If interested see yesterday's comment on the author of this piece, John Helmer, and his possible biases. In the case of Burisma I don't think they matter except possibly as an impetus to figuring out where the billions went.
Who Owns Burisma Part III
From Dances With Bears, February 19, 2015 (pictures omitted):
THE HUNT FOR BURISMA, PART II — WHAT ROLE FOR IGOR KOLOMOISKY, WHAT LONDON MISSED, WHAT WASHINGTON DOESN’T WANT TO SEE
By John Helmer, Moscow
The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the Central Criminal Court have reported that Nikolai Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian businessman and twice the minister of state for oil and gas licences, is the controlling shareholder of the Ukrainian gas producer Burisma. So what are employees of Igor Kolomoisky, warlord of Dniepropetrovsk and controller of the Privatbank Group, doing as the shareholder representatives on the Burisma board?
Kolomoisky isn’t the accommodating, retiring, passive sort, say sources who work with him. Zlochevsky has the more bending character of the two, the sources claim. So is Burisma their cooperative and joint venture, or is Zlochevsky Kolomoisky’s front-man, just as others were for Zlochevsky in the ten-year history of Burisma’s acquisition of valuable oil and gas prospects.
Zlochevsky, now 48, headed the Ukrainian State Committee for Resources between 2003 and 2005. He then served in the Verkhovna Rada where he presided over legislation regulating resource licences. Between 2010 and 2012 he was the Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. He then became Deputy Secretary of then President Victor Yanukovich’s National Security Council.
During the years he was a state official, if he acquired business assets, especially from licensing awards he was able to direct or influence in his official capacity, Zlochevsky was obliged to act indirectly. The transaction records of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirm that in 2009 Zlochevsky (below, right) and a partner, Nikolai Lisin (left), were the beneficial shareholders at the receiving end of a chain in which Millington Solutions and Sunrise Energy Resources sold title to two Ukrainian gasfields, Pari and Esko Pivnich.
Sunrise Energy Resources was a Delaware state company; Millington Solutions was a short-lived UK front, registered at an address on Regent Street, London, where the most active line of business was escort sex. Signing for Sunrise was its purported chief executive, Konstantin Tsiryulnikov; signing for Millington was Yevgeny Kozlov.
As their names suggest, these two are of Russian origin, with Soviet backgrounds. In the history of Burisma and its Ukrainian gasfields, they end up in Canada. Here is Tsiryulikov today and this appears to be Kozlov, an Ottawa lawyer.
For the start of the transaction chain in which Esko Pivnich (pictured below in 2006-2007) ends up on Burisma’s balance-sheet, read this filing with the SEC in 2004.In April of 2011 Lisin, whose business lines also included petroleum products, was killed in a car crash, apparently self-induced but by accident. In August 2012, a Ukrainian group calling itself the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC), reporting its research into the ownership of Ukrainian gasfields, claimed that Zlochevsky had sold out the year before, apparently after Lisin’s death.
AntAC describes itself as “a Ukrainian civil society organization, which unites experts from legal, media and civic-political sectors fighting corruption as a root cause of the key state-building problems in Ukraine.” Zlochevsky had let go of Burisma through a chain of companies called Ukrnaftoburinnya (Ukraine), Deripon Commercial Ltd. (Cyprus) and Burrard Financial Corporation (BVI). AntaAC’s reports cites Oleh Kanivets, a former chief executive of Ukrnaftoburinnya, as saying the chain ended up with Kolomoisky. “The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group.”
In March 2014, days after the ouster of Yanukovich in Kiev and the installation of a new regime, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started investigating Zlochevsky. According to the evidence it presented to the Central Criminal Court between March and December of 2014, and according to Justice Blake, who assessed the evidence, there is no mention of Lisin, Deripon, Burrard or Kolomoisky. The judge’s report of how Zlochevsky came by the Pari and Esko Pivnich licences refers only to the fact that Zlochevsky was the state official in charge at the licensing authority, the State Committee for Natural Resources at the time.
The operative companies accepted by the UK investigators and the judge to have been wholly or partly owned by Zlochevsky are identified as Burisma Holdings (Cyprus), Brociti Investments (Cyprus), Chartlux Resources Inc., its subsidiary TOV Kam, Cipriato Alliance Limited (Belize), Seanon Limited, Kisaliano Holdings Limited (BVI), Infox, Vestorgia Holdings Limited (Cyprus), Egeli Services (Cyprus) , and Audrinura Trade LLP (UK). The transaction chains involving these names were reported to the SFO and to the court by Zlochevsky’s lawyer, Andrei Kicha, in order to explain how cash of up to $35 million ended up in London bank accounts of Burisma. Most of the money and most of the names were reported to have nothing to do with Burisma’s gas business but came, allegedly, from real estate dealings by Zlochevsky.
Justice Blake concluded that SFO’s investigation had been barking up the wrong tree. “The transactions appear to involve more corporate vehicles than might seem necessary, but Mr Kicha explains that special purpose vehicles are often the means of conducting large scale transactions in Ukraine and explains why foreign companies and bank accounts are preferred to domestic ones. There is nothing to suggest that any other inference than criminality is implausible.” For Blake’s judgement to lift the freeze order on the bank accounts, read this.
How could it be that the SFO testified, and the judge accepted, that Kicha, the lawyer acting for Burisma and Zlochevsky, was moving Zlochevsky’s cash, when AntAC and other Ukrainian evidence already suggested that Zlochevsky had sold Burisma to the Privatbank group sometime in 2011? Did SFO investigator, Richard Gould, fail to substantiate this with Ukrainian authorities in Kiev? Did the succession of Ukrainian prosecutors evade questions on the point because of Kolomoisky’s countervailing influence? The SFO won’t get into detail. According to spokesman Nilima Fox, “I am unable to share anything further, however, due to the ongoing investigation.”
The Blake judgement of January 21 reveals that the court is open to more evidence, but for the time being it isn’t too keen to understand what is happening in Kiev to cover up for Burisma. The Ukrainian media are reporting that Prosecutor-General Vitaly Yarema (right) was pushed out of office on February 11 because he has reopened the Burisma investigation, aiming not at Zlochevsky, but at Kolomoisky. His dismissal, according to the uncorroborated reports, was Kolomoisky’s doing.
Privat Bank won’t answer questions on the relationship to Burisma, and neither will Burisma.
One explanation for the gap in the Blake judgement is that the evidence submitted to the court not only indicates that Zlochvesky kept bank accounts at BNP Paribas in London with the Burisma name; but also that he didn’t use them for Burisma’s gas business. That, the company website suggests, was firmly under control of the two genuine directors on the Burisma board – Anzelika Pasenidou and Riginos Kharalambus. These are genuine in the sense that the Americans on the board – David Apter, Devon Archer, and Hunter Biden — are not, because Pasenidou and Kharalambus directly represent the control shareholder.
An investigation of Pasenidou and Kharalambus (aka Charalambous) uncovers a fresh chain of offshore entities in which they are also board directors or executives. There is no overlap between this chain and the Zlochevsky one pursued by the UK investigators. So where, and to whom, does the Pasenidou-Kharalambus chain lead?....
....MUCH MORE
