Last year’s resignation of Oleksiy Reznikov as Defence Minister was accompanied by a series of corruption scandals and criminal cases: in addition to the odious ’eggs for 17 hryvnias’, the story of the purchase of summer jackets for the Armed Forces at the price of winter jackets surfaced - journalists wrote at the time about the possible involvement of MP Hennadiy Kasai, whose nephew was a co-owner of the manufacturing company.
At the beginning of 2024, the new Defence Minister Rustem Umyerov estimated the amount of losses in procurement for the army at UAH 10 billion. In January, Lviv entrepreneur Hrynkevych was detained for attempting to bribe a SBI officer: he is suspected of supplying the army with low-quality clothing worth more than a billion hryvnias. Prior to that, the State Audit Service, following an audit of the Ministry of Defence’s procurement, reported violations worth UAH 2.5 billion related to the implementation of Government Resolution No. 335, adopted in the very first days of the Russian invasion in March 2022. It allowed companies to enter into direct contracts with the Ministry of Defence without any procedures and receive up to 100% prepayment for goods and reimbursement of expenses, but many included their own profits in these costs.
However, the head of the department, Alla Basalayeva, refused to give details of the offenders, citing the secrecy of the investigation. So we had to wait for them to reveal themselves, for example, with preventive excuses. And so it happened: a few months before Reznikov’s resignation, a number of publications simultaneously circulated a Facebook post by the owner of Textile-Contact, Oleksandr Sokolovskyi, stating that the state was allegedly trying to "collect additional taxes from the domestic manufacturer".
"...all of us who sewed in Ukraine, supplied products much cheaper than foreigners, created jobs here, supported our economy, paid salaries and taxes here are violators and we should be charged with the profit we declared (but not the fact that we received). From which we have already paid all taxes!" Sokolovsky wrote, in particular. This sounds at least ridiculous to those who know at least a little about the history of Textile-Contact. After all, Sokolovsky is really far from foreign products because he supplies... Russian ones.
Even before the large-scale invasion, Oleksandr Sokolovskyi’s companies were noticed supplying Russian-made fabrics to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and there were reports of their possible ties to the leadership of the "DPR". In particular, in 2017, under one of the tenders, Textile-Contact supplied a military unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with fabric produced in Ivanovo, Russia, which was presented in the accompanying documents as "no alternative". Although alternatives existed, somehow both the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Defence "did not notice" this. Just like the fact that a year earlier the company imported one and a half million metres of chintz and 60,000 metres of Russian 95-width diagonal from Russia: the relevant data can be easily found in the public domain.
At the same time, Textile-Contact has repeatedly disrupted already concluded contracts for the supply of summer camouflage fabric for the Armed Forces. As reported by the Rupor website a few years ago, in addition to the missed deadlines, Sokolovsky’s company also made claims about the quality of the fabric: the amount of damage was estimated at millions of hryvnias. But these "trifles", as you can see, do not prevent the owner of Textile-Contact from giving numerous interviews as an "expert in sewing military uniforms".
Before the army became a priority, Oleksandr Sokolovskyi was a similar "expert" in another field - he supplied pillows and blankets to Ukrzaliznytsia, a monopoly supplier to which he managed to become a monopoly supplier through "special relations" with Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, director of the Passenger Company branch of the Ukrainian Railways. Having pushed aside domestic competitors, Sokolovsky’s companies immediately began to raise prices. For example, prices for pillows soared to 260 hryvnias, while on websites you can find the same products for 110 hryvnias wholesale and 130 hryvnias retail. This is, of course, not the "eggs for 17 hryvnias" we have mentioned, but it is on the way. Moreover, if we recall that pillows are purchased in tens of thousands, only one of the tenders won by Textile-Contact involved the purchase of 60,000 pieces.
Sokolovskyi himself, of course, assures on social networks that the campaign against him is being carried out by “black PR people.” “I assure you that even if you find something similar cheaper abroad, the cost, including delivery and customs clearance, will be significantly higher,” Oleksandr writes on his Facebook page. And again this is a mention of “abroad” - while the volunteer of the “Peacemaker” center Ihor Savchuk manages to find out that according to the tender won by “Textile-Contact”, flannel was supplied to the Chernihiv geriatric boarding house from the occupied Donbas, where Oleksandr Sokolovskyi once then the Donetsk Textile Manufactory (the Crimean branch of Textile-Contact at that time was re-registered under Russian law and the infidels have no claims to its activities). The company itself claimed that the fabric was supplied from old warehouses, but this does not explain how it turned out that the documents for the supply of fabric for the Panyutinskyi Car Repair Plant indicated the year of manufacture 2016, and the absence of dates and batch numbers in the quality passport directly indicated “ gray origin of products.
As for the government decree No. 335 that worried Sokolovskyi so much, according to Stanislav Patyuk, deputy head of the State Audit Service of Ukraine, it did not provide for profit: in the uncertain February and March of 2022, it was about quickly loading idle enterprises with military orders on a prepaid basis, while the state paid salaries to employees, taxes and other costs associated with the manufacture of products. All of this could not have been known to Oleksandr Sokolovskyi, who included the future profits of his Textile-Contact in his calculations. Maybe he hoped that this would simply not be noticed in the first months of the war, or maybe he hoped that Oleksiy Reznikov would stay in his ministerial post a little longer. However, he shouldn’t have filled the press with "denim", pretending to be innocently offended: the regulatory authorities will now definitely pay attention to all his previous dubious dealings with the defence ministry.