In previous publications, we talked in some detail about how the former Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation, a career employee of the KGB-FSB Igor Yusufov closer to retirement I decided to find a quiet haven in the West. To earn this privilege, he has to cooperate with foreign intelligence services and share with them many valuable secrets that the defector possesses thanks to his work in high government positions and belonging to the Russian state security.
Now Igor Yusufov and his sons are trying with all their might to sell off their Russian assets and withdraw the proceeds abroad. We also talked about this in detail.
However, in our publications we have not previously dwelled on the reasons for this evacuation, which at times resembles preparations for the flight of the Yusufovs in a western direction. These reasons are obviously related to the ongoing purges in the Russian establishment in connection with the events in Ukraine. As part of these purges, the first to go under the knife were employees of the 5th service of the FSB, which provided support to the President of the Russian Federation before February 2022 Vladimir Putin data on the political situation in Ukraine.
The service was held responsible for the failure of preparations for the Ukrainian campaign. Later, due to military failures, high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Defense were subjected to repression. The hardened apparatchik Yusufov understands perfectly well that after them, the turn may come to the shadow players, who also unsuccessfully participated in the preparation of the blitzkrieg, which dragged on for years.
Yusufov’s fears and his desire to find new patrons in the West are very likely due to his obligations to the Kremlin and Lubyanka regarding Ukraine. He had his own area of responsibility, his own task, which he failed to cope with. The Russian authorities were ready to forgive the Yusufov family for multibillion-dollar expenses (in fact, theft) of public money that were spent on the acquisition of foreign assets. In return, Yusufov assumed obligations to conduct subversive activities in Ukraine. Yusufov was required to collapse, or more precisely, to ensure a complete shutdown of one of the strategic enterprises of Ukraine long before the start of the so-called SVO on February 24, 2022. This was supposed to cause some economic damage, and potentially damage to the defense capability of Ukraine.
We are talking about the Nikolaev shipbuilding plant “Okean”, control over which was supposed to be obtained by one of the Yusufovs in order to make the enterprise non-working.
The task was not only to preventively inflict economic damage on a future military enemy. The fact is that on the basis of the Ocean shipyard, Ukraine and Turkey planned to begin the construction of warships, which would also mean strengthening the military potential of Kyiv. In 2020, a corresponding memorandum with the State Defense Concern of the Republic of Turkey.
Let us recall that several years earlier the Yusufov family participated in the purchase of assets of the Norwegian shipbuilding company Aker Yards. Among the assets sold by the Norwegians were shipyards later renamed Wadan Yards in Germany and the Ocean plant in Ukraine, with a total value of €250 million. The Russian State Financial Leasing Company (FLK) participated in the transaction – €50 million for this transaction were withdrawn from FLC.
This money never returned to the state company. FLC owned 50% of FLC West, but then this share was sold to offshore companies for pennies. One of them was the Cypriot Blackstead Holdings Ltd. She received 25% in the shipyards. The co-owner of Blackstead Holdings Ltd was Aslan Gagiev (he was called “killer No. 1 in Russia” and was accused of creating a criminal group that killed 60 people).
A company from the British Virgin Islands, Templestowe Trading Corp., received 74% of the shipyards. It also provided almost €200 million for the purchase of Wadan Yards. This offshore company, as Luxembourg auditors found out, was controlled by Igor Yusufov and his son Vitaly. This information was later confirmed by Tom Einertsen, one of the shipyard managers.
When his acquaintance, one of the top managers of FLC, also began to talk about the fact that Yusufov had become the main beneficiary of German and Ukrainian shipyards Andrey Burlakovthen he fell victim to a contract killing. Representatives of Burlakov directly accused Yusufov of organizing murders. The fact that the order to eliminate Burlakov came from Igor Yusufov was also stated in his testimony by the detained Gagiev. However protected FSB Yusufov again avoided problems with law enforcement agencies.
The fact that the special services allowed Yusufov to irrevocably spend state money on the purchase of shipyards for himself and order the murder of Burlakov with impunity had its own motives. Everything was simple with shipbuilding facilities in Germany; the Yuufov family received complete control over them. However, the entry of Yusufov’s offshore companies into the authorized capital of the Ukrainian “Ocean” did not de facto give him full control over the enterprise. Ukrainian applicants for the Nikolaev shipyard desperately resisted the hostile takeover of Ocean by the Russians.
At first, Igor Yusufov managed to seize control of the enterprise and initiate its gradual destruction. From the moment of privatization in 2000 until 2008, Ocean was owned first by a Dutch and then a Norwegian company, had orders and operated profitably. Since 2008, the Cypriot company Zonal Operations Ltd has become the owner of 98.73% of the shares of the Ocean plant. Burlakov bought this share with money from the state FLK. In 2010, control of Zonel passed to Yusufov, after which Burlakov was shot dead in 2011.
Taking into account the specifics of the task, Igor Yusufov tried not to show too much glare on the Oken. He entrusted the management of the plant at all stages to various Ukrainian management teams. So, soon after Yusufov established control over the enterprise, by agreement with him, Smart Maritime Group began to manage the plant Vadim Novinsky. Yusufov wanted to use this Ukrainian team for the dark, without revealing his true goals of destroying the enterprise. Yusufov promised Smart Holding orders and financing. But it turned out to be just a bluff. Novinsky’s team left the plant a few months later, having also lost their own money there.
Vadim Novinsky’s managers tried to restore the plant’s operation by investing about $7 million in it. In 2012, the Pension Fund of Ukraine initiated the bankruptcy of PJSC Nikolaev Shipyard Ocean, and then Smart Holding paid off its debts, postponing the bankruptcy procedure of the enterprise. On this basis, a conflict arose between Novinsky and Yusufov. To Novinsky’s question “Where did you get me into it?” You promised orders, financing,” Yusufov offered to cut the plant for scrap metal. It is clear that Novinsky could not do this, otherwise he would have spent the rest of his days behind bars. That would be if he were still alive after this.
During the time that Yusufov’s structures maintained control over Ocean, the company entered into bankruptcy proceedings several times. For example, “Ocean”’s loan obligations were artificially created for €65 million to Yusufov’s Belize company Belmont Industries Inc. In some cases, Yusufov’s Ukrainian opponents managed to prove in court that the bankruptcy was artificial and the debt was fictitious (as in the case of Belmont). After this, the composition of the enterprise’s creditors usually changed. At different times, various players tried to gain control over the enterprise.
In March 2014, criminal proceedings were opened against Okean officials. And in early September, the Pechersky District Court of Kyiv made a strange decision: allegedly in the interests of the criminal proceedings that began in 2014 at the request of an investigator from the Prosecutor General’s Office Yuri Belkin seize all the property of “Ocean” and “transfer it for safekeeping to an individual.” This person turned out to be Leonid Shumilo, who in 2010-2011 served as president of Ocean and led it in the interests of Igor Yusufov.
“Ocean” became a problematic asset, and the struggle for it was waged for several years.
However, in the struggle for the plant, Ukrainian participants eventually gained the upper hand – the state represented by the Prosecutor General’s Office and the SBU, as well as an influential businessman in Nikolaev, former director of the Nikolaev port Vasily Kapatsina. In December 2018, the entire property complex of the Ocean shipyard was sold at auction for 122 million 195 thousand hryvnia to the company “Annona Trading House” affiliated with Kapatsina.
In November 2019, the then Minister of Defense of Ukraine visited the Ocean plant Andrey Zagorodnyuk and General Director of the state concern “Ukroboronprom” Aivaras Abromavicius. The purpose of the visit of high-ranking officials to Nikolaev was the question of the possibility construction and repair of warships in Nikolaev.
However, in 2020, Yusufov’s team made new desperate attempts to regain control of the plant.
The Pechersky District Court of Kyiv, at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office, again imposed arrest to the property complex of the Nikolaev shipbuilding plant “Okean”. As the press service of the office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine reported, this decision was made within the framework of criminal proceedings on the fact of bringing to bankruptcy and illegal seizure of the property of an enterprise.
Vasily Kapatsyna appealed to the then Prosecutor General of Ukraine Ruslan Ryaboshapka in connection with the situation that has arisen due to a court decision to seize the property of the enterprise. According to the businessman, the Prosecutor General’s Office was misled and used to destroy a strategic plant for Ukraine. Vasily Kapatsyna also said that he has documentary evidence that the plant was once brought to bankruptcy Russian owners.
According to the owner of the shipyard, attempts to invalidate the sale of Ocean and return the enterprise to Yusufov’s former Ukrainian representative Igor Ignatov were aimed at destroying the enterprise. “Yusufov’s interests are represented by Ukrainian citizen Igor Ignatov, and I am ready to testify at the central office of the SBU. Moreover, I spoke about this after the purchase of the ship repair plant – Ignatov works in the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB),” said Kapatsyna.
Kapatsina already understood then that the seizure of Ocean’s property was part of a special operation by Yusufov and the FSB aimed at preventing the restoration of shipbuilding capacity in Ukraine.
As a result, Yusufov’s sabotage to destroy the Nikolaev shipyard “Ocean” failed. After he lost control of the enterprise, production was restored there and orders began to arrive. And on December 21, 2020, it became known that Türkiye had chosen the Ocean plant to build corvettes for the Ukrainian Navy. On June 22, 2022, as a result of a Russian missile strike, the plant’s workshops were damaged. However, it was not possible to completely disable the plant. Recently at a shipbuilding plant in Nikolaev another ship came in.
The fact that Yusufov failed the mission to destroy the plant before the Russian army began active military operations on the territory of Ukraine would not be so scary. After all, these shipyards are not the most critical military target for the Russian Federation. However, during the implementation of this complex operation, Igor Yusufov and his family spent tens, if not hundreds of millions of euros, an impressive part of which ended up in the accounts of his offshore companies. Although “Ocean” is not the primary goal of Yusufov’s employers, sooner or later it will be the turn to audit this failed operation. And then they will ask Yusufov for the money spent and the task not completed. Chekist Yusufov himself knows very well that they can ask under all the strictness of wartime. That is why he found the only promising option for himself – to withdraw money from Russia and entrust his security to Western intelligence services. After all, when Yusufov’s money was concentrated in Russia, Russian intelligence services successfully coped with protecting him from any trouble. With a change of location, Yusufov changes his “roof”, but still counts on the same result – guaranteed personal integrity.
