Millionaire Khmelnitsky will inflate “Zhulyany” at the expense of Kiev residents

The Master-Avia company will benefit from the reconstruction of the capital's airport. She has a dark past.

The capital’s municipality intends to spend UAH 358 million on the reconstruction of the Kyiv airport (Zhulyany) this year and in 2025. Another 136 million will be spent on the construction of an access road to it. And all this against the backdrop of regular protests by Kiev residents against spending on non-critical needs during the war.

First, the cost of many non-critical projects cannot be compared with the billions in defense spending. Secondly, a considerable part of them are really needed. And thirdly, even those cities where enemy bombs do not fall do not have to turn into ruins by the end of the war.

But in the story of burying hundreds of millions in Zhulyany, there are a number of serious questions. In conditions of a full-scale war, the air gates of the capital are closed, and until the end of the war (alas, obviously not very soon), investments in the reconstruction of the airport will not work. However, even after the victory over the aggressor country and the opening of the Ukrainian sky, the investments of Kiev residents in Zhulyany will not return to the capital’s budget. A commercial company and the businessmen behind it with a dubious reputation will make money at the airport.

The airport "Kyiv" (Zhulyany) is owned by LLC "Master-Avia" on a lease basis. This limited liability company was registered in the spring of 2010, a few days before the start of the competition for renting Zhulyan. Then it was the dawn of the corrupt regime of the future state traitor Viktor Yanukovych, so no one was surprised that the tenants were the associates of the pro-Russian president.

The object was so promising in terms of profits that the structure of the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg tried to appeal the results of the competition through the court. But the District Administrative Court of Kyiv then showed unprecedented patriotism, with its decision cementing the fact that Zhulyany would remain under the control of Master Avia for another 49 years (that is, until 2059).

Initially, the founders of Master-Avia were AMC Avalon and Aviagroup LLC, which were part of the orbit of the former people’s deputy from the Party of Regions, millionaire Vasily Khmelnitsky. In 2011, before the authorities took the side of Vasily Ivanovich in his litigation with Vekselberg, he had a new partner in “Zhulyany” - a large businessman from Donbass close to Yanukovych, Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, also known as the criminal “authority” by the nickname Yura Enakievsky (aka Yurets Maloy) and is currently on the wanted list.

Then the corporate alignment in Master-Avia became as follows: 50% from Freelance-Trans LLC, 10.05% from AMC Nika-Invest LLC, the Cyprus offshore Master Avia Holdings (Cyprus) Limited, which is directly behind Vasily Khmelnitsky, received 39.95%.

The founder of Freelance-Trans LLC was the Cyprus company Rexelmo Ltd, whose beneficial owner is Willem Martinus De Beer from South Africa. Until October 2014, Freelance-Trans was registered in Yenakievo (Donetsk region). This company was created in 2011, and its founder was the Cypriot company Ampezza Limited, associated with Yuri Ivanyushchenko. It was subsequently replaced by Rexelmo Ltd.

The founders of AMC Nika-Invest LLC were Atwood-Invest LLC and Gampiona Limited (Tortola). The beneficial owners of AMC Nika-Invest were Cypriot Abraham Petros and ex-deputy of the Kyiv City Council, ex-director of Zhulyan (2009-2011) Denis Kostrzhevsky, business partner of Vasily Khmelnitsky.

As Delovaya Stolitsa wrote, in the spring of 2012, Master Avia acquired a new passenger terminal “A”, after which the company’s business began to improve. At the end of 2012, it served 860 thousand passengers - 83% more than in 2011. And in 2013, passenger traffic more than doubled, to 1.184 million people. At the same time, Master Avia opened a new business terminal to service private flights and, inspired by financial success (in 2013, revenue was about 160 million UAH, and net profit - 50 million UAH), set its sights on large-scale reconstruction to achieve the target 10 million passengers by 2018.

However, this was never destined to come true. In 2014, the Yanukovych regime collapsed, Russian intervention began, Ivanyushchenko, along with his patron, fled to the aggressor country, which annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbass. Passenger traffic at the capital's airport fell at the end of 2014 to 1.1 million people and fell by another 13% in 2015 - to 945 thousand people.

In 2015, Yuriy Ivanyushchenko left Zhulyan, transferring his share in Master Avia to Vasily Khmelnitsky (as of 2023, according to the Clarity Project service, 100% of the company through Master Avia Нoldings (Cyрrus) Limited belongs to Khmelnitsky). It is unlikely that Yura Enakievsky’s departure from the airport was associated with a drop in the profitability of the project - by that time, law enforcement agencies had a lot of questions for Ivanyushchenko regarding a whole bunch of criminal cases.

However, Master-Avia itself began to acquire criminal cases.

On November 26, 2014, the National Police opened criminal proceedings No. 12014100090010737 under Article 190 of the Criminal Code (fraud).

As [high-profile cases] wrote, during the pre-trial investigation, investigators established that in July-December 2014, airport officials allegedly embezzled funds when the company purchased airfield cleaning vehicles. This happened due to the groundless rejection of more profitable and less expensive proposals from manufacturers of airfield special equipment and, on the contrary, the unconditional acceptance of the proposal of Master-Avia LLC. As a result, the airport purchased not new, but used cars from this company in the amount of UAH 10.39 million.

That is, it turns out that the tenant, by manipulating the controlled management of the municipal enterprise “Airport Kyiv”, extracted a large sum of money from the pocket of the Kyiv community.

In 2018, NABU decided to remove the skeletons in Master-Avia’s closet. On March 14 of that year, detectives of the National Bureau of Investigation opened criminal proceedings No. 52018000000000258 on the grounds of Part 5 of Article 191 of the Criminal Code (appropriation of another’s property on an especially large scale by an organized group) and Part 2 of Article 364 of the Criminal Code (abuse of official position).

The plot of the case was based on the conclusions of the State Audit Service of Ukraine based on the results of an audit of the activities of the municipal enterprise “Kyiv International Airport” (Zhulyany).

The conclusion of the state auditors stated that officials of the Kyiv City Council and KP IA "Kyiv" groundlessly determined the rent to the Master-Avia company for the use of the airport in the amount of 6% as for an integral property complex. But, as the auditors noted, the property did not meet the criteria of an integral property complex and higher rental rates should have been applied to it.

Other participants in the competition offered a rental rate of 15% of the value of the property, determined by an independent expert assessment report, but for formal reasons their proposals were rejected. The amount of lost rental income was estimated at UAH 22.5 million.

In addition, in 2011-2017, the utility company paid UAH 41.3 million. salaries of employees who actually performed work for the Master-Avia company.

Also, KP “MA “Kiev” entered into an agreement with “Master-Avia” to restructure the debt to the Khreshchatyk Bank (by the way, which was then under the control of Vasily Khmelnitsky, the beneficiary of “Master-Avia”), as a result of which the assets of the utility company were lost by 13 .5 million UAH.

According to auditors, the utility company received less than 41.6 million UAH from the contract with Master-Avia for refueling aircraft (by the way, the main source of income for Khmelnytsky’s “office” at the airport). Thus, KP received only 0.5% of the income from the provision of refueling services for each calendar month.

At the same time, it was established that the same persons at certain periods of time held leadership positions both in Master-Avia LLC and in the utility company.

Let us note that these criminal proceedings did not end in anything. Bye. But there are others in which Master-Avia appears as one of the links in criminal schemes.

On August 31, 2020, the Investigative Department of the Pechersk Department of the State NPU of Kyiv opened criminal proceedings No. 32020100000000430 on the grounds of tax evasion on an especially large scale and the illegal production of excisable goods.

According to the plot of the case, reflected in the court ruling, the investigation established that in the period 2017-2020, as a result of financial and economic relationships for cash payments without reflection in tax reporting with counterparties, namely: LLC "Flash Oil", PJSC "Company" Interlogos”, LLC “Novobud-VS”, LLC “Avtologisticatekhservice”, LLC “Master-Avia”, evaded paying value added tax in the amount of UAH 4.810 million and corporate profit tax in the amount of UAH 4.329 million.

According to the information received from the department of operational and investigative activities of the State Fiscal Service of Kiev, an illegal scheme of work was organized, which consists of selling fuel and lubricants for cash to value added tax defaulters without reflecting this sale in tax reporting, which led to tax evasion in especially large sizes.

In this scheme, Master-Avia played the role of a transshipment base. Or rather, it is a large oil depot in Kyiv. It was from here that fuel and lubricants were shipped for sale in the “shadow”.

Vasily Khmelnitsky’s company also appears in another criminal story, and an extremely high-profile one.

January 2023, the second year of a full-scale invasion by the aggressor country is underway. The limited liability company MGK Rail enters into a contract with the Ministry of Defense for the supply of 2,000 tons of diesel fuel to military units. But MGK Rail did not have its own diesel fuel. It enters into a contract with Concord Petroleum LLC for the purchase of 2 thousand tons of diesel for UAH 66 million. Concord Petroleum loaded a batch of diesel fuel into MGK Rail railway tanks, but did not see the money.

Based on this story, the Investigative Department of the Pechersk State Institution of the NPU of Kyiv opened criminal proceedings No. 12023100060000844 on May 10 last year. The case is being investigated as fraud on an especially large scale.

According to the court ruling as part of this proceeding, the lion's share of the diesel fuel “squeezed” by MGK Rail LLC from Concord Petroleum did not end up in military units, but ended up at the Kyiv oil depot of Master Avia LLC.