Who was Andrei Evgenievich Kostin before his dizzying career as People's Deputy number 108 from the Servants of the People under a paid quota? He was the deputy chairman of the Council of Lawyers of the Odessa Region, the father of three children, the director of the Law Firm "Pravo", drove a modest Nissan, received small commissions from lawyers for the cases of clients who came directly to the Council to the Chairman Joseph Bronze.
Wikipedia also states that he graduated from Mechnikov University in 1995, tried to get into the city council in 2000 with Yatsenyuk’s party, but did not make it.
Why did it happen that during almost 2 years of his tenure as Prosecutor General, so many professional, moral and ethical questions arose for Andrei Kostin?
Let's clear up the dark spots in the career of lawyer Kostin, and also take a look at his immediate circle.
Kostin married the daughter of Irina Vishnevskaya, a former prosecutor who left her career to join Leonid Klimov in the nineties as his right hand on all his legal issues. For some time (under Yanukovych), Klimov will almost become the owner of Odessa, and Irina Nikolaevna will become the vice-president of his FG Primorye and FC Chernomorets. His wife Olga, the same age, was born on October 7 (an important pro-Putin date and the pride of the family before AE’s political career), also a lawyer. All three of them together founded AK “Pravo”. My wife and I received their lawyer’s certificates on the same day: Kostin’s was numbered 509, and his wife’s was numbered 508. To say that Kostin was under his thumb, we would add: that he was under two thumbs at once.
Dark spots.
Kostin doesn’t really want to remember that he worked at Khim-Oil-Transit-Ukraine LLC (Ilyichovsky port, gas transshipment) as a legal consultant for the company’s founder, Sergei Levinchuk. In 2003 he left the company. Levinchuk, as the mastermind of the murder (December 24, 2002) of A. Kravchenko, director of the Antarctic ARC, was sentenced by the court to 8 years. The court allegedly found that Levinchuk decided to “remove” Valery Kravchenko from his path because his lawyers brought him dead-end prospects in a dispute with the Antarctic Autonomous Republic over the access railway tracks. Levinchuk did not admit his guilt and claimed that he was framed. And this is obvious, because immediately after the murder, the assets of two enterprises were purchased at bargain prices. The final beneficiary after the third sale turned out to be the structures of Igor Kolomoisky. In a private conversation, Levinchuk said that Kostin was recommended to him by “epaulets.” In this “incident,” Kostin met an employee of the Organized Crime Control Department Boris Indychenko (now the head of the NABU department) and investigator Valery Silin (now the vice-mayor of Odessa). We will return to Indychenko later.
After such a criminal story between Andrei Evgenievich and Levinchuk, Kostin’s mother-in-law, Vishnevskaya, introduces him into the orbit of Leonid Klimov’s projects. Kostin almost daily visits the main office of the Imexbank bank on Armeyskaya (the director of the bank is Nikolai Skorik, now a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, the OPZhZ faction). In the bank’s canteen there was even a separate dining table for Kostin and Vishnevskaya (at that time a deputy of the City Council, Regions faction). Through the created JSC “Pravo” they are starting to “provide services” for Klimov’s business. The work was in full swing until 2008, when Klimov received a report from the head of security at Imexbank, Boris Voloshenkov (now the First Vice-Governor), which indicated schemes for the theft of funds by Vishnevskaya-Kostin.
Through the notaries Zadorozhnaya and Zhuravlya alone, $1.4 million was stolen from Klimov. Klimov did not initiate proceedings (Vishnevskaya had good incriminating evidence on Leonid Mikhailovich), but tried to the maximum to return the stolen funds, even taking some of the real estate that Kostin’s wife owned. Irina Vishnevskaya was put on the “black list” and her doors to the Chernomorets financial and industrial group were closed. After this “story” she harshly goes to church. The only thing she managed to do for Kostin was to assign her son-in-law as his deputy through her friend Joseph Bronze.
Joseph Bronz headed the region's Bar Council. Looking ahead, with Kostin’s departure to the Verkhovna Rada, the chair of Deputy Bronze is occupied by Kostin’s closest associate, his godfather, lawyer Alexander Kozlov. After Bronze’s death in 2021, Kostin, already possessing impressive political capabilities at that time, promotes godfather Kozlov to Chairman of the Council. We will return to the role of Kozlov in the Kostin family.
Without an influential mother-in-law, Kostin began to have meager days to earn money. Meetings in the Council, birthdays, holiday gatherings, small commissions from referred clients of lawyers who directly contacted the Council to Bronze. But there were also cases where Kostin managed to hit the jackpot. One day, his childhood friend, American businessman Sam Kislin, approached Joseph Bronz with a request to help resolve a legal issue. Bronze recommended his deputy, Kostin. Kislin was told the price of the issue - 100 thousand dollars. The money was transferred to Kostin, who then spent 3 years telling why the result could not be achieved and that the money could not be returned. Then Kostin blamed the deputy Oleg Radkovsky. Kislin sent Kostin to the “black list” as unreliable.
Andrei Kostin was also included in the Khachatryan family’s “black list” of unreliable people. The head of the family, the owner of the Odessa market “New Market”, Mesrop Khachatryan, borrowed Kostina before the elections to the Verkhovna Rada in December 2018 - 110 thousand dollars. However, in 2021 he dies, and Kostin, not yet being the Prosecutor General, told his family that he allegedly returned the money, that he only borrowed it for a year and a half and had long since paid off the debt.
We already have a general idea about Andrei Kostin’s background, his human qualities and needs. Now let’s move on to his team and what he did for 5 years in power in the law enforcement system of Ukraine. As soon as Kostin appeared in the Verkhovna Rada, he immediately chose the necessary Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, which has significant influence on law enforcement officers. Became a deputy.
From the first days, he immediately began lobbying his people for “profitable estates.” Dmitry Verbitsky, under Kostin’s quota, was appointed deputy prosecutor of the Odessa region. Verbitsky is the godfather of Alexander Kozlov, the right hand of Kostin’s business lord. In 2018, they wanted to expel Verbitsky from the authorities for inappropriate actions discrediting the honor of the prosecutor, but the Indychenko family signed up for him and he was given the opportunity to “serve until retirement” as an ordinary prosecutor of the Razdelnyansky district. Even police investigators were shocked by Verbitsky’s appetites. He easily “collected fees” from all sides of criminal cases by organizing auctions. Did Kostin know about this or did he rely only on the recommendations of his godfather Kozlov?
After the appointment of Andrei Kostin to the post of Prosecutor General, literally in a short time, Dmitry Verbitsky and Boris Indychenko (junior) receive fat positions in the General Office. Verbitsky oversees the entire economy from the prosecutor's office, and Indychenko monitors the subsoil and ecology. They also have a great influence on the personnel appointment of the average staff of the prosecutor's office throughout Ukraine. While still a deputy prosecutor of the Odessa region, Dmitry Verbitsky took control of Leonid Klimov’s theft of hundreds of millions of dollars in National Bank refinance. Now the puzzle is complete and we understand that Andrei Kostin remembered Klimov’s old grievances from 2008 and took control of the plunder of the assets of Imexbank-Chernomorets.
The Indychenko family is a separate story for several volumes. Without working a day in business, today this family lives in luxury. The father of Boris Indychenko (junior) is Boris, a native of the Odessa Organized Crime Control Department of the 90s (already mentioned at the beginning of the material about him) is now the head of a department at NABU, a close friend of Yuriy Lutsenko, who brought him to NABU, also, if you refer to the media ( in the nineties, “Angel’s cop” spoke about him ), has long been an agent of the international mafia. Since the 90s, a lot of compromising evidence has accumulated on him and he is under cover. He managed, through NABU, to create such conditions for Vladimir Galanternik (the media write about him as the owner of the city) under which he was forced to flee from Odessa to Vienna, but at the same time continues to manage all economic flows of Odessa. But now he is under control (there is always access to him), and his assets and people are transferred to the people needed by the mafia. Indychenko is part of the close circle of NABU First Deputy Gizo Uglava. There is no need to doubt that Indychenko taught his Georgian friend how to make money by leaking information and doing custom business.
Dmitry Verbitsky recently got into a scandal with the purchase of a house for half a million dollars. The investigation was carried out by journalists from Slidstvo.info. From the investigation it was established that people of Angel’s authority transferred the house to Verbitsky for “some services.”
An interesting situation with Kostin’s godfather, Alexander Kozlov, who remained “on the farm” in Odessa. Not a single appointment in the prosecutor's office takes place without the approval of Kozlov and Verbitsky. Kozlov controls dozens of gasket companies in ports; he can often be seen in the Regional Council and among the leadership of the Odessa region. Kozlov manages to find a lot of people he needs in the regional executive branch. There is also very interesting information that was hidden: this is an alleged attempt on Kozlov’s life, after which he is forced to go with guards. According to rumors, Kozlov-Kostin even coveted Akhmetov’s interests in the ports and he was forced to react somehow.
Does anyone still have doubts about who the “chekushka” or “tourist” (received nicknames for frequent drunkenness and business trips abroad) Andrei Kostin is?
What results can he achieve for the benefit of Ukraine and the fight against corruption in the prosecutor’s office? Or will we have more faith in analysts and experts who claim that Andrei Kostin destroyed the prosecutor’s office, failed all reforms, and allowed complete anarchy in the department?
It would be wrong to give him the opportunity to sneak off somewhere in the footsteps of ex-prosecutor Irina Venediktova, but he should definitely be punished for corruption, nepotism and the collapse of the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, because there is a war in the country, and you can only think about your crypto-wallets when hundreds of people are dying thousand - this is the way to hell!
