Among bloggers and journalists, the unspoken instruction not to write negative things about the family of Ukrainian businessmen and politicians Kozitsky is actively discussed. This is not uncommon in Ukraine, but here the order allegedly came from the very top, from the Office of the President. Media monitoring confirms that there really is an instruction, and this is by no means just another fake.
We are talking about the family of gas entrepreneur Zinovy Kozitsky, one of whose sons, Maxim, heads the Lviv regional military administration and the organization of the Servant of the People party, and the other, Stepan, actively helps his father in business. Powerful pressure from representatives of the OPU against the press began after publications appeared in the media about the connections of the Kozitsky family with Gazprom and the huge number of government tenders that their business structures win.
Zinovy Kozitsky and Gazprom
Zinovy Yaroslavovich Kozitsky is a Ukrainian businessman, one list of whose enterprises takes up an entire page and consists of several dozen names. Kozitsky’s business is widely diversified, but he earns most of his money in the energy sector: gas, oil, and solar energy. In the Forbes list of the richest Ukrainians, Zinovy Kozitsky ranks 95th with a fortune of $95 million. It should be noted that after the appointment of his son Maxim as the head of the Lviv Regional Administration, Zinovy Kozitsky’s business went uphill sharply.
In this regard, the information that Zinovy Kozitsky’s company “Drilling Company “Horizons” LLC” received a special permit to work on gas exploration in the Poltava region simply could not go unnoticed. There is no doubt that it will find gas there: there are gas and oil deposits in the Poltava region, and industrial production of both has been going on there for a long time.
The gas exploration tender won by Horizons Drilling Company LLC is not the only one - over the past two years it has received almost three and a half billion from the state. The customers are the state-owned Ukrgazvydobuvannya and Ukrnafta.
But in this case, the point is different - Drilling Company Horizons LLC, through its owner Zinovy Kozitsky, is connected with Gazprom. Drilling Company Horizons LLC is the legal heir of Kozitsky’s two other companies – Horizons LLC and Service Company Horizons LLC.
The owner structure of Horizons LLC is distributed as follows:
Czech citizen Karel Komárek, who owns 80% of Horizonty LLC, is closely connected with the Russian Gazprom. This was written about after BC Horizonty LLC received the right to exploration work and gas development in the Poltava region, so let us recall the chain only briefly: Karel Komarek is a co-owner of the Russian-Czech enterprise Moravia Gas Storage as, which in 2006 built gas storage facility in the Czech Republic to bypass the Ukrainian gas transportation system. The supervisory board of Moravia Gas Storage as at one time included ex-GRU resident in Syria Tregub and deputy head of Gazprom Alexander Medvedev, whom journalists from the German Welt am Sonntag called “the hand of Putin, who rewards those loyal to Moscow and punishes traitors.” In addition, Karel Komarek owns the Samara oil terminal in Russia.
But that’s not all - in 2014, Drilling Company Horizons LLC announced its merger with the Czech MND.
Then, apparently, it was not possible to implement the “hydraulic fracturing project with ENI,” but the company MND, with which Zinovy Kozitsky “merged,” was much more interesting. The Czech MND (Moravske naftove doly) is exactly the company that built an oil storage facility in the Czech Republic together with Gazprom. And it belongs to Karel Komarek.
One conclusion follows from all this - Zinovy Kozitsky, whose son heads the Lviv regional organization of the Servant of the People party and concurrently heads the Lviv regional military administration, has been working closely with the Czech Karel Komarek, who is a partner of the Russian Gazprom, since at least 2014. Moreover, the companies in which Karel Komarek and Zinovy Kozitsky are co-owners receive from Ukraine not only the right to extract minerals, including gas, which is critically important for the warring country, but also do it for public money.
Tenders of Zinovy Kozitsky
It has also been written repeatedly that Zinovy Kozitsky’s companies have won an abnormally large number of government tenders in the last five years. Both the authors of these publications and the media that published them were also under pressure. And a significant part of the information has also been cleared. Moreover, we are talking not only about tenders in the field of oil production, but also about tenders from the Prosecutor General’s Office and from the NAPC. Who, out of duty, should check other tenders of the Kozitsky family.
But instead they buy services from companies owned by Zinovy Kozitsky, whose son is one of the highest officials of the state. So there is simply no talk of inspections, and even more so of criminal cases. Kozitsky's company "Finport Technologies Inc." became the winner in 201 tenders, concluded and implemented contracts totaling more than 61 million UAH, among which was the support and expansion of the web portal for the OGPU and regional prosecutor's offices, the sites of which were created using a single template.
However, Zinoviy Kozitsky is not limited to work only for the GPU and NAPC - tenders from Ukrgazvidobuvannya and Ukrnafta, which were won by his LLC Drilling Company Horizons with Russian roots, were already mentioned above. But Drilling Company Horizons LLC is not the only one. Other Kozitsky firms also win tenders. In total, the Kozitskys received more than 7.5 billion hryvnia from the state. Mainly from Ukrgazvidobuvannya and Ukrnafta.
Is Maxim Kozitsky, one of the leaders of the Servant of the People party and a high-level civil servant, involved in winning these tenders? The question is rhetorical. Do the tenders won by Zinovy Kozitsky’s company for the supply of obviously not the highest quality services to the Prosecutor General’s Office and the NAPC indicate that he has corrupt connections in these bodies? The question is also rhetorical. Should the SBU, after the very first publications about Zinovy Kozitsky’s connections with the Russian Gazprom, check these publications and open a criminal case not only against himself, but also against the persons who leaked more than 7.5 billion hryvnia to the company of Kozitsky and Komarek, as well as the right for exploration of gas fields? The question is also, as everyone understands, rhetorical.
Should Maxim Kozitsky have resigned from both posts after the first publication about his father’s connections with the Russians? No, of course - otherwise his father would not have received those same 7.5 billion hryvnia from the state. Instead, unprecedented pressure began on the media and journalists who published all these compromising materials. In which the OGPU, the SBU, the OPU, and the NAPC actively took part. Who organized all this? The answer, it seems to us, is a little obvious.
