Aleksandr Lebedev, co-chairman of the Russian–Ukrainian Interparliamentary Committee, during the first integration forum “The single economic space of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine: significance, opportunities, and prospects”.
Photo: Dmitry Lebedev
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NRB Driven Out of Ukraina
// Russian bankers demand satisfaction from Yulia Timoshenko
Reprivatization
On Friday, RF State Duma deputy Aleksandr Lebedev, a principal co-owner of the National Reserve Bank (NRB), sent a letter to Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko in which he claimed that the country's authorities had “cynically taken the bank's property (the matter concerns the 50-percent stake of NRB structures in Kiev's Hotel Ukraina) and threatened them with an appeal to international courts. He has still not received a reply to the letter, but plans are already in place to reprivatize the hotel.
The Hotel Ukraina (formerly called the Moskva), with an area of nearly 20,000 sq. m, is located in the center of Kiev near Independence Square. In 2004, on the petition of the director of the state enterprise Hotel Ukraina, Bohdan Vasilyev, the executive officer of then President Leonid Kuchma's administration, allowed the state enterprise Hotel Ukraina to move the hotel's assets to ZAO Hotel Ukraina. An NRB affiliate, the Commercial Company, received 50 percent of the ZAO's shares, and the other 50 percent went to the State Property Fund of Ukraine (FGI). In return, Commercial Company promised to pay $10 million to the ZAO's charter capital immediately and another $10 million within a year.
The scandal over the sale of the Ukraina began in winter after Igor Bakai, the head of the executive office of President Kuchma's administration, was accused of corruption and went into hiding in Russia, according to a statement by the Ukrainian authorities. Yury Lutsenko, then Ukraine's interior minister, accused Bakai of illegally selling a number of state-owned properties for 319 million hryvnia (about $64 million) to commercial structures, including Russian. According to Ukrainian officials, the properties included Glitsinia, a government dacha on the south shore of the Crimea, and the Dneipr (it was allegedly sold to a certain Russian businessman, Maksim Kurochkin) and Ukrainia hotels in Kiev.
In June, Kiev's Economic Court seized the property of ZAO Hotel Ukraina under a claim filed by the city prosecutor's office. FGI lawyers represented the prosecutor's office in the court. They challenged the very formation of ZAO Hotel Ukraina. “We believe that not everything was done according to the law,” said Oleg Shmuliar of FGI's legal department, in explaining the government's position. NRB representatives denied any connection with Bakai and insisted that the acquisition of the hotel was absolutely legal. “We had no deal with Bakai,” said Viacheslav Yutkin, president of NRB Ukraine. “We set up a joint venture on an equal basis with FGI. We didn't take anything from anybody; on the contrary, we paid $10 million.”
Meanwhile, according to Kommersant's information, FGI has already prepared a plan to privatize the Ukraina. According to the plan, applications will be accepted from potential buyers until November 10. The new auction for the sale of the hotel is supposed to take place on November 14. However, as they told Kommersant at FGI, the cabinet of ministers has still not approved a draft of the corresponding resolution.
However, NRB's management has evidently lost hope of resolving the problem at the local level or with mid-level officials. On Friday NRB President Aleksandr Lebedev sent a letter directly to Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko asking her to intervene in the dispute over the Kiev real estate. In his letter, Lebedev contends that the Ukrainian authorities are merely trying to take 50 percent of the shares in the Hotel Ukraina from the NRB affiliate and protests the reprivatization. “Ultimately, there is international law and courts whose decisions cannot be included in any schedule,” Lebedev said indignantly.
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Spokesmen for the cabinet of ministers did not comment on Lebedev's letter yesterday. The Kiev Economic Court plans to start considering the suit of the prosecutor's office and FGI on the merits on August 5.
Kommersant will be following the development of events.
Aleksey Bobrovnikov
All the Article in Russian as of July 25, 2005
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