Why the Dnepropetrovsk region, the “business center” of Ukraine, turned out to be the quietest Russian-speaking region.

The head of the government apparatus of the Dnepropetrovsk region, Ukrainian patriot Gennady Olegovich Korban and another Ukrainian patriot and vice-governor Boris Albertovich Filatov are bending over sheet A3: they are trying to figure out the Ukrainian names of different departments on the diagram of powers of the regional government. Before the eyes of a Forbes correspondent, powers are distributed and the power structure is approved.

- Why do you get this? - Filatov asks in pure Russian, pointing his finger at one of the complex Ukrainian government institutions. - He still runs to me for all questions.

“I don’t need it, take it for yourself,” Korban agrees good-naturedly and with a ballpoint pen makes an arrow on the sheet in the direction of Filatov.

The phone rings. “As I understand it, the leader raises the question there, primaries begin there, there are support points that are interesting to us, you understand what I’m talking about - Korban goes to the window. — You go on Skype there, I’ll tell you which areas. We need to help, yes,” Korban says, raising his tone. “Elect... Whoever needs to be.” (The conversation took place ahead of the presidential elections in Ukraine scheduled for May.)

Another call - someone on the line asks to share gasoline (the military has been short of fuel in recent days). “Now you send me an SMS, what they need in what volume - brand and quantity, I forward it to my people, and they release it,” Korban orders and puts the iPhone on vibration.

According to tax statistics for 2014, 240 millionaires are registered in Dnepropetrovsk, that is, people with an annual income of more than 1 million hryvnia. In terms of 1000 inhabitants, this is even more than in Kyiv. Dnepropetrovsk is considered the unofficial business capital of Ukraine, and now entrepreneurs have finally taken power in the region.

An office in a government office is more like a meeting room in a business office. There are no portraits of presidents, usual for officials, on the walls. There are no turntable phones either. All the time some people come in without knocking, it is clear that no one here protects the peace of officials. And Korban and Filatov bear little resemblance to civil servants.

In peaceful life, Gennady Korban and Boris Filatov are long-time friends and partners in the media projects Glavred and UNIAN, in which they have a minority stake. In January of this year, Korban and Filatov left Ukraine after Filatov said something unflattering about the administration of President Yanukovych, and Korban turned on Channel Five on a huge screen located in the Plaza shopping center he owned. “Channel Five,” by the way, is still broadcasting in the center of Dnepropetrovsk.

Co-owner of the Slavutich-Capital company with a fortune of $153 million, Korban is one of the hundred richest Ukrainians according to Forbes. In addition to shopping centers in Dnepropetrovsk, he also owns minority stakes in dozens of enterprises. Ukrainian media have repeatedly ranked him among the minority owners of the Privat group of Igor Kolomoisky, now the governor of the Dnepropetrovsk region; Korban himself denies ownership of a stake in Privat.

The Russian-speaking region of Ukraine, ruled by an oligarch planted from Kyiv, who does not hide his Jewish religion - it would seem, what else can be thought of to prepare a popular revolt against the new Ukrainian authorities? But for some reason, it was the Dnepropetrovsk region that turned out to be the calmest in the southeast of Ukraine. Unlike neighboring regions, where mass unrest breaks out and alternative power structures are formed, only one demonstration took place in Dnepropetrovsk. And it ended peacefully - after negotiations

People parted ways with Filatov, who was responsible for domestic policy, and did not gather again. According to a recent survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 84% of residents of the region are categorically against its annexation to Russia. This is 13% more than the Ukrainian average.

Walking around the city, it’s hard to believe that just a hundred kilometers away, the Ukrainian military is trying to take control of chunks of the state’s crumbling territory. And in Dnepropetrovsk, in expensive restaurants on the embankment, young ladies drink cocktails, there is brisk trade on the street, and there is no control at the entrance to the administration - the Forbes correspondent was not even asked for a passport. A quiet haven inside the bustling Ukraine. How did this happen?

Promised land

Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky's office is on the 18th floor of the world's largest Jewish community center. The huge Menorah complex resembles a stairway to heaven or a pedestal, each step of which is a building, one higher than the other.

From the rabbi's office there is access to the observation deck. “That’s where the central synagogue was,” the rabbi shows the new development area. “The house remains, it is now inside a modern building, it has been reconstructed.” The area where the synagogue building is hidden was built by one of the richest residents of Dnepropetrovsk and one of the sponsors of the Jewish community, Vadim Ermolaev (No. 55 on the Ukrainian Forbes list, $190 million). His construction company is named after the first letter of the Semitic alphabets, Aleph. “There, below the red house, religious Jews live. In general, Jews live everywhere in the city,” Kaminetsky smiles.

Dnepropetrovsk (originally Ekaterinoslav) owes its birth to the most grandiose journey in Russian history of Empress Catherine II on the occasion of the capture of Crimea. The trip was produced by Count Potemkin, who organized the groundbreaking ceremony for a new cathedral and a new city on the mountain, not far from the current Mayak restaurant. At the presentation of the new city, while snacking on black caviar, the French ambassador Count Segur muttered: “In Ekaterinoslav we saw the beginning of a city that will not be inhabited, the beginning of a church in which there will never be services; the place chosen for Ekaterinoslav is waterless.”

At first, the new city was developing only at the expense of the budget; only unprofitable state-owned enterprises were built in Yekaterinoslav. However, Catherine decided to establish a special zone for Jews to live in the new city, and things went ahead. An iron foundry, a cloth factory and other attributes of a developed economy appeared here, built by representatives of the Jewish community, which by the beginning of the 20th century already constituted more than a third of the population.

The Bentley fits nicely into the synagogue parking lot, and the driver readily tells Forbes how to get to the temple. Already at eight in the morning, morning prayers in the main synagogue are full. Here is the co-owner of the company producing semi-finished turkey products “Akhdus” (translated from Hebrew as “unity”), Arthur Zolotarevsky, putting on tefillin. Here, the deputy chief of staff of the National Defense of the Dnepropetrovsk region, Maxim Dubovsky, is frightening everyone with stories about Russian saboteurs in the city. The synagogue here is more like a business club with interests. No one bothers you to discuss business, and after prayer, you can resolve business issues in one of the kosher restaurants located here.

The Jewish theme in Dnepropetrovsk sounds completely natural. “This is a club in which everyone is united by a spiritual idea,” says Ruslan Shostak, co-owner of the VARUS supermarket chain, Dnepropetrovsk resident, about the community. “I don’t go there, but all my friends who go there say that the microclimate there is really quite comfortable.” According to Shostak, the rabbi sometimes acts as a guarantor for large transactions. “It’s rare, but it happens. The rabbi helps all club members in any way he can. Everyone turns to him. He is such a global GR director for the entire Jewish business community.”

Now, if you believe the statistics, there are almost no Jews left in the city - according to the latest census, only 0.4% (even in Moscow, according to the 2010 census, it is more - 0.46%). However, the Jewish community is very influential. And this doesn't annoy anyone. But was it only Jewish enterprise that made Dnepropetrovsk the business capital of Ukraine, surpassing even Kyiv in terms of the number of large companies created here?

Game of Thrones: City of Elites

No one would have heard of the industrial town of Dneprodzerzhinsk, not far from Dnepropetrovsk, if Leonid Brezhnev had not been born there. The monument to the Secretary General still stands in Dneprodzerzhinsk (unlike the monument to Lenin that was transported to the museum).

This attitude is quite reasonable. In personnel policy, Brezhnev adhered to the old Soviet principle of trusting only his own. Dnepropetrovsk under Brezhnev was like St. Petersburg in the Putin era - the secretary general pulled to the top everyone he managed to meet and make friends with before he began leading the country. From the Dnepropetrovsk Metallurgical Plant, Brezhnev recruited Nikolai Tikhonov, who became chairman of the Council of Ministers, and Nikolai Shchelokov came from there, whom Brezhnev called to head the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Brezhnev expelled the first secretary of the Central Committee of Ukraine, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, from Dneprodzerzhinsk.

But even now the influence of the Dnepropetrovsk elite on Ukrainian politics is difficult to overestimate. The acting president, the recently released former prime minister and the head of the opposition, two of the top three richest Ukrainians - all of them grew up in Dnepropetrovsk.

Another native of the city played a role in this, now preferring to remain aloof from political and business processes. General Director of Yuzhmash Leonid Kuchma played the role of an exporter of the Dnepropetrovsk elite to independent Ukraine.

Until 1987, Dnepropetrovsk was a city closed to foreigners, a forge of the most important types of weapons. The local Yuzhmash produced the Cyclone and Cosmos launch vehicles, as well as the Molodets and Voevoda combat missile systems, better known by NATO classification as Satan. Until 1991, every third intercontinental ballistic missile in service with the USSR Strategic Missile Forces was launched in Dnepropetrovsk.

In the mid-1990s, after becoming the second president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma launched the careers of many participants in the Ukrainian Forbes list. In the early 1990s, a young candidate of science, Viktor Pinchuk (now No. 2 on the Ukrainian Forbes list, $3.8 billion), who made his living in the resale of pipes, rented half a floor on the sixth floor of the local Pipe Institute. And the second half was rented by his friend, who was engaged in the gasoline trade, Yulia Timoshenko. The neighborhood grew into the Commonwealth company - together Pinchuk and Tymoshenko were engaged in the export of Russian and Turkmen gas to Ukraine. In 1997, Pinchuk began dating the president’s daughter Elena; they officially registered their relationship five years later. Even before the marriage, Pinchuk controlled the Novomoskovsk Pipe Plant, the Nizhnedneprovsky Pipe Rolling Plant and the Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant, and after the marriage in 2004, Pinchuk acquired Krivorozhstal with another billionaire Rinat Akhmetov (now the richest Ukrainian). But by that time, his former partner Yulia Tymoshenko had grown into a serious politician, and Pinchuk’s good relationship with his father-in-law became one of the main accusations against Kuchma for his “family” approach to economic policy. Krivorozhstal was taken away from Tymoshenko with the arrival of the Orange, but Pinchuk remained afloat. In 2012, he built and launched the first modern metallurgical plant in Ukraine - an investment of $700 million went to his native Dnepropetrovsk.

Is Pinchuk the main oligarch in the region? No not like this. There is no one oligarch owner in Dnepropetrovsk. Millionaires and other entrepreneurs exist well in this environment; there are enough resources for everyone. “What is Ukraine? - Korban argues. — This is the export of metallurgy, chemistry and a little mechanical engineering. Metallurgy includes coal, electricity, ferroalloys, ore, and processing plants. All this is in the Dnepropetrovsk region. Unlike Donetsk, where this chain is broken.”

Only the main brand of Soviet Dnepropetrovsk, the Yuzhmash plant, remains in decline. After the collapse of the USSR and the end of the arms race, Yuzhmash lost a huge share of military orders: in order to survive, the plant produced umbrellas and bicycles. The divorce from Russia, which decided to curtail cooperation with Ukraine in the missile and aerospace spheres, was even more difficult. “We are very closely tied to Ukraine in terms of military-space cooperation, but due to the political situation and NATO’s position we are forced to look for an escape route - we will redeploy orders to Russia, Belarus and even China,” a major Russian official associated with the defense industry explains to Forbes. “How can we trust them if their elite has been living and working in the United States for a long time?” According to him, the refusal to cooperate was mutual. Ex-President Viktor Yushchenko asked the plant’s management to distance themselves from Russia as much as possible. This is not easy to do, since Yuzhmash purchases 70% of the metal and components for missiles in Russia and Russia brought the company up to 85% of export revenue.

Despite the fact that the State Space Agency of Ukraine and the Federal Space Agency of Russia signed a memorandum of understanding in 2013, Yuzhmash is trying to focus more on the west than the east. In 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Vega launch vehicle, and the United States launched two Antares launch vehicles - part of their propulsion system and first stage were manufactured in Dnepropetrovsk. Two more stages were sent to the United States for the launch of Antares in 2014. However, the plant lacks Western orders.

Business Governor

The most prominent representative of the Dnepropetrovsk elite is the founder of the Privat group of companies and the country’s largest Privatbank, Igor Kolomoisky (No. 3 on the Ukrainian Forbes list, $2.4 billion). A graduate of the Dnepropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute, Kolomoisky started a business in the late 1980s by selling office equipment, which he and his friends brought from Moscow. In 1992, with his partner Gennady Bogolyubov, he founded Privatbank. Voucher privatization turned Kolomoisky into an oligarch - he collected 2.3% of all vouchers in the country and exchanged them for shares in two factories and two mining and processing plants. He didn't stop there. Now Kolomoisky’s interests extend from petrochemicals to ferroalloys, from ski resorts to air transportation (he owns the Dnipropetrovsk airport). Its most valuable asset is the country's largest Privatbank (assets - $24 billion, capital - $2.8 billion, according to IFRS data as of September 2013). In addition to money, Kolomoisky is interested in football and religion. He is vice-president of the Football Federation of Ukraine and head of the European Jewish Union.

After the victory of Euromaidan in January 2014, in a situation of complete managerial collapse, Kolomoisky himself proposed his candidacy for the post of governor. “Before, the governor had to negotiate with the elites,” says Korban. “Now we are the elite.” It has been mentioned more than once in the press that Kolomoisky, like Pinchuk, initially supported the “Euromaidan” - at least the information resources of both covered the protest rallies very loyally from the very beginning.

Having become governor, Kolomoisky immediately promised two things: not to do business and to speak Ukrainian. At his first press conference on March 3, Kolomoisky said in pure Russian that Vladimir Putin was “inadequate and completely crazy.” Putin did not remain in debt and dubbed Kolomoisky a “unique rogue” and a “scoundrel” who managed to deceive even Roman Abramovich. After this, Kolomoisky’s business in Russia ended. State Duma deputies from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation asked the Prosecutor General's Office to check the Russian subsidiary of Privatbank - Moskomprivatbank (assets of 56 billion rubles and deposits of 40 billion rubles) for involvement in the financing of terrorism. A little later, the Bank of Russia introduced a temporary administration in the bank, and then launched the procedure for its reorganization. Privatbank had to sell its Russian subsidiary to Binbank for 6 billion rubles, but then problems began in Crimea - the Central Bank suspended the activities of the bank’s branches, and the prosecutor’s office is seeking to seize property.

If Moscow manages to put pressure on Kolomoisky’s business, then problems have arisen with the region. The Russian-speaking Dnepropetrovsk region remained the most loyal region of Ukraine to the new authorities. Kolomoisky keeps the situation under control: cars with “yellow-black” flags drive through the streets, people sign up as volunteers to protect the region from the “little green men.” Billboards appeared on the streets of Dnepropetrovsk: “$10,000 for a Muscovite” with the Privatbank logo. How do they deal with dissatisfied people? In response to a demonstration against the appearance of representatives of the Right Sector in the military units of the region, Vice-Governor Filatov called a group of activists and invited them to tour the military units with an inspection to check if there were “Bandera supporters” there. Kolomoisky himself spoke to the communists. As witnesses say, he skillfully trumped quotes from Marx and eventually convinced them that the field was moving in the right direction. Did he manage to convince Russian investors and businesses of the same thing?

Nothing personal

The Moscow-Dnepropetrovsk branded train slows down in front of the Kazachya Lopan station. This is already Ukraine - the border is two kilometers behind. Border guards enter the carriage. The situation is nervous. "Purpose of the visit? Who are you dating? Do you have an invitation? Where to stay? — the border guard bombards Forbes correspondents Pavel Sedakov and Artem Goloshchapov with questions. — How much money are you carrying with you? There is an extract from

Bank?"

After a half-hour interrogation, the reporters are put on a passing train to Belgorod, given a copy of the refusal to cross the border due to “unconfirmed purpose of travel” and “insufficient financial support.” The journalist's ID only made the situation worse. “Now we will close your entry for three years,” the border guards rejoiced. Under this pretext, a dozen passengers were removed that day - men from 18 to 50 years old. “Ukraine is an expensive country,” the captain explains, scanning the passports, and, softening, adds: “It’s just not the best time to travel to Ukraine.”

And is not the best time to invest in Dnepropetrovsk? Forbes correspondent Ilya Zhegulev, who flew to the city by plane the next day, asks this question to the head of the local government apparatus, Korban. He looks away and doesn’t answer. His colleague Filatov is there: “We are waiting for people from Russia to come. I think that from there any thinking, educated people will run here. We are waiting for them to run not to the USA, not to London, not to France, but to Ukraine.”

All the pre-crisis years, the presence of Russian business was especially noticeable in Dnepropetrovsk. Retail chains were the main business “interventionists” in Ukraine at that time. “O’Key”, “Arbat Prestige”, “Euroset”, “Pyaterochka”, “Perekrestok” - who hasn’t tried to start a business here. But, as Shostak, the owner of the VARUS retail chain, says, Russian management has encountered problems. “The main mistake of Russians is misconceptions about the Ukrainian market. It seems to Russians that Ukraine is the same as Russia in terms of mentality and profitability. But that's not true. Business margins here are much lower, so we need to concentrate on working with transaction costs and focus on the details.” Recently, Shostak’s VARUS company bought all the stores of the Perekrestok chain. The X5 group of companies began selling the business last summer. Co-owner of VARUS

he sees only advantages in the purchase - Dnepropetrovsk residents have entered the Kiev retail market. By the end of July, 13 stores with an area of 12,000 square meters will reopen. m - already under the VARUS brand. A month earlier, VARUS bought the stores of the outgoing SPAR chain.

“In Ukraine, working with gray and black money is often practiced and encouraged, but for us, as an open company, this is not acceptable,” a source at X5 explains the company’s decision. “In addition, the solvency of the population is much lower.”

One of the most high-profile stories of the penetration of Russian business into Ukraine became widely known thanks to the commentary of Vladimir Putin, who spoke about the “deception” of Roman Abramovich by the Kolomoiskys. In 2007, Kolomoisky became a co-owner of the Evraz Group, selling it metallurgical assets in Ukraine for $1 billion and a 9.72% stake in the group. Now Evraz Group, co-owned by Russian billionaires Roman Abramovich and Alexander Abramov, has 99.25% of the shares of the Sukhaya Balka Mining and Processing Plant, 95.57% of the shares of the Dnepropetrovsk Metallurgical Plant named after. Petrovsky, 93.74% of the shares of the Bagleykoks coke-chemical plant, 98.65% of the Dneprokoks shares and 93.83% of the Dneprodzerzhinsky coke-chemical plant, as well as 50% of the Southern Mining and Processing Plant (the fourth largest iron ore mining and processing plant in Ukraine).

After the Mosprivatbank story, several politicians in Ukraine called for symmetrical actions in relation to the property of Russian companies. However, as Korban says, “no one is going to take anything away.” He claims that Evraz feels comfortable in the Dnepropetrovsk region. The political situation does not affect the production activities of Evraz’s Ukrainian assets,” the company’s press service told Forbes.

However, a well-known Russian businessman and member of the Forbes list says that after the annexation of Crimea and the escalation of the crisis in the south-east of Ukraine, retaliatory actions to nationalize Russian assets in Ukraine “look almost inevitable.” But he adds that this will primarily affect Russian state-owned companies. Private traders can wait for now.

— With the participation of Pavel Sedakov and Ukrainian border guards

The homeland of independent billionaires