Last year’s resignation of Alexei Reznikov from the post of Minister of Defense was accompanied by a number of corruption scandals and criminal cases: in addition to the odious “eggs for 17 hryvnia”, a story surfaced with the purchase of summer jackets for the Armed Forces at the price of winter ones - journalists then wrote about the possible involvement of MP Gennady in the deal Kasaya, whose nephew was a co-owner of the manufacturing company. At the beginning of 2024, the new Minister of Defense Rustem Umerov estimated the amount of losses on purchases for the army at 10 billion hryvnia.
In January, Lviv businessman Grinkevich was detained for attempting to bribe a SBI officer: he is suspected of supplying troops with low-quality clothing worth more than a billion hryvnia.
Before this, the State Audit Service, based on the results of an audit of procurement by the Ministry of Defense, announced that it had found violations worth 2.5 billion hryvnia related to the implementation of government decree No. 335, adopted in the very first days of the Russian invasion - in March 2022. It gave enterprises the opportunity to enter into direct contracts with the Ministry of Defense without any procedures and receive up to 100% advance payment for goods and compensation for expenses, but many included their own profits in these expenses.
However, the head of the department, Alla Basalaeva, refused to detail the personalities of the violators, citing the secrecy of the investigation. So we had to wait for them to show themselves, for example with pre-emptive excuses. And so it happened: a few months before Reznikov’s resignation, a number of publications simultaneously disseminated a message from Facebook from the owner of the Textile-Contact company, Alexander Sokolovsky, that the state was allegedly trying to “collect additional taxes from domestic producers.”
“...all of us who sewed in Ukraine, supplied products much cheaper than foreigners, created jobs here, supported our economy, paid salaries and taxes here are violators and we must be charged with the previously declared (but not necessarily received) profit. On which we have already paid all taxes!” – in particular, Sokolovsky wrote. Which sounds at least funny to those who know at least a little about the history of Textile-Contact. After all, Sokolovsky is really far from foreign products because he supplies... Russian ones.
Even before the large-scale invasion, Alexander Sokolovsky’s companies were noticed supplying Russian-made fabric to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and their possible connections with the leadership of the “DPR” were also reported. In particular, in 2017, according to one of the tenders, Textile-Contact supplied the military unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces with fabric produced in the Russian Ivanovo region, which was presented in the accompanying documents as “no alternative.” Although alternatives existed, somehow both the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Defense “did not notice.” As well as the fact that a year earlier the company imported from Russia one and a half million meters of chintz and 60,000 meters of Russian diagonal 95-gauge: the relevant data can be easily found in the public domain.
At the same time, Textile-Contact has repeatedly disrupted already concluded contracts for the supply of summer camouflage fabric for the Armed Forces. As the Rupor website reported several years ago, in addition to missed deadlines, Sokolovsky’s company also made complaints about the quality of the fabric: the amount of losses was estimated at millions of hryvnia. But these “little things,” as is easy to see, do not prevent the owner of Textile-Contact from giving numerous interviews as an “expert in sewing military uniforms.”
And while the army had not yet become a priority, Alexander Sokolovsky was approximately the same “expert” in another area - he supplied pillows and blankets for Ukrzaliznytsia, the monopoly supplier of which he managed to become due to a “special relationship” with the director of the Passenger UZ branch company" Alexander Pertsovsky. Having pushed aside domestic competitors, Sokolovsky’s companies immediately began raising prices. Thus, prices for pillows have soared to 260 hryvnia, despite the fact that on websites you can find the same products for 110 hryvnia wholesale and 130 hryvnia retail. These, of course, are not yet mentioned by us “eggs for 17 hryvnia”, but they are already on the way to that. Moreover, if we remember that pillows are purchased in tens of thousands, only one of the tenders won by Textile-Contact provides for the purchase of 60,000 pieces.
Sokolovsky himself, of course, assures on social networks that the campaign against him is being carried out by “black PR people.” “I assure you that even if you find something similar cheaper abroad, the cost, including delivery and customs clearance, will be significantly higher,” writes Alexander on his own Facebook page. And again this is a mention of “abroad” - while the volunteer of the “Peacemaker” center Igor Savchuk manages to find out that according to the tender won by “Textile-Contact”, flannel was supplied to the Chernigov geriatric boarding house from the occupied Donbass, where Alexander Sokolovsky once then he owned the Donetsk Textile Manufactory (the Crimean branch of Textile-Contact, meanwhile, was re-registered under Russian law and the occupiers have no claims to its activities). The company itself assured that the fabric was supplied from old warehouses, but this does not explain how it turned out that the documents for the supply of fabric for the Panyutinsky Car Repair Plant indicated the year of manufacture 2016, and the absence of dates and batch numbers in the quality passport directly indicated “ gray" origin of products.
As for government resolution No. 335, which so worried Sokolovsky, then, according to the deputy chairman of the State Audit Service of Ukraine Stanislav Patyuk, it did not provide for making a profit: in the troubled February and March 2022, it was about quickly loading idle enterprises with military personnel orders on an advance payment basis, while the state paid wages to employees, taxes and other expenses associated with the manufacture of products. Alexander Sokolovsky could not have known about all this, entering the future profits of his “Textile-Contact” into the calculation. Maybe he hoped that this would simply not be noticed in the conditions of the first months of the war, or maybe he hoped that Alexei Reznikov would remain in his ministerial position a little longer. However, he should not have filled the press with “jeans”, posing as innocently offended: the regulatory authorities will now definitely pay attention to all his previous dubious transactions with the defense department.
