04 October 2024 , 20:35
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War is war, but the country’s surrender to the Russians continues at a rapid pace. On September 18, the State Property Fund sold another property in the center of Kyiv - the "Ukraina" hotel. And again, it was bought for pennies by Russian oligarchs, who registered the purchase in the name of a front man.
The official buyer was Ola Fine LLC, the ultimate beneficiary of which is a certain Krippa Maksym, a mysterious Ukrainian super-billionaire whom no one has ever seen in person and who is none other than a figurehead for the Russian oligarchy, buying up Ukrainian property for pennies. More about Maksym Krippa a little later, first let’s evaluate another outstanding achievement - the sale of a hotel in the center of Kyiv for pennies.
The Ukraine Hotel is a fourteen-story building with 375 rooms, four elevators, 80-space parking, restaurants, six conference rooms, a shelter with a conference room, a swimming pool, a sauna and other necessary infrastructure. All this is in the heart of the capital, on Maidan. The hotel was sold for 2 billion 511 million 777 thousand 888 hryvnia. That is, for 59 million dollars. A huge sum. Why then "for pennies"?
Because very few people in this country can count. If you divide it all up, one room cost $159,000. That’s also a lot of money - about the same as a small one-room apartment in a new building in the center of the capital. If you think in these terms, the deal is a success for the state. However, this is not a residential building, it is a business. And the price per square meter in this case immediately increases two or three times, and in the case of Maidan, this multiple can be tens of times more. The next factor is that they did not buy individual apartments in a new building, they bought the entire complex: an operating hotel with all the infrastructure - swimming pools, saunas, restaurants, land, parking, equipped rooms. This is called an "operating business", and it should cost several times more. A zero should be added to the amount that the state received. Then it would be a successful deal.
What did the government do to make sure no one thought about such things? They threw dust in the eyes with the magic of big numbers: two and a half billion is a huge sum for an ordinary poor Ukrainian. Then they added a few touches to this - like, the hotel is unprofitable, requires modernization, there was a fool who paid a huge amount of money for it, and the state got rid of illiquid assets. And the people ate it up.
But this is not a question for the people. But for the competent, if they can be called that in this country, bodies. In particular, for the SSU, which clearly knows who actually bought another hotel in the center of Kyiv. Another one - because the companies registered to Maksym Krippa, since the change of power in Ukraine, have begun to massively buy up state (and not only) property. Krippa started with the Dnipro hotel, also located in the center of Kyiv, which he bought for one billion one hundred million. Today, the companies in which Maksym Krippa is the nominal owner have bought the Parus business center, recreation centers of the nationalized Prominvestbank in Koncha-Zaspa and Kozyn, the Knyazhyi Dvir base of the National Bank of Ukraine near Kyiv, and so on. All this is being merged into Krippa’s hands for pennies.
The state has no formal claims – as they say in the State Property Fund, “everything goes through the Prozorro system. It gives independence to the participants.” Formally, this is true. But if you look at the auctions won by Maksym Krippa’s companies, then suspicions arise that everything is not as simple and transparent as the FDMU claims.
But the main question is not even in the obviously understated prices. But in who is Maksym Krippa, who is called the owner of the NAVI eSports team, on which he allegedly earned all his money. At the moment, Maksym Krippa is the beneficiary of twenty Ukrainian legal entities, which, in turn, are registered as the property acquired in Ukraine. Including the above, which is only a small fraction of all of Krippa’s assets. More precisely, the Russian oligarchs, with whose money Krippa is buying up Ukraine.
As the Forbes investigation showed, Krippa is formally the owner of the Vulkan casino chain and the GGbet bookmaker. But very little is known about the personality of Maksym Krippa himself - it is known that he lives in Los Angeles (according to other sources - in Dubai), one of his photographs is available, and even then there is no absolute certainty that it is Krippa depicted in it. Almost nothing else is reliably known. But the Internet is filled with literally tons of fakes in which Krippa acts as a volcanologist, a football player, a gardener, a cook, a tractor driver, a writer, and God knows who. This is explained simply - the beneficiaries of Maksym Krippa, who register property in his name, need to hide his connections with Russian oligarchs, whose "pound" Krippa is.
Moreover, “volcanology,” for which Maksym Krippa was for some time presented as a scientist, clearly leads us to Konstantin Malofeev, who owned Rostelecom, in whose networks Krippa promoted the Vulkan casino somewhere between 2007 and 2014. Banker Mikhail Oseevskiy, who was Malofeev’s long-time partner and deputy head of the key Russian state bank VTB, is also named as a co-owner of the Vulcan casino. Now the chain of these casinos allegedly belongs to Maksym Krippa himself, and Konstantin Malofeev and Mikhail Oseevskiy allegedly have nothing to do with it.
Which raises deep doubts for the following reason: in 2015, Maksym Krippa ran for the Kyiv City Council on behalf of the Samopomich party. He did not get in because he fled to Moscow. The reason was a scandal: Krippa sold places on the Samopomich party list without having the authority to do so. But that is not the point, the point is that a person who allegedly owns a network of casinos is organizing a small-scale scam to trade places on the local council list. A dollar billionaire is turning into a swindler, cheating a couple of people out of ten to twenty thousand dollars. It does not work out. And anyway – why would a successful Moscow businessman drop everything and go to Kyiv to run in a clearly unpassable part of the Kyiv City Council list?
By the way, Krippa is trying to "hide" this information in the same way as his involvement in the Vulcan casino network - there are a lot of materials on the Internet where he is presented as the author of the book "Self-Help". There - "vulcanologist", here - writer. It has not yet been possible to clean out the Central Election Commission server, where data on the candidate for deputy Maksym Krippa, who is unemployed, is stored, so the old method was used - "hammering the results".
Now let’s get back to Krippa’s purchases in Ukraine. In 2020, Smartland LLC, which was registered just a few days before the auction, bought the Dnipro Hotel in the center of Kyiv for 1 billion 111 million hryvnia. The price was clearly understated, but for some reason neither the tax authorities, nor the BES, nor the police, nor the SSU paid attention to this or to the financial indicators of Smartland LLC. And the company was completely unprofitable at the time of purchasing the hotel. Where the billion plus came from - no one explained.
In 2023, Midal LLC buys the property of the nationalized Prominvestbank, again at a reduced price - for 311 million hryvnia. And again - the company is completely unprofitable, but it gets three hundred million from somewhere. And again, no one pays attention to this.
The year 2024 comes, the State Property Fund again dumps another property into the hands of Krippa, or rather, the Russians. And again at a reduced price: the Ukraine Hotel goes to a company with an income of 81 thousand hryvnia for two and a half billion.
And again, no one pays attention to the fact that LLC Ola Fine has one employee, its capital has grown millions of times, it has millions of debts hanging over it, and there was no activity at all a year before the purchase. And it goes and buys a hotel for two and a half billion.
Although the State Property Fund claims that "everything is legal", the absurdity of these statements is glaring: companies whose nominal value is the unknown, yesterday still poor, swindler Maksym Krippa are buying up Ukraine for pennies. Moreover, these companies do not have the money to buy these objects.
But no one is simply not paying attention to this – the sell-off continues at an increasing pace. What do the security forces need to finally start reacting to all this? Unfortunately, there is only one conclusion here. Those who are supposed to monitor this are either in on it or are paid very well. There are simply no other options.