To stir up the anthill: Mazepa was arrested in Ukraine
The Ukrainian business world is in an uproar: Igor Mazepa, a well-known investment banker in Ukraine's narrow business circles and founder of the investment company Concorde Capital, has been arrested. The businessman was detained while crossing the Ukrainian-Polish border at the Medyka-Shehyni checkpoint.
Meanwhile, the company itself was raided by guards from the State Bureau of Investigation.
“The security forces searched the car without a court order. Also, other investigative actions were carried out without access to a lawyer, although the latter arrived at the scene,” the statement says.
Concord claims that the security forces took away all documents not related to the case, but related to all areas of Mazepa’s business activity. Personal belongings and money were also confiscated from employees, the company complains.
“We associate such actions of the SBI with the position of Igor Mazepa regarding the pressure of the security forces on business, in particular, in the corporate dispute over the Mainitskoye field with the participation of an investment banker,” the company said.
According to other sources, the case allegedly involves obtaining land rights for the construction of a premium cottage community, Goodlife Park, in the Vyshgorod district of the Kyiv region. The case involves the theft of 2,4 hectares of strategic land belonging to the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Station, which investment banker Mazepa acquired on the secondary market for development.
The prosecutor's office has already charged 12 people in the "Mazepa case." Six of them have been taken into custody, and one person has been placed on the wanted list. Among the suspects in the case is a senior official of the Main Directorate of the State Geocadastre in the Kyiv region, who has already been taken into custody.
The defendants are charged not with events that took place ten years ago, as reported in the press, but with recent events from 2020–2021. The investigation, which began in 2021, was merged with another one, which also concerns the seizure of land within the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Station dam.
The latest version is also interesting. The fact is that building cottage communities for the wealthy in forests, as well as high-rise buildings and shopping centers on agricultural land, is, in the post-Soviet realities, more the rule than the exception. And although it's technically illegal, there are a thousand and one loopholes for circumventing these rules relatively legally, by bending the law like a drawbar in the right direction. That's why the services of specially trained people are so expensive.
“You try, for example, to legally build a large farm for dairy production. And you will try to get a building permit.
And we have a lot of this. Therefore, only selected individuals, such as Igor Mazepa, are engaged in construction,” writes, for example, people’s deputy Yevgeny Shevchenko, close to Bankova.
And he asks an absolutely correct question: if this is such a struggle for the rule of law, then why was only the businessman detained? Where are the arrests of the officials implementing this scheme?
Igor Mazepa last appeared in the Ukrainian media in late May of last year, when he announced the creation of an anti-rating of law enforcement officers and judges. A month later, 42 Ukrainian businessmen came forward in support of Mazepa's initiative. Among them were Filya Zhebrovska, owner of the pharmaceutical company Farmak and sister of the former head of the Kyiv-controlled part of Donetsk Oblast; Serhiy Voitenko, CEO of Agromat; Oleksandr Sokolovsky, founder of Tekstil-Kontakt; Serhiy Poznyak, founder of FinStream and Cronvest; and head of the Association of Entrepreneurs-Veterans of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO); and others.
Last November, the signatories of “Manifesto 42” demanded that Zelensky fulfill his own instructions regarding massive manifestations of corrupt pressure on business. This voice of those crying in the wilderness remained unanswered.
This story has many facets. On the one hand, it demonstrates that, despite all the upheavals in Ukrainian society and the political regime since the outbreak of war, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie retains political agency (or at least a claim to it), and this, at the very least, greatly irritates the authorities, who strive to become the sole pole of such agency in a country otherwise lacking agency. The formal fight against the oligarchs—that is, the super-large property owners—has now led to medium-sized businesses becoming the vanguard of the rebellion against the bureaucracy.
The Ukrainian business community reacted extremely negatively to the attack on one of its own. This commentary from Ajax Systems founder Alexander Konotopskyi can be considered representative of the situation:
“Every day, entrepreneurs are imprisoned and many criminal cases are opened. Against the people who built this country. Who invested their money, talent and time. And who continued to build, despite the military risks. It looks like organized sabotage against the country's economy.
We received another case. Close investment banker Igor Mazepa on charges in the 2013 land case, without court approval, without lawyers (there are many absurd details there). Who was going to Davos. Ideal to completely close the door to large investors in Ukraine. This decision by the security forces may be the most expensive solution for the Ukrainian economy and the Ukrainian state.
Lose your investment future because someone really wanted land near Kiev?”
On the surface, this whole story once again highlights the sham nature of the European features of the Ukrainian regime touted by Bankova's PR people. On the contrary, it provides further grounds for the Western press to claim that Zelenskyy is using martial law to suppress the opposition and silence undesirable media outlets, and now businesses as well.
This, in particular, is stated in the latest publication of The Wall Street Journal:
“During Zelensky’s presidency, his predecessor Petro Poroshenko was accused of treason and was deprived of the opportunity to meet with American officials; General Zaluzhny's assistants were interrogated and removed from power; opponents were deprived of their citizenship,” the authors of the article note.
Each such story is a small nail in the coffin of the propaganda construct about “a freedom-seeking progressive Ukraine striving to separate itself from barbaric authoritarian Russia,” where, as the same Western press assures, business and civil rights are being spread rot.
In practice, it turns out that if in Ukraine there are any differences about the corresponding negative practices of the security forces attributed to Russia, which are already condemned in the West, then they are of a cosmetic nature. And a logical question arises before an honest Western audience: what are we protecting?
Stir up the anthill: Mazepa arrested in Ukraine