The reincarnation of Oleinik: a repeatedly compromised figure is trying to return to big politics

Party Diversity

47-year-old Svyatoslav Oleinik was born in the city of Dnipro. His career began in the same place - Oleinik worked in the prosecutor’s office. And then he opened a private law practice. In 2006, Svyatoslav Oleinik ran for the first time for people’s deputies on the electoral list of the Tymoshenko Bloc. In 2007, in early elections, he was again elected to the Verkhovna Rada from the BYuT party. And the first scandal with his participation occurred in 2010: in September of this year, along with several other colleagues, Oleinik was expelled from the opposition BYuT faction for supporting the pro-government parliamentary majority led by representatives of the Party of Regions.

After BYuT, there was the Ukraine of the Future party, from which Oleinik ran for mayor of Dnepropetrovsk at that time. He lost the elections, but “Ukraine of the Future” held 39 deputies in the local councils of different levels of the Dnepropetrovsk region. Together with this party, Oliynyk tried to go to the 2012 parliamentary elections, but his political force did not overcome the 5% barrier, and Oliynyk did not get into the Verkhovna Rada of the 7th convocation. Oleinik also made an unsuccessful attempt to return to parliament with the “Ukraine of the Future” in 2014. And after that, luck did smile on him, although Oleinik did not become a people’s deputy.

Then he again changed his party affiliation and in 2015 was elected a deputy to the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Council from Kolomoisky’s Vozrozhdeniye party. At that time, the leaders of the Renaissance, Vitaly Khomutynnik and Viktor Bondar, did not hide friendly relations with Kolomoisky, and Khomutynnik, moreover, was a business partner of the oligarch.

As you know, Kolomoisky himself has never been a people’s deputy. But for almost two decades, he helped deputies from various political parties apply to parliament. And the 2019 elections were no exception. The Renaissance party, controlled by the oligarch, also delegated its people to the Council of the last convocation. However, Oliynyk was not among them. From November 8, 2019 to December 16, 2020, he worked as chairman of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Council.

And at first everything was fine. But as Kolomoisky’s relationship with the presidential vertical changed, Oleinik felt a chill to cooperate with the authorities elected in 2019. In an interview with Glavkom, he said that he removed the Ze-team sticker from his mobile phone and no longer supports President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was generally a landmark interview in many respects. In it, Oliynyk said that he was ready to support even the party of the provocateur Shariy, but not the Servant of the People. He also did not deny close ties with Igor Kolomoisky.

In 2020, during the local elections, Oliynyk headed the headquarters of Vitali Klitschko’s Udar party in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Klitschko did not confirm this information, but the media wrote about it as a proven fact.

Meanwhile, another remarkable event took place. The mayoral elections in Krivoy Rog ended with a sensation. The headquarters of the candidate from the Opposition Platform for Life, Konstantin Pavlov, announced the victory of his nominee. But what does Oliynyk have to do with it, you ask? To the fact that Oleinik, as best he could, used administrative resources in support of Pavlov, giving a direct or indirect instruction to vote for the right candidate. This was also covered by the local media. After the death of Pavlov in 2021, the duties of the mayor of the city are temporarily performed by Yuriy Vilkul, who only confirms the old suspicions: Oleynik’s hands in Kryvyi Rih were actually given away to the OPPL.

business deals

Svyatoslav Oleinik not only ran around parties and looked for influential patrons. NABU has been interested in the former deputy for a long time. To understand what is at stake here, we need to resort to retrospective again, to 2014-2015. It was then that proximity to the financial flows of the region allowed Oliynyk to create a whole system for pumping money out of the state budget, which for the time being worked like clockwork. He was the beneficiary of a number of companies involved in construction, utilities, etc. Of course, unofficially.

But back to NABU. The main points of the claims of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau against Svyatoslav Oleinik are lies in the declaration, tax evasion and many corruption scandals. In particular, Svyatoslav Oleinik is suspected of hiding his property using nominees.

One of these “dummy” was the head of Investment Service Ukraine Ivan Gerasimenko (together with him Oliynyk was the ultimate beneficiary of Ukrainian Media Systems LLC and Investment Service Ukraine LLC). According to some reports, Gerasimenko has several apartments in Kyiv and the Dnieper, as well as a villa in the Odessa region.

Oleinik also did not declare the property of his common-law wife, Irina Gunazy, but the investigators learned that she had a lot of land in the Dnepropetrovsk and Kiev regions, the Dnieper, a household in the Dnieper, and non-residential premises in Pavlograd. Separately, it is necessary to mention the assets of Oleinik, recorded on his wife, in Slovakia.

Gunaz has houses, land and a business. Several land plots are registered on it, a non-residential building with an area of ​​1019 sq. m, agricultural building and land plot 7117 sq. m. In general, the common-law wife of Oleinik owns a considerable amount of property, which he did not declare. As the Slovak edition Finančné Noviny wrote, Oliynyk considers Slovakia as a “reserve airfield” in case of problems with Ukrainian tax authorities and law enforcement officers.

In addition, NABU entered into the register of pre-trial investigations the criminal proceedings on the privatization of the Aul chlorine transfusion station, to which, as chairman of the regional council, Svyatoslav Oleinik was directly involved. This strategic enterprise is the only one in the region that was engaged in the packaging of chlorine for the purification of drinking water. As the journalists found out, Oleinik held a session at which a decision was made to privatize AHP. Soon the station was bought by the Mega Plus Agency associated with the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky.

The details of this transaction interested the Antimonopoly Committee and investigative journalists of Our Money. Back in 2020, the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine published a requirement to provide information on the purchase of the Aul chlorine transfusion station. As Nashi Dengi found out, the actual buyer, Andrey Zhitnikov, who bought the strategic enterprise for more than 30 million hryvnia, lives in an ordinary five-story building in the Dnieper, and his wife said that the station was simply “hung up” on her husband.

Prior to buying the strategic enterprise, Zhitnikov worked for Privat Holding, owned by Igor Kolomoisky, and for Energoalliance, which was owned by one of Kolomoisky’s oligarch’s managers. Until 2016, Ukrnafta supplied gas to DneprAzot through this company. It is Igor Kolomoisky who has a monopoly in the production of liquid chlorine, which is used to purify drinking water for the whole country. His company DniproAzot is the only domestic manufacturer of this important reagent.

And it was DneprAzot, which produced chlorine, that supplied the substance to the regional water utilities exclusively through the Aul chlorine transfusion station. The AHP privatization case was qualified under article 364 of the Criminal Code - abuse of power or official position. If the guilt of Svyatoslav Oleinik is proven in court, he faces 6 years behind bars.

Oliynyk has not been charged in another high-profile case. This refers to the explosion in the Dnieper high-rise building, which in October 2007 claimed the lives of 23 people. The accident occurred due to the negligence of Dneprogaz, but the perpetrators were never punished, because Oleinik’s lawyers defended Dneprogaz. About how Oleinik covered up the perpetrators, it became known from a 40-minute documentary, according to Obozrevatel and the Grom project.

Although the Cabinet of Ministers filed a lawsuit against the perpetrators of the tragedy for almost UAH 94 million, the victims did not receive a penny of this money. Dneprogaz lawyer Yaroslav Grizodub, who was also a full-time lawyer for CGI Agency LLC, which belonged to Varvara Oleinik, joined the game. At the same time, the managing company of Dneprogaz was LLC GAZEKS-Ukraine, a subsidiary of the Russian company GAZEKS, which is known to be controlled by Putin’s ally Viktor Vekselberg. In other words, Oleinik defended the interests of GAZEKS-Ukraine, during which Svyatoslav Oleinik became a great friend of its director Vitaliy Demyanuk.

Love for Russia and flight abroad

Finally, we add that the SBU also became interested in some aspects of Oleinik’s activities. In July 2021, the Security Service began to summon for interrogations former people’s deputies who voted in 2010 for the so-called “Kharkov agreements”, investigating a case of high treason. Among them is Svyatoslav Oleinik.

Chronologically, the latest scandal involving Oleinik is his post on a telegram channel about “reconciliation” with Russia. A still-incumbent member of the Dnepropetrovsk Regional Council has circulated Kremlin narratives about a compromise with Russia. Denis Kazansky drew attention to this. “Oh, we have a new Muraev here. The former head of the Dnepropetrovsk regional council, close to Kolomoisky, Svyatoslav Oleinik, writes that it is necessary to compromise with Russia as soon as possible, taking into account his interests, and places in his post the flag of the state, which in his hometown alone killed 40 people at a time with a rocket attack on a high-rise building,” Kazansky noted.

The journalist added that for many years he has been writing about politics, collaborators, traitors, but still cannot comprehend that there is such boundless bestiality. “They will justify anything. And the genocide of his people, and concentration camps, and gas chambers. As far as I understand, since he writes this, he is not currently in Ukraine. Just wondering, how is he going to return to his hometown and look into the eyes of his countrymen? - asks the journalist.

The person involved in the scandal himself claims that the message about peace with Rerosia is falsified, and he himself does not even have accounts on social networks. So, perhaps, Oleinik is still not indifferent to how he will be perceived in his homeland. But this hardly testifies to his patriotism. It’s just likely that the multiple party-to-party jumping champion is already off to a rocky start before a new run into politics.