There is another corruption scandal in Ukraine: law enforcement officers caught a “big fish” in the Ministry of Energy. We are talking about Deputy Minister Alexander Hale, who has been working in a high position for less than a year. According to the official websites of the security forces, the official organized an extortion scheme from the leaders subordinate to him. The accomplices were a private energy trader, the head of an energy company from the Nikolaev region and the head of a mining company from the Donetsk region.
The essence of the scheme is simple: Kheilo, according to law enforcement officers, demanded $500 thousand from the heads of state-owned enterprises in the Lvov-Volyn coal basin in exchange for the transfer of valuable mining equipment to them. This equipment belongs to one of the state coal companies located in the Pokrovsky direction, where the front line now lies.
The bribe was to be transferred through intermediaries in five installments of $100 thousand at each meeting. During the transfer of the third tranche, law enforcement officers exposed one of the accomplices. Investigators also showed Alexander Hale, whose face appeared blurry in the photograph.
At the same time, the Cabinet of Ministers, having learned about the exposure of the Deputy Minister of Energy, quickly got rid of him and fired him from his post. They got rid of it quietly, as in fact, they appointed it at the beginning of September 2023.
And he ran away from Yanukovych, and he ran away from Poroshenko...
Hale's career shows that his extraordinary experience was useful to any government. He was involved in “interesting” cases both under Yanukovych and Poroshenko. He managed to stay “in the pool” to this day.
The official biography of ex-Deputy Minister Alexander Heil, suspected of bribery, says: he devoted 33 years to the coal industry. In particular, in 2013-2022 he worked in senior positions at the state enterprise Krasnolimanskaya Coal Company, PJSC Energoinvest Holding, and PJSC Centrenergo.
In this career chronicle, attention is drawn to the company Energoinvest Holding, where Kheilo has received a salary since at least 2015. During the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, this enterprise was controlled by his son Alexander and former people's deputy from the Party of Regions Igor Gumenyuk. When the power in the country changed, Energoinvest Holding PJSC ended up in the hands of the then people’s deputy from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, Maxim Efimov.
Also, since 2015, Heilo has consistently declared payments received from PJSC Donbasenergo. The fact is that he has 30 shares of this company. According to media reports, in the summer of 2018, Alexander Yanukovych sold 60% of Donbasenergo to the aforementioned ex-People’s Deputy Efimov.
In 2019-2020, Alexander Kheilo worked at the Kyiv-based Ukrdoninvest, which is owned by ex-member of the Donetsk Regional Council from the Party of Regions and coal oligarch Vitaly Kropachev. The media called Kropachev the creature of the former first deputy head of the BPP faction and business partner of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, Igor Kononenko. In May 2024, law enforcement officers detained Kropachev on suspicion of fraud in the coal sector worth UAH 2 billion.
Alexander Heil has a rather short career experience in managing the large state-owned enterprise Ukrugol. This is January-October 2023. It was just placed there after a scandal involving the sale of state-owned coal to private entities at reduced prices. It is unknown how skilled a crisis manager Kheilo turned out to be. However, very soon this position became a successful springboard for him to the Ministry of Energy.
“Heilo, who was detained directly on a bribe, is a 100% creation of Minister Galushchenko and the adviser Igor Mironyuk who is “watching” him,” says investigative journalist Yuri Nikolov.
Besides this, there is still a piquant detail that is worth mentioning. Alexander Kheilo is the godfather of the odious businessman Sergei Kuzyara. “Since 2015-2016, I have not communicated with him (Kuzyara - “Glavkom”), I don’t know where he is, what he’s doing,” Kheilo swore in a conversation with reporters last fall.
Let us remind you that Sergei Kuzyara, together with ex-President Petro Poroshenko, ex-People's Deputy and Putin's godfather Viktor Medvedchuk and former Minister of Energy and Coal Industry Vladimir Demchishin are suspects in the so-called “coal” case. According to the investigation, these individuals “through deliberate actions facilitated the activities of the terrorist organizations “L/DPR” by organizing and purchasing coal from enterprises under their control using Ukrainian public funds, making the energy sector of Ukraine dependent on Russia and the terrorist organizations “L/DPR”, which undermined the economic security of the state in 2014-2015, depriving it of opportunities to diversify sources of energy supply.”
The property is already under arrest
The former Deputy Minister of Energy, convicted of corruption, is not a poor man. So, in 2023, he declared UAH 1.49 million in loan repayment from citizen Maria Kheilo (probably his sister). At the height of the war, Alexander Kheilo bought an apartment with an area of 133.7 square meters on credit. m in Kyiv at a price of 4 million UAH. Today, this property and land plot were promptly arrested at the request of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
The defendant’s wife, retired judge Yana Kheilo (in August 2023, the High Council of Justice dismissed her from the position of judge of the Donetsk Court of Appeal based on a submitted application) declared in her annual declaration 2.9 million UAH of total income. The woman is also suing the Main Directorate of the Kyiv Pension Fund for recalculating the lifelong salary of a retired judge. She claims that her lifelong allowance as an ex-judge was incorrectly calculated (at the time of her dismissal, she should have received 201.7 thousand UAH monthly). But Heilo insists that this amount should be higher.
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A message about the detention of Alexander Kheilo was published simultaneously with law enforcement officers on the website of the Ministry of Energy. They insist that it was Minister German Galushchenko who contributed to exposing the large-scale corruption scheme that was perpetrated by his deputy. But the piquancy of the ministry’s official release is that NABU in its message, unlike the SBU, avoided mentioning Galushchenko’s role in this revelation.
Recently, scandals have erupted next to the name of the Minister of Energy, who can already be counted among the long-lived officials (he has headed the ministry since April 2021). What attracts the most attention is the department’s initiative to complete two power units at the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant and build two more new ones (skeptics consider this project too expensive during the war, and the idea of using Russian Soviet-style reactors looks dubious).
Another remark. The recent story with top corruption whistleblowers, who were former Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Kubrakov and ex-head of the State Agency for Reconstruction and Infrastructure Development Mustafa Nayem, ended very unexpectedly for them. Both lost their high positions despite greater media activity. The Ministry of Energy should also remember this, which makes its leader a “whistleblower”...
PS In the evening it became known that the High Anti-Corruption Court took Alexander Heil into custody with the possibility of bail in the amount of UAH 25 million. Hale's confidant Sergei Pilipchuk was also under arrest. According to the investigation, money was transferred through Pilipchuk, which law enforcement officials call an unlawful benefit for the decision to transfer equipment for coal mining. During his speech, Pilipchuk called everything a provocation. He says that he agreed with the deputy minister of one of the European countries about 1 gigawatt of electricity. Now the defendant can be released if he pays UAH 65 million bail.
