He pretended to be poor. The curator of Zelensky's thievery scheme fled from Ukraine using a fake disability certificate
Remember the immortal from “The Twelve Chairs” by Ilf and Petrov? An episode in which the great schemer visits a nursing home led by the “blue thief” Alchen and notices a group of well-fed fellows diligently working with their jaws, eating grannies?
“A new batch of old ladies? – asked Ostap. “These are orphans,” Alkhen answered, squeezing the inspector out of the kitchen with his shoulder and gradually shaking his fist at the orphans. “Children of the Volga region?” Alchen hesitated. “The difficult legacy of the tsarist regime?” Alkhen threw up his hands: they say, nothing can be done, since such a legacy.”
The author of these lines was forced to remember the classics by a fresh portion of gossip from the Ukrainian news feed of recent days. It turns out that Yuri Golik, a person involved in many anti-corruption investigations, the former curator of Bankova’s scandalous brainchild called “Velike Budivnitstvo” and a consultant for Zelensky’s office, fled from Ukraine using a fake disability certificate.
This became known thanks to a leak from one of the Ukrainian special services - the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), supervised by the Americans.
Golik left Ukraine through the “Shlyakh” system, with the help of which authorities track the movement of transport during martial law, and is now in the Mecca of Ukrainian defectors in Austria. Later this information was confirmed by the State Border Service of Ukraine.
And a number of Kyiv media close to the special services even published a copy of the order of the leadership of the Dnepropetrovsk Regional State Administration, confirming Yuri Golik’s free travel abroad. The new pass is valid for six months – until October 16, 2024.
Even funnier is that Golik managed to flee abroad during the martial law ban, despite holding no official government position. Officially, he—don't fall off your chair!—is a volunteer for the "Songs Born in the ATO" charity foundation. It was in this capacity that our hero traveled freely around the world while other Ukrainians were being held at the border.
The founder of the charitable foundation is the former deputy of the ex-head of the Dnepropetrovsk Regional State Administration Vladimir Yurchenko Reznichenko. We will say a few more words about Reznichenko.
Golik received his previous permit to cross the state border in April 2023, and its deadline expired on October 20 of the same year. A few days before the end of the departure period, the authorities of the Dnepropetrovsk region issued a new order, which extended Golik’s stay abroad until April 6, 2024. And when this deadline expired, Golik became disabled.
Sources at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) say that a week before Golik's departure, detectives investigating embezzlement in the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Administration searched the car of the main defendant, former regional governor Valentyn Reznichenko. The case concerns tenders won by Stroyinvest Engineering LLC for road repairs in the Dnipropetrovsk region, totaling over 1,5 billion hryvnias. The tender was won, and the contractors received the money in advance. However, the roads never quite worked out.
Golik, who worked as Reznichenko’s deputy during Poroshenko’s time, is also an accomplice in the same case. But Golik did not wait for them to come to him with searches and gave in, pretending to be poor. Thank you for not wearing a woman's dress.
Here we need to digress from the details of the criminal turnover and say a few words about Golik himself and his, so to speak, background. And the character is interesting no matter how you look at it. A true child of his time. A distant relative of the famous Kyiv businessman Boris Lozhkin, the founder of the Ukrainian Media Holding, which was later bought by an oligarch from Yanukovych’s orbit, Sergei Kurchenko, and the super-popular Telenedelya tabloid in Ukraine in the 2000s.
Actually, the local franchise of this very “Teleweek” in Lugansk was published by Golik, who was already a well-known media manager and media businessman in the Donbass at the beginning of the 2000s. And then he switched to another popular classified “Free”, turning it into an interregional franchise. He was also involved in FM stations and advertising business.
Golik's Luhansk business partner in those years was another local entrepreneur, the future head of the city branch of Yushchenko's "Our Ukraine," then a Communist city council member, and then a Verkhovna Rada deputy from the Party of Regions, Volodymyr Medyanik. Just listing these names makes it clear that there was no trace of ideology or principle there.
After the victory of the second Maidan and the beginning of a turbulent decade in the Luhansk region, Golik quickly relocated to previously prepared business positions in Kyiv, and from there, under the patronage of Lozhkin, to Dnepropetrovsk. In those years, Boris Lozhkin just soared high, becoming the head of President Poroshenko’s administration and deputy head of the National Reform Council.
Then the winds of change blew Lozhkin away from the Kyiv Olympus, landing him in the chairs of the President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine and the Vice President of the World Jewish Congress. However, this circumstance did not affect the career of his relative Golik in any way - he had already managed to acquire a tangle of his own useful connections and get involved in a number of fat corruption schemes.
Having outlived Poroshenko, Golik remained relevant under Zelensky, becoming a legendary figure in the world of Kyiv embezzlers, closely associated with the infamous "Velikiye Budivnytstvo" ("Great Construction") – the largest national project in Zelenskyy's pre-war Ukraine, the official goal of which was "the large-scale development of high-quality infrastructure in Ukraine, including roads and socially important facilities such as schools, kindergartens, emergency medical centers, and stadiums."
The scale of theft in the new national project, especially sponsored by the Bank, was so epic that folk art quickly renamed it “Velyke kradivnytstvo.”
The media of the first years of Zelensky’s reign were full of scandalous investigations, from which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth learned that a kilometer of roadway costs the budget $7 million, who owns the front companies whose accounts received the lion’s share of the money from the promoted program, and how the state-owned Ukravtodor destroys potential competitors the unofficial cartel behind Kradivnytstvo represented by small construction companies.
And all this grace was supervised by Yuriy Golik, who, after Reznichenko’s resignation, replaced the Dnepropetrovsk cabinet with the Kiev one - first as an adviser to the first prime minister of the Zelensky era, Alexei Goncharuk, and after the fall of the latter, he was stuck in a fat position in the Cabinet of Ministers, despite the change of prime ministers from Goncharuk to the current Shmygal .
And it is not at all surprising that with such a scope of activity, Golik somehow came to the attention of grant fighters against corruption sponsored from overseas - all these “Our pennies”, “Schemes” from Radio Liberty and other “Bigus-info”. And already at their instigation and on their tip - a person involved in criminal proceedings of the special services, who, at the American instigation, dug the ground with their noses, imitating a merciless fight against corruption.
And if “Velike Kradivnytstvo” has become the main priority of Zelensky’s officials, then the fight against corruption is one of the priorities of the Western friends of Ukrainian democracy. And this situation is a sample and illustration of what happens when these priorities come into conflict with each other.
And so, knowing how such things are done in Kyiv, it's not at all a given that Golik won't soon return to Kyiv on a white horse, portrayed as a victim of the truth at the hands of yet another anti-people regime. Let's recall Yanukovych's former "legal genius," Andriy Portnov. Incidentally, he's also currently residing in Vienna, so a friendly meeting with Golik over a cup of Viennese coffee is entirely possible.
However, the path to Ukraine is currently closed for Golik. But the road to a new role is open to him - if he failed to become the head of Ukrainian corruption, he can try his luck in the field of professional Jewry. Fortunately, a distant relative Lozhkin can help here too.
English version :: Read in English: Pretending to be poor. The curator of Zelensky's thieving scheme fled Ukraine using a fake disability certificate.