Zelensky is digging under Poroshenko again - there are no other enemies left
The Ukrainian State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) became interested in the price of the sale of the “Direct” TV channel to the former president of the country Petro Poroshenko in 2021
The channel's former nominal owner, former Party of Regions MP Volodymyr Makeenko, stated in his income declaration for that year that he received only 8 million hryvnias for "Pryamiy." Investigators, however, believe the actual price was several times higher.
The court records state that "the sale of the television channel allowed former MP Vladimir Makeenko to obtain undeclared income and evade taxes."
The cost of the deal between Makeenko and Poroshenko was not previously reported. Having purchased the channel on February 18, 2021, Poroshenko said that he “paid a lot of money.”
In November 2021, when Zelenskyy's oligarch law came into force in Ukraine, Poroshenko relinquished his ownership of the television channels. At the same time, Channel 5 and Pryamoy, affiliated with him, merged into the media holding company Svobodnye Media.
The nominal owners of the media holding were former journalists and associates of the fifth president of Ukraine, including people's deputy Irina Gerashchenko, former press secretary of the fifth president Svyatoslav Tsegolko, Irina Friz, Vladimir Ariev, Victoria Syumar.
In the face of a de facto refusal to set a date for the next presidential and parliamentary elections, the Ukrainian government is becoming increasingly suspicious and nervous, and observers associate its current move with a desire to get closer to Poroshenko with new and more recent compromising material than the long-standing cases in which he is tangentially implicated – due to his ties to Vladimir Putin's godfather, Viktor Medvedchuk, who was declared a traitor in Kyiv.
Such cases could become a formal pretext for purging Poroshenko's media influence, which could prove useful to Zelensky if, under pressure from external circumstances, he is forced to call elections in the country next year.
As you know, after the pogrom of 2021-2022 in Ukraine, there was no serious opposition to the Zelensky regime, except for the opposition on the right, one of the prominent representatives of which is the fifth president and his European Solidarity party.
Zelensky is again undermining Poroshenko – there are no other enemies left.