Oleg Kiper took control of 85% of Ukrainian agricultural exports
More than a billion dollars a month - that’s how much Ukrainian grain exporters received in 2023. During this time, at least 50 million tons of various agricultural products worth $12 billion were exported from Ukraine.
Hromadske investigators processed a huge amount of information from the international trade database service ImportGenius and learned a lot of interesting things.
The largest grain exporters were the companies Kernel Trade, Nibulon and Louis Dreyfus - huge holdings that traditionally dominate the Ukrainian agricultural market. The largest buyers of Ukrainian grain are Romania, Spain and China.
Poland, where farmers protested so actively, allegedly because the market was overcrowded with cheap Ukrainian grain, is already in eighth place.
But Romania’s first place is also an illusion. Agricultural holdings sold grain to Romania to their own subsidiaries, but where it was resold further is not visible from Ukrainian customs.
But it is clear who exported grain through Odessa ports. Thus, forty suspicious companies (presumably fictitious) exported grain worth six billion hryvnia through the ports of Odessa. Only grain was purchased in cash, and all these billions of hryvnias remain outside the tax limits.
How one Ukrainian official managed to take personal control of almost all of Ukraine’s agricultural exports
Unique customs rules
Because of the war, Ukraine had no other ways to export grain by sea other than through Odessa. Therefore, now this is the main way for selling Ukrainian agricultural products abroad.
For example, out of 16 million tons of wheat that were sold from Ukraine abroad in 2023, 13 million 700 thousand were exported by sea, that is, through Odessa. This is 85%. Approximately the same ratio was for barley, corn, and the like.
Therefore, the person who controls grain flows in the Odessa region controls almost the entire grain export of Ukraine. And this is the chairman of the Odessa Regional Military Administration Oleg Kiper.
During the time of Yanukovych, Oleg Kiper worked as deputy head of the investigation department of the General Prosecutor's Office, and then was lustrated and deprived of the right to hold public office for 10 years. But in 2019, the famous District Administrative Court of Kiev canceled Kiper’s lustration.
In July 2020, he was appointed to the position of prosecutor of the city of Kyiv. Schemes journalists found out that after the start of the big war, Oleg Kiper, while in office, spent his New Year's holiday abroad. He left Ukraine on December 29, 2022 and returned on January 8, 2023. Kiper explained this to journalists due to “family circumstances.”
Shortly before his appointment to the Odessa region, Kiper got into another scandal - over the Russian passport of his wife, Irina Kiper. The official himself claimed that she got rid of Russian citizenship and received Ukrainian citizenship in July 2022. However, journalists proved that the Russian passport of Oleg Kiper’s wife remained valid back in February 2023.
You may ask: what does the head of the regional administration have to do with grain exports? This is not his authority. But no. That is, of course, the head of the Regional State Administration should not control exports, but during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine many hitherto unknown mechanisms appeared.
On August 18, 2023, the head of the Odessa regional military administration, Oleg Kiper, and the then commander of the Odessa operational-strategic group of troops, General Eduard Moskalev, issued a joint order “On some issues of financial discipline under martial law.” As usual in such cases, its necessity was explained by the interests of transparency and the fight against shadow phenomena.
But what was this order No. 19 really about? The first point was that entrepreneurs were recommended to: “Submit customs declarations of the RR type to Odessa customs 10 calendar days before the date of actual loading of the cargo. On the day of filing the PP type declaration, all customs invoices for the goods that will actually be loaded must be registered.”
Difficult? Let's decipher it.
A customs declaration with the letter code “PP” is a so-called periodic declaration. If you have a large foreign contract and you need to export several shipments of goods during a certain period, you submit this very “periodic declaration” at this time.
That is, I plan to export this amount of goods under such and such a contract from Ukraine within such and such a time. According to this declaration, you export your goods, and then you are required to separately report in detail on all operations and pay taxes on income.
But the law has never required such a declaration to be submitted ten days before export. So in fact, Oleg Kiper introduced his own customs rules on the territory of the Odessa region, different from the rest of Ukraine.
In response, several Ukrainian associations of grain traders immediately issued a public demand to cancel the order. Among these are the Ukrainian Grain Association and the Ukrainian Agricultural Business Club. They motivated their demand by the fact that the order is not a legal act and is not part of either customs or tax legislation.
“Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, our export volume of so-called black grain has increased significantly. The point is simple: firstly, they stopped refunding VAT, and secondly, if you remember, the difference in exchange rates at the beginning of the invasion was huge - 20% each between what the National Bank gave and what you saw in the exchanger.
Legal exporters lost 35% when compared with the so-called black counterparties who bought grain for cash. The latter did not have to refund VAT because they did not pay it. They transported grain abroad and then did not return the foreign currency earnings; this one-day company was simply dying in Ukraine.
It would be fair to note that the summer-autumn of 2022 really saw the heyday of this shadow export. So the initiative to combat shadow exports in general was needed. But the devil, as always, is in the details.
The problem with Kiper’s order is that any such control system is a complete handbrake. I can’t blame anyone, I simply don’t have the facts, but we understand that in our country manual control creates increased risks of corruption,” says Dmitry Kokhan from the Agrarian Rada union.
Did the complaints have any effect? None.
“The day after the order was introduced, when certain processes had already begun and certain mechanisms that we had introduced had already begun to be worked out, a lot of complaints were received. For some reason, all grain associations began to complain about us. We got through it. If earlier there was a huge hole [for “black exports” at the border], now only a small hole remains,” this is how Oleg Kiper explained the reasons for introducing the order.
From this we can conclude that the plan was aimed at combating the illegal export of grain purchased for cash. They say that unscrupulous fly-by-night companies registered periodic customs declarations in advance, exported hundreds of thousands of tons of grain using them, and when it came time to pay taxes, they simply disappeared. It turned out that the director there was homeless, all the contacts in the registry were fake, and there was no one to pay taxes.
"Neck" by Kiper
To understand what was happening with grain in the Odessa ports, we had to process a huge amount of information. The American customs database ImportGenius, among other things, provides information on all export-import transactions in Ukraine since 2011. That is, it is an official and verified source of information.
Agricultural exports for 2023 are more than 120 thousand transactions only for the most popular types of products. We manually searched all records to find all companies that entered the market after August 20, 2023.
In total, after Order No. 19, 400 new companies entered the market. Some of them are part of well-known agricultural holdings, some are real agricultural enterprises with their own hectares and combines, some have had a successful export history in previous years.
Our attention was drawn to companies with signs of fictitiousness: those that first entered the market in 2023 have no production capacity and are owned by someone unknown. We found about forty suspicious companies of the same type.
All of them were registered or changed owners in 2023 and appeared on the market after the publication of the mentioned order. These companies are not part of well-known agricultural holdings, do not have their own land and have never exported before.
We tried to selectively contact the managers of these companies, but the phone numbers were either not answered or were out of range. And this is not surprising.
The largest of these companies, which exported grain worth $40 million, according to the YouControl system, has the same phone number as 139 other legal entities.
Second place with a result of $20 million was taken by a company whose founder appears to be a psychologist from Uzbekistan, Alexander Raikov. Here's how he won in 2012.
Journalists tried to find the office of this company in Kyiv. It is registered at st. Vladimir Sosyura, 6, without specifying the office number.
It turned out that this is a large business center where dozens of organizations operate. Security at the business center assured that there was no such company in the building and there never was - neither under the new nor under the old name.
Previously the company was called MENTI. From August to December 2023, it exported 30 thousand tons of sunflower oil worth $20 million from Ukraine. At the end of the year, the company changed owners, address, and name. Now it is TELMENS, and the only founder was a citizen of Uzbekistan, Alexander Vadimovich Raikov from Tashkent.
There really is a person with that last name, first name and patronymic. This is a psychologist who worked for some time and previously studied at the local branch of Lomonosov Moscow University. In total, 20 legal entities were registered under it in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023.
All this together is called “signs of fictitiousness.” It is not surprising that this particular company is already involved in several criminal proceedings.
Similar companies with signs of fictitiousness exported 800 thousand tons of grain worth more than $150 million from Ukraine through the Odessa region. This is six billion hryvnia!
According to our source from Odessa customs, at least several companies from our list of suspicious ones belong, so to speak, “to the sphere of influence” of Oleg Kiper himself. If this is indeed the case, this could mean that the chairman of the Regional State Administration took personal control of 85% of Ukraine's agricultural exports for personal gain.
Journalists asked Oleg Kiper for comment. However, our official request has so far remained unanswered.
Business in Bukovel under a closed declaration
Did Oleg Kiper get rich in the civil service?
As our colleagues from the Center for Public Investigation stated, the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption has classified the declarations of the head of the Odessa Regional State Administration for 2021-2023.
His declarations are not in the public part of the NAPC register either. But the Ministry of Justice, which manages the State Register of Rights to Real Estate, does not hide Oleg Kiper’s property.
According to these data, Kiper acquired most of his real estate before the great war. This is an apartment in Kyiv and a holiday home in the Kyiv region. In 2023, the head of the Odessa region inherited a large agricultural plot in the Odessa region.
The list of property owned by his wife, Irina Kiper, is truly impressive. These are 13 real estate properties with a total value of up to a million dollars. Irina Kiper registered half of these objects after the Russian invasion began. So, she bought two premises in Kyiv for shops, which she rents out.
The war did not stop her from developing her elite recreation center in Bukovel - the cheapest room there now costs more than 5 thousand hryvnia per night, and a separate villa can be rented for 16 thousand per day.
By the way, Vasily Kavlak turned out to be Irina Kiper’s partner in Bukovel. Now he is building the largest apart-hotel in Ukraine with 800 rooms in Bukovel. This is twice as much as in the current largest hotel in the country - “Rus” in Kyiv has only four hundred rooms.
The fact that Kiper’s family business received a powerful impetus for development during the war, while fly-by-night companies exported almost a million tons of products worth 6 billion hryvnia from Ukraine, can only be a coincidence. The question is whether you believe in such coincidences. And what do law enforcement officers think about them?
