How UMCC ilmenite is shipped to Crimea, and the State Property Fund covers the supplies

How UMCC ilmenite is shipped to Crimea, and the State Property Fund covers the supplies

An interesting, almost detective story was told to us by the port workers.

On July 2, such a vessel was set to load at the Odessa seaport. It was expected that this handsome giant would be loaded with 24 thousand tons of ilmenite from United Mining and Chemical Company (UMCC) to the address of a German trade "front" called ITS. The company is suspected of having ties with businessmen Firtash and Lyovochkin. It is assumed that the intermediary is involved in buying UMCC products for the benefit of the "Crimean TITAN" in Russia.

The declaration according to which the UMCC products were to be shipped by sea alerted customs officers from the anti-smuggling department. They decided to check the supply route and suspended the loading of the vessel. It seemed suspicious to the law enforcement officers that the ship was delivering ilmenite to the Mediterranean Sea, and then its trail was lost. Where the goods were heading, UMCC did not answer, covering it up as a commercial secret, as the port workers told.

Usually, such cargo is sent to annexed territories, such as Crimea, for example. And it is known that supplying goods and materials from mainland Ukraine there is prohibited. But! The head of the State Property Fund, Dmytro Sennychenko, personally intervened in the situation. They say he bypassed the thresholds of high offices, even involving the Security Service of Ukraine, so that the vessel was indeed loaded without checks and unnecessary delays.

Why does the management of UMCC hide the end buyer of their products, and who is behind it?

ITS International Trade & Sourcing GmbH & Co. is a company with a staff of 2 people with Russian surnames. Its founder and director is a certain Oleh Tsyura. ITS is little known in the market. Its turnover has not exceeded 1.5 million euros so far.

But on June 17, the company was very lucky – it signed a contract with the acting chairman of the board of the United Mining and Chemical Company, Peter Davis. The contract amount more than doubled the ITS’s previously achieved turnover - 3.7 million euros. The payment delay under the contract is 15 days, the price is below market value by 20-40 dollars per ton. It’s a typical scheme for withdrawing working capital from a state company.

Nevertheless, Peter Davis boasted about this contract to domestic media, talking about another "victory" in the sales of ilmenite from the Irshansk Mining and Processing Plant (a branch of UMCC) on June 27. And market participants and experts suspected that the end buyer in this contract was the "Crimean TITAN" of Dmytro Firtash, which now belongs to the Russian Federation.

Why were suspicions raised? There were several reasons. The first is that ITS did not request samples of UMCC’s products before purchasing them. Instead, it immediately bought large volumes. This means the final buyer is not random or new – they are already familiar with the products of the Irshansk Mining and Processing Plant.

Such a consumer may be the "Crimean TITAN", which from 2004 to 2014 already purchased ilmenite with TIO2 content of 54% from the Irshansk Mining and Processing Plant. From this, it produced titanium dioxide, known as titanium white. Clearly, they did not feel the need for a precautionary double-check.

If the final purchaser and processor of UMCC’s Ilmenite is indeed the Crimean enterprise, as market participants and experts suspect, then Peter Davis’s boasting of such a contract was quite reckless, and customs workers’ suspicions are fully justified.

There is an interesting connection of Peter Davis with the companies of Firtash and Lyovochkin. In 2012, he was listed as a member of the supervisory board of the ’Clearing House’ bank under Firtash’s partner Ivan Fursin.

This sheds light on why Peter Davis, on the eve of UMCC’s privatization, handed over such large volumes of products to an obscure firm, and with a discount to boot.

But Peter Davis is not only covered by a curator in the State Property Fund - Dmytro Sennychenko. He has other helpers. Helping him withdraw UMCC funds to benefit Firtash’s Crimean enterprise is the head of UMCC’s security service and a board member, Yuriy Solovey. He personally oversees shipments under the contract with ITS together with his former boss from the Party of Regions era – Yuriy Vaskov. According to the port workers, using his old connections in the Seaport Administration, the former official engaged to "settle" the issue of shipping ilmenite in the Crimean direction to the German "front" ITS.