Do you mean Yulia Timoshenko?
Posted on 12/08/2004 4:23:27 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
...The oligarchs have another fear: that a Yushchenko victory could push them out of the inner circle of power and perhaps force a review of controversial privatization deals under which the clans acquired huge state-owned industrial facilities, sometimes for hundreds of millions of dollars below market value.
Yushchenko's campaign has made its position clear.
"When you see a country that's been turned into a limited joint stock company that's controlled by a handful of people, this is something we can't accept," Oleksandr Zinchenko, a key Yushchenko lieutenant, said in an interview this year. "The system requires radical change."
Akhmetov, a young coal and steel baron who is believed to be Ukraine's richest man, is chief executive of System Capital Management and has assets estimated at $1.9 billion to $3 billion.
He heads the powerful Donetsk clan, which also includes the powerful Donbass Industrial Union and other smaller firms.
Kuchma's son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk, Ukraine's second-richest man and head of Interpipe Corp., controls a clan nearly as powerful as the Donetsk group. A third clan's leading members include Viktor Medvedchuk, Kuchma's powerful chief of staff. Medvedchuk is associated with the Kiev-based Slavutich group, which has huge assets in trade, agribusiness and energy.
The clans back political parties that have substantial representation in parliament, and they control all three major national television channels.
"Medvedchuk is the second-most-powerful person in the country," said Bondarenko, the analyst. "He controls the most important information venues: the information flow to the people, via television, and the information flow to the president. Medvedchuk personally prepares and apportions the information which gets on the presidential desk."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
The tycoon's closest friend, Boris Kolesnikov, is head of the regional parliament and the most powerful public official in an area where election observers say thousands of ballots were falsified.
Some voters here tell stories of arriving at the polls in midafternoon and being greeted by bolted doors and thugs. "We're out of ballot papers," one woman said she was told.
Two days after the election, a local electrical company manager said she was ordered to buy jackets for employees to send them on a mandatory trip to Kiev to demonstrate on behalf of Yanukovich.
"We had to make sure that the coats would be bought in different sizes, different colors and different styles so that the people who went there wouldn't look like Chinese athletes, all wearing exactly the same thing," said the manager, who identified herself only as Oksana.
Akhmetov's personal stake in the outcome of the election is huge. In June, companies belonging to Akhmetov and Pinchuk won a bid for privatization of Ukraine's largest steel plant, Kryvorizhstal, for $800 million, despite the fact that companies such as U.S. Steel had bid as high as $1.5 billion. Akhmetov and Pinchuk's empires each gained an estimated $500 million from the transaction, according to estimates.
A Yushchenko win would almost certainly lead to a government attempt to reverse the transaction.
This is the tip of the iceberg - Graft is a $30 billion problem in Ukraine.
Sounds like a good time to unload any Ukraine Heinz ketchup-factory stocks....
The thing is 100% foriegn ownership of these companies would probably advance the ukrainian economy just fine. Ownership doesn't matter. People should remember this when thinking about foreign investment in the US too.
Do you mean Yulia Timoshenko?
That's a tycoon I would contemplate a merger with.
Now I have neither any business nor any interest in it,” Ukraine’s opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko told a press conference today.There is almost nothing left of her business now, she said. The State Tax Administration has held a series of audits at each of her enterprises, which has, in fact, destroyed them, the ex-vice-premier said. At the same time, she noted that even those businessmen, who cooperated with her and tried to set up their own enterprises, undergo persecutions on the part of the tax administration, a ForUm correspondent reported.
Tymoshenko also said that the authorities had offered to return her business in exchange for denial of opposition policy. “This is out of the questions,” Tymoshenko emphasized adding that she would never accept this proposal.
She has also declared that the State Tax Administration, in cooperation with the company Slavutych-capital belonging, in her words, to Hryhoriy Surkis and Privatbank, has sold the bills of the Integrated Power Grids of Ukraine, which were to be given over to Russia at 400 million hryvnias, at a mere 1.3% of this sum. According to Tymoshenko, the stocks have gone to Medvedchuk, Surkis and Pinchuk.
LOL!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.