Former head of the Vinnytsia Regional State Administration Sergei Borzov and his wife “Servant of the People” Irina Borzova earn money in occupied Crimea
They legalize these unofficial incomes through individual entrepreneurs of their daughters, who have just reached adulthood. Having only their small civil servant salaries from official income, they buy expensive foreign cars, land plots and pay for the education of their daughter Anna Borzova. All this is possible in the third year of the war thanks to Irina’s father, Naum Barula, who has close contact with the President of Ukraine.
April 2024. At one of the gas stations in the city of Vinnitsa, the chairman of the Vinnitsa regional military administration, Sergei Borzov, according to some reports, in a drunken state, got into an altercation with four guys. Obviously, in order to teach them a lesson, using his position of power, Borzov summoned representatives of the TCC to the place, who began handing agendas to the opponents of the head of the region.
Video from surveillance cameras that recorded the incident spread across social networks, whose users were outraged by Borzov’s behavior, calling him a “local king.” The recording recorded how the Vinnitsa “governor”, together with his comrade, Deputy Chairman of the Tulchinsky Regional State Administration Mikhail Murga (who was detained by SBI investigators in February 2024 on suspicion of extortion and taking a bribe of 4 thousand dollars), drove up to a gas station. The altercation with her visitors is not visible in the video, but Borzov can be seen calling somewhere, after which several military personnel arrive at the scene, to whom the head of the Vinnytsia region points his finger at someone who needs to be served with a summons.
“That evening, four guys will receive summonses only because they met the angry and drunken Sergei Borzov on their way,” commentators testified. On June 25, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky dismissed Sergei Borzov from the post of chairman of the Vinnytsia Regional State Administration.
Who is Sergei Borzov?
Sergei Borzov, like the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky, is a former player of the “Club of the Cheerful and Resourceful.” His first official place of work was Game LTD Company LLC, where in July-August 1997 he was a DJ. Then he moved to Crimea, where in Sudak he worked for three years as an administrator of the company of Russian Alexander Maslyakov “AMIK-Ukraine”. From 2006 to 2011 he led the KVN team “Vinnytsia Peppers”, and later the “Ukrainian National Team”.
Borzov’s path into politics was not as fast and successful as that of the current Ukrainian president. In 2006, he tried to become a deputy of the Vinnitsa city council from the Liberal Ukraine party, but failed. Five years later he was a candidate for deputy of the regional council from Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s Front for Change. But he also did not get the required number of votes.
But at the beginning of June 2014, comedian and historian by education Sergei Borzov, director of the KVN teams “Vinnitsa Peppers” and “Ukrainian National Team”, who worked in the Russian creative association “Alexander Maslyakov and Company”, nevertheless began his political career when President Peter Poroshenko, who sponsored the Vinnitsa Peppers team, appointed him deputy head of the State Administration of Affairs. A year later, Sergei Borzov became the acting head of the State Administration, where he immediately, as befits a typical Ukrainian civil servant, began to enrich himself through his position.
How Sergei Borzov appropriated a state apartment in the center of Kyiv
Literally a few months after Borzov’s appointment as head of the State Administration, the state enterprise Ukrzhitloservis, subordinate to the State Administration of Affairs, issued a certificate of ownership to Sergei Borzov for an elite 187-meter apartment in a high-rise building on Lesi Ukrainki Boulevard in the center of Kyiv.
As SBI investigators saw, the apartment was illegally taken out of service. So, in fact, the head of the State Administration received free ownership of a state-owned apartment worth 10 million UAH, where he immediately registered, in addition to himself, his wife and four other close relatives.
As soon as this became known in 2016, President Poroshenko fired Borzov from the State Administration, and SBI investigators opened criminal proceedings on this fact under Part 2 of Article 364 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine “Abuse of official position, resulting in grave consequences.”
However, the case did not reach its logical conclusion, as very often happens in Ukraine: the last mention in the Unified Court Register for the said criminal proceedings is contained in the resolution dated December 16, 2019 on providing NABU detectives with access to data on telecommunication services of Borzov’s relatives, who allegedly lived with him at the time of privatization of the apartment. Since then, the investigation seems to have come to a standstill: no data on the judicial review of the proceedings has been recorded anymore. At the same time, the almost 190-meter Kiev apartment is contained in Borzov’s declarations to this day - no one took it away from him.
But the media contains information about an attempt to remove negative references to Borzov from the information space in the context of this criminal case. Probably, the ground was being prepared for his new appointment, because it was in 2019, after his victory in the presidential elections, that Vladimir Zelensky returned Sergei Borzov to the post of head of the State Administration of Affairs.
Despite the corruption scandal, Borzov confidently joined the new president’s team: in 2020, he ran for mayor of Vinnitsa from his Servant of the People party, but again Vinnytsia residents did not show confidence in him, giving the former KVN member only 6% of the votes. With such a rating and track record, the president
Zelensky on June 19, 2020 appointed Sergei Borzov as head of the Vinnytsia regional state administration, despite petitions about Borzov’s corrupt past.
Naum Barulya. How a Russian passport did not prevent you from being close to the President of Ukraine
The logical question will be: what or who convinced President Zelensky to take on his team a person who has already framed the former president (and as a result managed to do the same with the current one)? There must be very good reasons for a person who became the head of state on the image of an opponent of corruption and old people to get dirty with the personality of Sergei Borzov.
Well, yes, they both came out of KVN, you say. And you will be partly right. Because, apparently, Borzov’s guide in politics is his father-in-law Naum Barulya, a Ukrainian producer and long-time partner of Vladimir Zelensky in the 95th Quarter. It was together with Barulya that Zelensky founded the TV show “League of Laughter” and produced a number of famous Ukrainian television series. Therefore, it is not surprising that Baruli’s son-in-law easily found himself on the Servant of the People team.
And not only the son-in-law, but also the daughter herself. Irina Borzova, the wife of the former head of the Vinnytsia region, became a people’s deputy of Ukraine from the presidential party in 2019 and heads the Verkhovna Rada subcommittee on state youth policy.
However, is it possible to surprise anyone else in Ukraine with nepotism? Hardly. But the fact that the protégé of the spouses of Ukrainian politicians, the Borzovs, still has a Russian passport to this day, will perhaps still evoke certain emotions.
63-year-old Naum Barulya received a Russian citizen passport on April 28, 2009 No. 53 09 828555 and tax identification number 561210429784, when checking which on the official website of the Federal Tax Service you can verify that the status of Barulya’s Russian passport is valid to this day. In addition, Barulya has housing in annexed Crimea: his registration address according to his Russian passport is the city of Sudak, st. Oktyabrskaya, 4, apt. 4.
How the Borzovs and Barulis earn money in Crimea and pay millions to the Russian budget
The Profile-N company was once founded by Baruli’s daughter Irina Borzova, when, after graduating from university, she decided to start doing business in Crimea, which was still free of Russians. “Profile-N” owns the chain of cafes “Vkusny Ezh” and a hotel in Sudak. After the annexation of Crimea, Borzova, despite the fact that she became a deputy of the Vinnitsa City Council from the party of Vladimir Groysman, continued to conduct business in Sudak, re-registering it according to Russian laws. Therefore, all these years, the cafe and hotel in Sudak not only bring profit to the Baruli-Borzov family in Russian rubles, but also replenish the Russian budget, from which the war against Ukraine is being waged.
So, in 2016, Irina Borzova, already a deputy of the Vinnytsia City Council from the party of Vladimir Groysman, received a profit from this company of about 600 thousand rubles, and in 2017 she paid taxes and contributions to the aggressor country in the amount of 275,400 rubles, more than Ukrainian politician, in fact, not only recognized the Russian occupation power, but also financed it.
Borzova left this business only in 2019, when she left for the Verkhovna Rada (it’s not nice for a Ukrainian parliamentarian to pay taxes to the enemy of her country), but it was continued by her father Naum Barulya, who became 100% owner of the enterprise. According to Russian registers, the Crimean business of the Baruli-Borzovs is only thriving: the income of Profil-N LLC for 2023 increased by 37% and amounted to 3.5 million Russian rubles.
Today the company "Profil-N" is a food establishment on the central embankment of Sudak called "Coolness". The stylistic design of the establishment is permeated with “nostalgia for the USSR.” The design is replete with appropriate posters, portraits of heroes of Soviet films, and the cafe logo is decorated with a red star.
According to the Russian Spark registry, the cafe’s income over the past 5 years amounted to more than 15 million rubles, of which in 2022 - 2.5 million rubles. From 2019 to 2022, the company accumulated more than a million rubles in taxes for the Russian budget, of which the occupiers’ treasury was replenished by half a million after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In addition, for 5 years after the occupation of Crimea, until 2019, Naum Barulya co-owned the large hotel-restaurant “Parus” on the central embankment of Sudak. His partners in this business all this time were pro-Kremlin politicians. In particular, Anatoly Sinyuk, a former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Crimea from the Party of Regions, who supported the annexation of the peninsula in 2014 and subsequently received suspicion of high treason. In 2018, when Barulya and Sinyuk jointly owned a restaurant in Sudak, Ukraine imposed sanctions against the latter. After the full-scale invasion, Sinyuk supported Putin's actions.
Another partner of the League of Laughter producer, Boris Deitch, is a former people’s deputy from the Party of Regions, who also supported the seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula and called for a pseudo-referendum to vote for the annexation of Crimea to Russia. Back in 2012, Boris Deitch and Naum Barulya, together with KVN players, performed in Sudak under the flags of the Party of Regions.
Now Parus LLC is a profitable company, it is owned by Anatoly Sergeevich Sinyuk, Sergey Borisovich Deich (son of Boris Deitch), Elena Abramovna Braude, Igor Alekseevich Kosmarov (all founders have a Russian Taxpayer Identification Number), and Olga Ivanovna Demitaeva, the head.
According to open data, until recently Naum Barulya was also the owner of a number of companies with Crimean registration, in one of these companies - Attraction LLC, which owns an amusement park in Sudak - his wife Zhanna Vladimirovna Barulya also had a 5% share in this enterprise.
Are the Borzovs using the sole proprietorship of their daughter Anna Borzova to legalize unofficial income?
In the context of this, interesting facts also emerge from Sergei Borzov’s declarations in recent years. According to them, in 2020, Anna Borzova, the 22-year-old daughter of Irina and Sergei, opened a sole proprietorship, which operates restaurants and provides mobile food services. And immediately this individual entrepreneur began to bring millions in income to the girl who had just reached adulthood at that time: 1 million 311 thousand UAH in 2021, 1 million 112 thousand UAH in 2022, and in 2023 - 1 million 83 thousand UAH
At the same time, analysis of information in the public domain does not in any way confirm that Anna Borzova is really engaged in some kind of restaurant business. But it was discovered that, having graduated from Vinnitsa State Pedagogical University, she now works as an acting assistant with her grandfather, Russian citizen Naum Barulya: they worked together on the creation of the Ukrainian comedy series “To be honest” from the Kvartal-95 studio.
That is, from all this one gets the impression that student Anna Borzova is simply used by her parents to legalize their unofficial income - probably from their business in Crimea. The gift of Naum Baruli to his granddaughter Anna Borzova in the form of 2.5 million UAH, declared in 2021 by Sergei Borzov, also suggests this idea. Also, for example, as a gift from his mother, a citizen of the Russian Federation living in Crimea, the Odessa judge Dmitry Tishko, lenient towards Russians, legalized his income.
How Irina Borzova appropriated city land on the river bank in Vinnitsa for the construction of a restaurant
Remember the incident at the gas station involving Borzov? Then he called a whole group of TCC employees with one call late in the evening. The close ties of the former chairman of the Vinnytsia Regional State Administration with the TCC could be traced not only in this shameful story, but also in another, no less disgusting one. In 2023, the chairman of the Vinnitsa TCC, Roman Poterlevich, according to the SBI, appropriated one of the eight apartments provided by the local developer Vladimir Khomenko for the families of military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
As a result, military families actually moved into seven apartments, and the father of the TCC chairman moved into one of them. In August 2023, the State Bureau of Investigation seized this apartment through the court, and the developer Khomenko stated that Poterlevich took possession of the apartment on the orders of Regional State Administration Chairman Sergei Borzov - they say it was his bribe to the head of the TsK.
But it was not only “badly located” housing that haunted the Borzov family. In 2015, their friend and partner Viktor Ishchenko was the director of the state enterprise “Center of the State Land Cadastre”, when the Vinnitsa City Council, of which Irina Borzova was a deputy, leased him a land plot of 800 square meters in a picturesque location on the banks of the Southern Bug in Vinnitsa — on Uspenskogo Street near the dam. After some time, this land plot and two more next to it - with an area of 523 square meters and 3600 square meters, were already owned by Saibor LLC, the founder of which at that time was Irina Borzova herself, and now - her daughter Anna Borzova with a share in 55%.
In 2016, according to media reports, construction of an elite restaurant began on these sites. According to the construction passport, the customer of the project was Viktor Valentinovich Ishchenko. In the declaration for 2016, deputy Irina Borzova indicated that she spent her money on the construction of a facility with an area of 686 square meters, owned by Viktor Ishchenko. That is, the tandem of Irina Borzova with the head of the State Land Cadastre Center allowed them to carry out a scheme with the withdrawal of city land in a prestigious location and build a restaurant on it. How the land, which was owned by the community and leased to Viktor Ishchenko, later ended up in the ownership of deputy Irina Borzova is a big question that should definitely be of interest to law enforcement agencies.
As well as the fact that as soon as Sergei Borzov became the chairman of the Vinnitsa Regional State Administration, the LLC-firm “Alex-2”, owned 50% by his father Nikolai Prodanchuk, and where Sergei Borzov himself once worked in 2002, began to actively win in state tenders in Vinnitsa, in total receiving about 3 million UAH of income from the Vinnitsa budget.
Expensive cars and training in Europe. The Borzovs' expenses are several times higher than their official income.
Already typical for Ukrainian deputies and civil servants is the fact that an analysis of their declarations demonstrates the discrepancy between their official income and their lifestyle. Using their official salaries, they manage to buy expensive cars, land plots and educate their children abroad. The Borzov family is no exception.
For example, according to the declaration for 2016, Irina Borzova purchased a 2016 BMW 520 car worth about 40 thousand US dollars, despite the fact that the joint income of Sergei Borzov and his wife that year was only 23 thousand 170 dollars.
In 2021, Borzov was already more prudent and did not allow the arithmetic of his income and expenses to show negative values. To do this, you can simply underestimate the real value of the property in the declaration, so that the questions “where does the money come from?” do not arise. That year, the chairman of the Vinnytsia Regional State Administration purchased a plot of land with an area of 1,000 square meters next to his house in the village of Selishche, Tyvrovsky district, for exactly 100 thousand UAH ($3,675). His income allowed such a purchase, but the fact is that this plot is located in a picturesque and popular place on the banks of the Southern Bug, there is a forest nearby, and the distance to Vinnitsa is only 7 km. Therefore, the average market value of a similar plot near the river is 1000 US dollars per hundred square meters, that is, its plot should have cost around 10 thousand US dollars, and not 3 times less.
In 2022, the Borzovs bought a 2016 Mercedes-Benz Vito 114 and indicated in the declaration that its price was 15 thousand dollars. But it is impossible to find such a car at this price: its average price on the market varies from 25 to 29 thousand US dollars.
Meanwhile, according to information from Linkedin, the Borzovs' youngest daughter, 18-year-old Elizaveta Borzova, has been receiving a bachelor's degree in international communications from September 2023 at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, the Netherlands. For foreign students, a bachelor's program at this university costs an average of $7.4 thousand per year. Also in this amount you need to include the cost of living in the Netherlands, which averages 1000 - 1600 dollars per month, that is, 12 - 19.2 thousand dollars per year. Therefore, together this will be from 19.4 to 26.6 thousand dollars per year in expenses for a family of civil servants, who officially earns only 1.18 million UAH (about 30 thousand dollars) per year. What do they live for then after such expenses? Is it really the “left” income from business in Crimea, taxed by the Russian state?
By the way, it is interesting that Elizaveta Borzova, like her sister Anna, as soon as she reached adulthood, immediately registered a sole proprietorship (activities: other types of education, activities of intermediaries in the trade of food, drinks and tobacco products, activities of restaurants, provision of mobile services nutrition). It is clear that the 18-year-old Dutch university student is unlikely to be involved in the food trade and restaurant business in Ukraine - most likely, her sole proprietorship is also used to legalize the income of the Borzovs and Naum Baruli.
Considering that Naum Baruli’s close contact with President Zelensky, apparently, has not disappeared anywhere, it is possible that Sergei Borzov, after the scandalous dismissal from the post of head of the Vinnitsa Regional State Administration, will “surface” again somewhere. His father-in-law will continue to earn money in the occupied Crimea and pay taxes to the aggressor country, while his wife will continue to pass laws in the Verkhovna Rada. No matter how it fits into one’s head in the third year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine.
