During the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, there were many half-jokes that the richest people could be sanitizer manufacturers. But Ukraine is a unique country, and our business producing disinfectants can unexpectedly begin to generate large profits during a full-scale war.
This is exactly what happened in the life of the owner of the Ukrainian Chemical Technologies company, Pavel Bartkovsky. After the full-scale invasion, his business took off sharply, he began to acquire expensive real estate and began an active media company to create a positive image.
Pavel Bartkovsky is the owner of four companies that are united in the Ukrainian Chemical Technologies group. The official website states that the company was founded in 2000. Bartkovsky probably forgot a little when exactly he organized the business. After all, none of his four companies was registered in 2000.
Bartkovsky's oldest company, Khimproekt LLC, was registered in November 2001, and at that time its main activity was intermediary services in the purchase and sale or rental of real estate for industrial and technical purposes. Simply put, Bartkovsky was engaged in the resale of machine tools.
Only in 2006, Khimproekt LLC changed its activity to the production of soap, detergents and cleaning products.
In the same 2006, Bartkovsky founded Ukrkhimtekh LTD LLC. In 2016, the businessman created Barox LLC, whose main activity was the provision of real estate for rent. The company itself was registered to his mother Valentina Bartkovskaya. And finally, in 2018, Mirex Group LLC appeared, which the businessman shares with the Pole Tkach Krzysztof.
All four companies are frequent bidders for state-owned companies. In particular, Bartkovsky’s companies supply detergents to Ukrzaliznytsia, educational institutions, Naftogaz of Ukraine, and so on. Also, judging by the official website of the Ukrainian Chemical Technologies company, their products are used by such food industry giants as Myronivsky Hliboproduct and the Yatran meat processing plant.
An expert on the chemical products market, with whom the Antikor editorial team spoke, expressed obvious surprise that the Ukrainian company is proud of its own production and does not talk about what these products are made from. “In fact, it is very difficult to believe that in Ukraine someone produces disinfectants and claims that it is purely Ukrainian production. Moreover, when it is well known that the chemical industry has always been under Mr. Firtash, who is now the most famous Viennese prisoner, and whose enterprises are far from in the best situation,” says the expert.
He adds that the components of similar products produced by Bartkovsky are 300% cheaper, say, in China. At one time, Ukraine also imported them from the aggressor country of Russia. “So where does the company you named actually buy its ingredients and why does it claim that the recipe is purely Ukrainian is a big question. It is also strange that the same MHP purchases disinfectants from a Ukrainian company, while it is hundreds of times cheaper to do this in China or India. Is there a story here with kickbacks that help promote products?” - he comments.
If you look at Pavel Bartkovsky’s social networks, you can see with the naked eye that his activity has changed dramatically since 2022. He began giving out a lot of interviews about how to grow a business. Typically, such materials are written to order and generously paid for by the interviewer. And if readers of, say, Forbes may still be interested in reading how to develop the production of detergents, then it is difficult to understand why information about personnel transformations in Ukrainian Chemical Technologies may be of interest to the potential audience of the technical publication AIN.
The reason for Bartkovsky’s sudden activity is simple - the truth began to emerge about how his business was actually built. About numerous lawsuits against former employees, about slander and how his godfather from the State Bureau of Investigation helps him. Yes, yes, the godfather of his children, according to media reports, is the deputy head of the Main Investigation Department of the State Bureau of Investigation, Alexander Artyukh.
There are three court cases related to Bartkovsky’s pressure on former employees. In the first, Ukrkhimtekh LLC asks the court to recognize the information disseminated by its former employee Alexander Dzyuban as unreliable and such that it spoils the reputation. Moreover, Bartkovsky asked the court to recover 7.5 million hryvnia from the latter. The businessman is trying to convince the court that the information disseminated by Dzyuban had such a negative impact on the company’s image that it lost millions in profit.
In fact, the essence of this trial lies in Bartkovsky’s desire to sink his competitor. Indeed, in 2021, Dzyuban created his own company, Profi-dez LLC, which also produces detergents and disinfectants.
Another lawsuit concerns a whole group of former employees of Pavel Bartkovsky’s company. The businessman’s side claims that the executive director, commercial director and technologist, who have worked in his company since 2012, stole technical documentation and product recipes. Then they allegedly told the trade secret to another person, who in 2021 began to produce products similar to those manufactured by Bartkovsky, under a different brand.
In November 2022, the Dnieper Court of Kyiv sided with Bartkovsky’s Ukrkhimtekh LLC and allowed searches of a group of people whom the businessman accused of stealing intellectual property. But there was no further movement on the case. It is obvious that the case died or the investigators realized that they were misled by Pavel Bartkovsky’s slander and in fact no one stole any information.
The third case has a certain note of cynicism. In it, Bartkovsky accuses Roman Rassokha, director of his own company Himtime LLC, of stealing chemicals worth almost 700,000 hryvnia. The businessman wants to convince the court that his employee secretly shipped 7,400 kg of goods from February 2022 to February 2023, and then, having access to the accounting system, created fictitious tax invoices for allegedly selling them.
Investigators found out that Roman Rassokha, being of military age, went abroad during the full-scale invasion and did not contact the investigation. Therefore, he was put on the international wanted list.
The cynicism is that Pavel Bartkovsky and Roman Rassokha follow each other on Instagram. It is unlikely that people who are really suing for more than half a million will be friends with each other on social networks and like photos. So, obviously, this case is very complicated and looks more like a conspiracy between two men who want to hide certain information from the tax system.
The outbreak of Russia's war against Ukraine brought Pavel Bartkovsky not only the desire to engage in his own PR campaign and sue former employees. Starting in 2022, the businessman began to acquire real estate.
Bartkovsky lives with his wife and two children in a huge estate in the village of Pukhovka. The register of property rights indicates that the family owns several plots of land and three buildings in the Vega horticultural society. On his daughter’s Instagram you can see that Bartkovsky lives in a luxurious home with perfect landscaping on the site.
More to come. In the period from 2022 to 2023, the businessman became the owner of as many as three apartments and three garages in the RiverStone residential complex in the capital’s Bereznyaki. Two apartments have an area of 122 square meters and one - 120 square meters.
The cost of similar housing in another section of the same residential complex now reaches $450,000. So all of Bartkovsky’s property acquired since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine could be worth more than $1 million.
But that's not all. The couple have two more apartments in a neighboring building at Truskavetskaya, 8, purchased earlier. One, with an area of 89 square meters, is registered to Pavel Bartkovsky. The other is for his wife Oksana.
There are also apartments in which both Bartkovskys are registered. Thus, between the two of them, the couple have seven apartments, five of which are luxury, three garages and a luxurious estate.
Of course, the reader can reproach the author: they say, Bartkovsky is a businessman and can certainly afford such a large amount of property. But, according to the YouControl platform, the quarterly net profit of Ukrainian Chemical Technologies LTD LLC as of November 2023 amounted to 16.5 million hryvnia. In dollar terms, this is $412,000, which would be enough for only one Bartkowski apartment. Of course, in the event that he puts all the company's profits in his pocket and leaves employees without wages.
In addition to real estate, it is worth adding Bartkovsky’s expenses for systematic complimentary interviews and materials about his company. He also has to spend money on the courts. And, finally, the cost of a family vacation is also not cheap. This year alone, according to Pavel Bartkovsky’s daughter’s Instagram, they were in the UK and Bali.
It is impossible not to note that Bartkovsky’s wife Oksana was a nominee for the title “Mrs. Ukraine International-2024”. The woman did not win the crown, but hardly anyone can get into such competitions for free. At least, evil tongues have long been gossiping that all sorts of competitions for married women are pure entertainment, which is generously paid for by their husbands.
Pavel Bartkovsky is a striking example of a businessman who, thanks to the “bending over” of employees and an active PR campaign, grew from just a seller of sanitizers into a real business tycoon during the war. But business raises a lot of questions. Firstly, where are the components for production of products imported from, and not from Russia or China by chance? Secondly, why exactly during the war did a rather specific business begin to bring in super-profits that made it possible to buy up luxury real estate? And thirdly, why are financial statements drawn up for the Tax Service with figures that do not reach the level of a TOP company on the market, and this does not raise questions.
