, as was then customary to say, "...worked for Avdyshev". Younger people simply do not know about that "dawn of capitalism" with a touch of bandit "romance", when almost every firm was the fiefdom of a certain criminal group. Avdyshev was a nationally infamous bandit – his "brothers" subjected markets and shops, banks, and law offices to "tributes", and cash "dues" in karbovanets coupons and later hryvnias flowed into the "Bankirskyi Dim", where they were converted into solid dollars. The teacher of life for young Lyovochkin and Cherkaskyi was Harry Habovich - a patriarch of the Ukrainian bandit movement, influential even today.
"Bankirskyi Dim" and all subsequent Lyovochkin’s business created with a group of classmates: Ivan Fursin, Serhiy Svyatko, Vyacheslav Avramenko, Rostyslav Shyller. Fursin is known as a co-founder of "RosUkrEnergo" with Firtash. Svyatko stole state money from the State Mortgage Institution. And Shyller was robbing the "Savings Bank", transferring its money into the pocket-sized defense bank "Ukrspetsimpeksbank".
This bank project he implemented under the watchful patronage of the SDPU(o). For this purpose, in June 2000, Shyller won the mid-term parliamentary elections and entered the parliamentary faction of the SDPU(o).
A few weeks later, such an enterprise as JSC "MK-Invest" appeared with founders in the form of Serhiy Svyatko, Vyacheslav Avramenko, Rostyslav Shiller, JSC "Exchange Investment Depository", LLC "Ukrainian Stock Group", JSC "Savings-Invest", and... Ihor Cherkaskyi.
By working with the SDPU(o), Cherkaskyi attracted positive attention from Viktor Medvedchuk. At that time, the "gray cardinal" decided to establish personal control over the arms business in the country. Ihor Smeshko, who was under the ESDPU(o) and led the Committee on Military-Technical Cooperation and Export Control, assisted him with this.
With Medvedchuk’s suggestion, during the last two months of 2002, Leonid Kuchma signed a whole series of decrees and orders dedicated to reforming the arms trade system. At the end of October 2002, a decree was born, the general idea of which was to transfer control functions over Ukraine’s military-technical cooperation with foreign states to the Presidential Administration. By the decision of the head of state, a department was created in one of the administrations of the Administration, whose responsibility included military-technical cooperation. Ihor Cherkaskyi, directly from the chair of the top manager of "Credo-Classic", was put at the head of the department. The head of the Administration, Viktor Medvedchuk, received the right to influence the choice of a candidate for the general director of the state company "Ukrspetsexport".
However, Cherkaskyi did not justify the advances paid to him. Regarding the arms business, he turned out to be a complete amateur. As a result, Kuchma quickly replaced Cherkaskyi with Viktor Hvozd.
Cherkaskyi increasingly approached Medvedchuk on business matters. For example, Ihor Borysovych’s father, Borys, in 2004 became one of the founders of LLC "Farmed" along with the brother of Medvedchuk’s chief of staff, Ihor Pachkiv - Volodymyr Pachkiv. Among other founders was the "Raylon Trade Limited" company, representing the interests of Maksym Kurochkin.
After the Orange Revolution and the escape abroad of DUS head Ihor Bakay, Cherkaskyi calmly returned to business and simultaneously created the "Foundation for Legal Initiatives" with orientation on Medvedchuk. He registered the Foundation in Vitaliy Sheludchenko’s apartment, with whom he was associated with the auto transport business.
To be continued...
Prepared by Ivan Pomidorov, CRiME