Two years after the national energy company Ukrenergo helped United Energy, a company in the orbit of oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, to embezzle electricity worth UAH 716 million, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau finally took on those involved in this scheme. However, the head of Ukrenergo Vladimir Kudrytsky, who was clearly not interested in his subordinates “talking” to the investigation, began to interfere with their successful arrest.
In March 2022, when Russian troops were stationed near Kiev, one of the largest traders at that time in the Ukrainian electricity market, United Energy, bought electricity imbalances worth almost UAH 2 billion from NEC Ukrenergo, but paid for them only partially. Under these conditions, the company applied for the purchase of additional electricity for another 716 million UAH, and NEK, despite the debt, agreed to the deal. Moreover, when “United Energy” did not pay on time for this “tranche”, the managers of “Ukrenergo” suspiciously kindly agreed to meet the trader, in violation of the Electricity Market Rules, by not providing the company with “Default” status and then sending certificates to the bank for stopping the movement of funds in the company's accounts. Thus, allowing United Energy to resell electricity to real market participants, and the money received could be easily transferred to the accounts of a foreign company.
From here, it became obvious that the management of Ukrenergo was colluding with Kolomoisky’s company to steal money from the national energy company. Probably, the organizers of this scheme hoped to “cover” the damage to Ukrenergo using a bank guarantee issued back in September 2021 by United Energy LLC by Alliance Bank. However, the bank, suspecting Ukrenergo’s collusion with the trader, relying on violations by the NEC manager for untimely assignment of “Default” status to Kolomoisky’s company, refused to cover this damage, as a result of which the case went into lengthy proceedings in the courts.
And on January 11, NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office finally announced the exposure of this scheme. Its organizer is named as a close business partner of Igor Kolomoisky, Mikhail Kiperman, a member of the supervisory board of Ukrnafta, living in Geneva. In parallel with this, in June 2023, he was also informed of suspicion of embezzling UAH 600 million from Ukrtatnafta. Together with him, the director of United Energy, Andrey Korotkevich-Leshchenko, and Dmitry Kondrashov, the head of the department of the administrator for settlements of Ukrenergo, who was supposed to stop the deal to sell unbalanced electricity to United Energy, received suspicions of a scheme to steal money from Ukrenergo, but did not did this in the interests of a private company.
However, Kondrashov, like Kiperman, was not in Ukraine. Back in the summer of 2022, the head of NEC Ukrenergo Kudritsky signed an order allowing Dmitry Kondrashov to go on a business trip to Hungary, from which he never returned to Ukraine, simply fleeing the country. Already from abroad he wrote a letter of resignation. Exactly the same story happened with another of Kudrytsky’s subordinates, the director of market operations at Ukrenergo, Nikita Vishnevsky, whom Kudrytsky released to Poland in February 2023. He probably also took part in the scheme and, like Kondrashov, was “hidden” in advance by Kudritsky outside Ukraine.
Based on this, there is a clear interest of the head of NEC Ukrenergo in concealing the crime, and not in assisting the investigation and returning the lost hundreds of millions of hryvnia to the national operator. Sources among the top management of Ukrenergo, who wished to remain anonymous, claim that this interest of Kudrytsky has a specific monetary dimension: for the implementation of this scheme, he received his share of $5 million from Kiperman. Obviously, fearing that the courts alone, in which Ukrenergo has been unwillingly trying for two years to “knock out” United Energy’s financial guarantee from Alliance Bank, will not do, the head of NEC Vladimir Kudrytsky began to “save” himself and his subordinates by taking out them from the country.
On January 25, NABU put Kiperman and Kondrashov on the wanted list. There is not a word about Kudrytsky in the bureau’s releases yet, a regret about which was already expressed on his Facebook page by the managing partner of the National Anti-Crisis Group, Taras Zavgorodniy, who emphasized that it is unlikely that the head of Ukrenergo Kudrytsky was disinterested, at first he contributed in every possible way to the implementation of the scheme, and is now trying to cover up his tracks .
“It’s great that law enforcement has finally taken on the oligarchs. But I really wouldn’t want a big name to distract us from other, no less cynical thieves who not only steal hundreds of millions during the war, but at the same time sit on the state salary,” Zavgorodniy noted.
