Recently, Robert Zelenko, chairman of the board of directors of the credit union Podnikatelská družstevní záložna, was found dead in Prague. This union was involved in the case of a contract for the supply of 100 thousand mines between the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and the Lviv Arsenal company.
Zelenka's death once again draws attention to the strange events that occurred in the Czech Republic around the scandalous contract.
The body of Robert Zelenka was found on June 8. According to iDnes, the day before the police put the man on the wanted list: in the morning he took his daughter to school and disappeared.
“Given that the missing person has recently had psychological problems and anxiety states, it is possible that his life is in danger,” the police noted on June 7, according to NV news.
Journalists note that at first the police report said that the missing man “probably committed suicide.” However, the statement was later edited "out of respect for the family of the deceased" and the reference to suicide was removed.
Zelenka’s death forces us to once again return to the history of the Lviv Arsenal, which remains not properly investigated in Ukraine.
Let me remind you that on October 10, 2022, Lviv Arsenal entered into a contract with the Ministry of Defense, according to which it was supposed to supply mortar rounds of 120 mm and 82 mm caliber.
The company received an advance payment of 97% under the obligation to deliver weapons to Ukraine in two months. The funds were paid, they were sent through several companies - first through the Slovak company Sevotech, then the Croatian WDG Promet, but the weapons were never delivered. But it turned out that a Croatian company, for money identical to that received from the Ministry of Defense, bought an abandoned gunpowder factory in Bosnia. At the same time, almost 4 million euros were withdrawn to the cache during the first transactions.
In March 2023, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine filed a claim with the economic court to recover UAH 1,340,465,698 in advance payment from Lviv Arsenal. In the winter of 2024, this money was seized. And the then head of the Department of Military-Technical Policy of the Ministry of Defense, Alexander Liev, was arrested. However, then strange things began to happen to the case. Despite the fact that the investigation was conducted by the National Police, they applied to the Supreme Anti-corruption Court for permission to arrest. Then the case itself was referred to NABU. The Anticorruption Bureau honored him and returned him to the National Police. Liev is now at large.
Consider it forgotten about the Lvov Arsenal case. And then - death in the Czech Republic.
What is the role of the credit union Podnikatelská družstevní záložna in this scam?
Having failed to deliver 100 thousand mines to Ukraine, WDG Promet stated in the press that they were robbed by their own bank operator Kamil Bakhbukh. From the same credit union.
Bakhbukh instead accused WDG Promet that the owners of WDG Promet, the Croatian gunsmiths Zubak, bought an abandoned gunpowder factory with Ukrainian money.
In the Hromadske investigation, Bakhbuch directly states that there was no money in the WDG Promet accounts until the money transferred by the Ministry of Defense entered there. He claims that the owners of the company, the Zubakov family, have been looking for an opportunity to buy the Vitesit gunpowder plant in Bosnia since 2021. And they did it for Ukrainian money.
But one of the defendants in the case, a representative of the supervisory board of Sevotech, Alexander Khoroshaev, said that Bakhbukh was a long-time partner of the owners of the Croatian company Zubakov, and “WDG Promet became hostages to the fraudulent actions of the top management of Podnikatelska druzstevni zalozna. 5,372,000 million euros, which were illegally taken by fraudsters of a Czech bank.”
The same Khoroshaev was almost the first to send a message to Ukrainian journalists that Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala was involved in Podnikatelska druzstevni zalozna.
In January of this year, the resource Seznam Zprávy discovered that Czech Prime Minister Fiala hid from the public part of his savings, amounting to approximately a million crowns, which he deposited into an account in the union.
The publication discovered that 140 million crowns had disappeared from the union.
“We are investigating the circumstances related to PDZ, the case against Ukraine was the impetus for this,” a source from the National Center for Combating Organized Crime of the Czech Republic confirmed to the newspaper.
Actually, the scandals surrounding the Czech Prime Minister and Lviv Arsenal forced Robert Zelenka to give an interview.
He confirmed that Fiala had a deposit in the credit union, but did not consider it a “cardinal sin” not to indicate 1 million crowns in the report. Like, this is an “unfortunate omission.”
Regarding the Ukrainian case, Zelenka said: “WDG presented us with many documents and contracts that looked completely in order, and we had no reason to doubt their authenticity.”
“Their business relationship appeared transparent until June 2023, although there were small indications that their deliveries may be delayed due to delays in the issuance of some licenses that are required to carry out arms shipments. However, from the moment we received the first relevant suspicion, based on our own investigations, in June 2023, which indicated that this may have been fraud, we immediately did everything possible to prevent further activity by WDG. But we could not determine in advance that this was fraud, just as the Ukrainian side did not see this,” assured the chairman of the board of the credit union.
According to Zelenka, no charges were brought against Podnikatelská družstevná plážná, “on the contrary, representatives of the Ukrainian side have repeatedly expressed gratitude that thanks to our activities it was possible to secure a significant part of the money in accounts in the Balkans.”
Zelenka, of course, did not admit that his company was involved in money laundering.
According to him, the materials about the union and the prime minister were more likely related to the intention of the whistleblower Pavel Wurst to “take over the enterprise.”
“In connection with weapons fraud, for example, in Ukraine there is talk about the possible role of Russian intelligence services, whose goal was to damage the reputation of Ukraine, present it as a corrupt country, reduce its willingness to receive outside funding, and attack the clearly pro-Ukrainian Czech government,” he added .
However, in fact, the activities of the union were in the sphere of interest of Czech law enforcement agencies; in recent years, it was fined due to its activities and there was talk of a possible loss of its license.
Czech media call Zelenka more of a formal leader of the union, while in reality it was led by Kamil Bachbuch, mentioned in Ukrainian history.
“As a lawyer by proxy, he represented other companies associated with the union or even acted as their owner (Galerie Gema, Gemacom, Distav construction, Wastech, Gozer Privattiftung or Gozer Financial Services). There is still a suspicion that he was simply covering for the real owners and following the instructions of the unofficial boss Kamil Bachbuch. Even Bakhbukh has not yet answered the question of what he knows about Zelenka’s last days,” writes Seznam Zprávy in a new material.
As the author of the article notes, Zelenka was sitting on several chairs. As a lawyer, he collaborated with lawyer Stepanka Bachbuch, the wife of Kamil Bachbuch. He also had a relationship with another former owner of the union.
iDNES.cz was the first to write about Zelenka’s death.
“Unfortunately, the man was found without signs of life,” said Prague police spokeswoman Eva Kropachová.
According to Seznam Zpráv, the police concluded that it was suicide, which Kropachova confirmed. “Someone else’s fault is excluded,” the editorial office answered the question.
However, this story may seem much more complicated.
The author should pay attention to the last paragraphs about Zelenka's death in the Czech edition.
Seznam Zprávy tried to personally communicate with Robert Zelenka in April, when the Prague lawyer Petr Walisz had an extraordinary meeting of PDZ members, where the possibility of liquidating the union was also to be discussed.
Before the meeting, Walish told the editor that “it would be impossible to talk to Zelenka. Zelenka himself refused to be interviewed after the meeting. Through the window of his car, he made a dismissive hand gesture to indicate that he had no intention of talking about anything. Then he left.
“The next membership meeting is due to take place before the holidays begin, on Friday 28 June in the early evening. The invitation, which appeared on the union’s website in recent days, was signed by the deceased chairman of the board of directors,” the publication writes.
Well, it's time to meet lawyer Peter Walisch, who is a lawyer for spies and Russians. He is also associated with those involved in the Lviv Arsenal case.
As Censor.NET wrote earlier, almost simultaneously with the conclusion of the Lviv Arsenal contract, a certain Vladislav Klischar joined the supervisory board of one of the intermediaries in this deal - the Sevotech company.
This is a person who is part of the circle of Andrei Gmyrin, the fiscal officer of the Yanukovych era, who in 2021 was a member of the Office of President Zelensky.
Gmyrin is a defendant in the NABU case regarding the theft of public funds from the Odessa Port Authority and the United Mining and Chemical Company. It also includes Klischar’s companies - EPI Group sro and Belanto, to which the OGKhK sold ilmenite at a cheap price, which then went to Russia or occupied Crimea at market prices.
However, Gmyrin managed to flee abroad before suspicions were announced, and they were not raised against Klischar.
In a comment to Hromadske, the businessman assured that he had never had anything to do with the money of the Ministry of Defense. However, his entry into Sevotech and exit very strangely coincide with the signing of a contract with Lviv Arsenal and the beginning of his massive media coverage in 2023.
Klischar has been living in the Czech Republic for a long time. He has several companies there, each of which is more interesting than the previous one. Among them is a certain LEO INTERNATIONAL GRUPP, where the partners are Belanto lawyer Alexander Bezzubets and Alexander Belyaev.
Yes, this is the same Alexander Belyaev, who is the brother-in-law of the former head of the SBU Ivan Bakanov and the former business partner of Vladimir Zelensky himself. More than an interesting and odious character.
Another company is ILS INVESTMENT GROUP sro. Klischar’s partners there are Belyaev and Alexander Melnichuk.
You won't find the profiles of all these people on Facebook. The pages of their relatives are now also closed after the materials were published on Censor.NET.
You won't find them on LinkedIn.
However, it seems that someone has been creating alternative versions of their work biographies for them since the end of last year.
So, in December 2023, material about Klischar, Belyaev and Melnichuk was published on the blackboxosint website, which at that time had two materials. It said that these persons want to buy a share of Parimatch from the founder Eduard Shvindlerman. As you know, sanctions were introduced against this company in Ukraine in March.
“They introduced themselves to Parimatch employees as employees of the CIA and European intelligence services. At the same time, they were introduced to Parimatch shareholders as investors with connections to the governments of the United States, Europe and Ukraine. There is practically no publicly available information about Alexander Melnichuk; as a result of analyzing data from open state registers, one can come to the conclusion that this person leads the most secretive lifestyle. Since 2015, there has been no information about the official employment of Alexander Melnichuk in Ukraine, however, according to some sources, he presents himself as an employee of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine,” the material says.
No comments from Parimatch have appeared in the press since that time, but businessmen familiar with the shareholders spoke of a certain “concern” in the company. As you know, since last year the company Parimatch has been under sanctions in Ukraine due to connections with Russia.
As it turned out, a reprint of the same article was later published on the French website Facta.media. It is unlikely that France was very interested in the fate of the Ukrainian gambling operator. But that's how it is.
Then it’s even more interesting - already in January 2024, similar materials with the title Weapons, Money and SARN were published on the London insider and talk-finance.co.uk websites: how a Czech-American group appropriated Ukraine.
The materials begin as follows: “The latest journalistic investigations show that an organized criminal group can operate in the EU, in particular in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as in the United States - the group is engaged in the arms trade, judicial fraud and the theft of funds allocated for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
London insider also tells about Belyaev and Klischar what was previously published in the Ukrainian media, but adds something new.
According to London insider, according to a comprehensive study of commercial registries, Klischar and partners are closely associated with the SARN group of companies, which operates in the Czech Republic and the USA.
The group includes the Czech company SARN Europe sro (a subsidiary of the American SARN ENERGY LLC), headed by Czech lawyer Petr Valisch.
This is exactly the same lawyer who appointed a meeting of the credit union that appears in the Lviv Arsenal case.
“Vališ specializes in financial law, assists a number of Czech legal entities, and also defends spies and Russian businessmen in courts,” the publication writes.
“In particular, Walis was involved in the case of former Czech military intelligence officer Roman Liner (who worked in Belarus), who embezzled about 189 thousand crowns of official funds of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Wališ also defended former powerful Czech intelligence officer Martin Uher, accused of fraud in office. The lawyer was also involved in cases against the Russian oligarch Roman Popov,” the material says.
This information about Valis is indeed validated by materials from the Czech media.
In the Uher case, Valish is generally considered the second accused.
Among other news, there is, in particular, mention of a company that was accused of illegal possession of weapons in 2015. Then about 50 thousand anti-tank grenade launchers and ammunition from the 1970s and 1980s were seized; according to media reports, they were outdated and modernized by Pyro- Technology. She was also represented by Walish.
You can also find information in the media about the conflict between SARN and Czechoslovak Group AS
And if the information about SARN is rather unclear, then the Czechoslovak Group is the leader of the Czech arms market, owned by Jaroslav Strnad. And in fact, a little-known company wants to get a share in the business of the Czechoslovak Group.
Last year the entire group had record sales of around 25 billion kronor, almost double the previous year (14.4 billion).
All this fragmentary news does not allow us to finally put the puzzle together, but it seems that most of the materials for uncovering the Lviv Arsenal scam are now in the Czech Republic. And it was there that most of the defendants in the case lived. If you haven't already escaped.
