2 Million for Gontarevs

In 2013-2014 Valeriya Gontareva performed secret repayments of her husband’s debts to high-ranking officials in the country. The financial amount of the repayments reached 2 million USD.

That money was not indicated either in the declarations of the couple or in the declarations of their family’s creditors due to its illegal sources that led to Poroshenko.

The information I’m posting below was coming out of the correspondence the couple carried on in 2013 while sorting private things out and getting ready for the divorce.

At that time Oleh and Valeriya Gontarevs faced the issue of property division including their assets in Crimea I’d made public not long ago.

To cut a long story short, Oleh Gontarev borrowed 1.5 mln USD from his friends and partners and didn’t manage to pay it back. He needed the finances to invest into the development of his music business, but the husband of the NBU head went bankrupt on it.

Besides the debt he had to pay off 20% of the annual income to the creditors that made 1.8 mln USD in total.

However, all the money was being repaid by Valeriya Gontareva as her husband turned out to be an easy rider with a church mouse status. That line was a citation from their correspondence.

Well, there were no official data on payments as all the money was in black cash.

So, on January 16, 2013 Valeriya Gontareva wrote a letter to Petro Chernyshov. At that time he occupied a position of CEO at the beer brewing company ‘Carlsberg Ukraine’ (from 2014 to 2018 he has headed the company ‘Kyivstar’ as its CEO).

Gontareva notified him in that letter that she was fully responsible of her husband’s debt in the amount of 390k USD since then. She was obliged to have it paid off till 2014 sticking to the following schedule: June 2013 – 100k USD, December 2013 – 100k USD, June 2014 – 100k USD, December 2014 – 90k USD.

As any decent wife would do she forwarded that correspondence to her husband adding a sneering comment in the message with a recommendation to sing a song ‘I’m finally free’.

According to the schedule of payments one part of the debt in the amount of 190k USD was paid off in 2014 when Gontareva had already headed NBU and her income/obligations had been subject to declaring. However, there were no existing or paid off debts of hers or her family members according to section 6 ‘Information about financial obligations’ of her declaration for 2014. Simply put, that sum was concealed and not declared.

A bit later in July 2013, Valeriya Gontareva let her husband know that the debt in the amount of 430k USD had been completely paid off to Oleksandr Sklyarov, current member of the National Commission for the State Regulation of Communications and Informatization, and he had no financial claims any more. That statement was notarized.

From August 2010 till February 2013 Sklyarov had occupied executive positions at PJSC PFTS UA-EXCHANGE the owner of which was Moscow Exchange MMVB-RTS (the Russian Federation). I didn’t manage to find out the amount of income Olexandr Sklyarov had received in 2013 as at the time he had not been a public servant. But according to his declaration of income for 2014 Sklyarov was far from being a poor man. In 2014 his income reached 678k UAH, he also had 2.4mln UAH in his bank accounts, 1.4mln UAH was held in securities and 45k UAH in the charter fund. He also spent 1.6mln UAH on buying a car.

If we convert the amount paid by Valeriya Gontareva from USD to UAH regarding the currency exchange rate in July 2013 it would be 3.5mln UAH that Sklyarov received from Gontareva and in total it all made only 94% of the income Sklyarov declared in 2014 including shares and placement.

Besides, Gontareva notified her husband of the receipt confirming money transfer from Oleh Gontarev to a man who later ditched the husband of the NBU head. In that very correspondence she told Oleh that the receipt was at Ivano-Frankivsk Court. And the name of that man who had played a bad game with the husband of the Head of the National Bank of Ukraine was Valera. Gontareva let Oleh know that she was aimed at winning the trial and wanted to pin the whole debt on that rascal and then find him applying to Interpol.

In September 2013 Oleh Gontarev was in a hectic correspondence battle with Valeriya Gontareva. It gave explanations why the million debts had actually emerged. Having been bored with banking Oleh created a project that was connected with the music industry. Its name was the Club but he had to shut it down as the project was not profitable.

To start that kind of business up Oleh Gontarev needed finances that were anonymously borrowed behind the back of his wife and the creditors were exactly her friends and partners. The money was lent for an interest rate of 20% per annum. So the debt amount transformed from 1.5mln USD to 1.8mln USD.

In the view of Oleh, all of the creditors turned out to be rather attracted to money and Volodymyr Demchyshyn, Valeriya Gontareva’s partner at ICU, future member of the National Regulatory Commission on the Energy and Utilities of Ukraine and Minister of Energy, surpassed all of them in that attraction. He showed himself as the greediest and the ‘smartest’ one. And he didn’t need such friends as Petro Chernyshov, some man by the name ‘Bodya’ and Mr. Sklyarov at all.

And there’s the most interesting part of all that. Till September 2013 Gontareva didn’t have a flicker idea about Demchyshyn’s credits to Oleh Gontarev and the debts in the amount of 1.4mln USD that her husband had to pay off.

Reading the correspondence as of September 4, 2013 it became obvious that the debt of Oleh Gontarev to Demchyshyn had not been paid off and the sum had been rather substantial (supposedly something around 400k USD). Oleh himself tried to pay it back but he got no money at that moment. In course of the hectic exchange of messages Valeriya Gontareva offered him a civilized divorced and she was ready to pay the money back to Demchyshyn within two years (according to the similar schedule that had been applied to Chernyshow) while her husband was waiting for partner Valera to give 1.8mln USD back.

So Demchysyn, former Minister of Energy, also functioned as a creditor of the Gontarevs. However, he decided to conceal the interests he had received out of the lent amount and didn’t include those data in the section 2 ‘Income Information’ of the declarations for 2013 and 2014. The supposed amount was 400k USD that exceeded the official declared income of Demchyshyn in 2013 several times.

So there appeared several unquestionable facts:

· In 2013-2014 Valeriya Gontareva paid debts of her husband in the amount of 1.8mln USD off that made at least 14.6mln UAH while her total income in 2014 including sale of shares was 26.3mln UAH. But the Head of the National Bank of Ukraine ‘forgot’ to declare those amounts and it should be considered legally as declaring of deliberately faked information entailing criminal liability.

· Being creditors of Gontareva’s husband and civil servants at the same time, Demchyshyn and Sklyarov made a deliberate choice not to declare the sums of the repaid money and interests they had received in course of that deal following Gontareva’s example.

There is one more conclusion one can make having read the correspondence of the Gontarevs as to those debts debates. All the people who surrounded Gontareva had roots in Russia or were somehow connected to Russian businessmen. Judge for yourself:

· Mr. Chernyshov had Russian citizenship and worked for Russian companies. He applied for Ukrainian citizenship after Gontareva’s appointment to a post of Head of the NBU and in one year he was granted with it by Petro Poroshenko.

· Mr. Sklyarov governed the PJSC PFTS UA-EXCHANGE that was owned by Moscow Exchange. That exchange was suspected in buying and selling the government bonds for striking exchange deals aimed at covering illegally obtained income. Sklyarov himself became a member of NCSRCI (National Commission for the State Regulation of Communications and Informatization) in May 2014 after Poroshenko had taken power.

· Mr. Demchyshyn had some connections in annexed Crimea. He assigned people suspected in cooperation with the LDPR (Lugansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic). Moreover, there is a reasonable question popping up whether his appointment as Head of the National Regulatory Commission on the Energy and Utilities of Ukraine was done with the support of Valeriya Gontareva against the family debt of 2014 or not.

Illegal income sources of Gontareva heading the NBU can be proven by the purchase that was made by her bankrupt husband in 2016 who spent 12.5mln UAH for a 316 m² house with no official sources of income of his own.

As all of us can see the things (and private life) between Oleh and Valeriya went much better out of a sudden after Valeriya had come to power. At first her husband acquired a place for dwelling and a bit later in 2018 Valeriya bought an estate in London for 30mln USD herself.

According to the article 366-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, deliberate declaring of false information, the main characters of my investigation namely Gontareva, Sklyarov and Demchyshyn are accused of, entails:

a fine of 2,500 to 3,000 times the individual income tax exemption limit or community works for a period of 240 hours or imprisonment for a term of up to two years with deprivation of the right to occupy certain positions or carry out certain activity for a period of up to three years.

If the National Agency finds out facts of possible illegal enrichment while checking the aforementioned personalities as to the article 368-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, the punishment will be as follows:

Imprisonment for a term of up to two years with deprivation of the right to occupy certain positions or carry out certain activity of up to three years with confiscation of property

I hope these guys will get my message :-)