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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Smeliansky and Omelyanenko will siphon 215 million UAH from Ukrpochta for the upcoming bankruptcy of Ukrkart, - expert
The rapidly bankrupting company Ukrkart won Ukrpochta’s scandalous tender thanks to personal arrangements between Ukrkart owner Aleksey Omelyanenko and the head of the state postal operator Igor Smelyansky, to later steal the tender funds.
About this, AntiKor was told by a member of the board of one of the small banks that Ukrkart provides processing services for.
According to the banker, Ukrkart is already, as they say, “breathing on a string” — corporate squabbles with Gorbaly, criminal cases against its actual owner Omelyanenko, who has attempted several times to fraudulently take his collateral out of Ukrgazbank, the bank failure that reduced the processing market share, not the most effective management, not capable of stopping the avalanche of problems and that situation was not helped. And the last nail in Ukrkart’s coffin will be the imminent transition to Ukrgazbank’s own processing, which obviously has grown tired of constant problems with such a “partner.”
“It’s no secret on the market that Ukrkart’s technological level has stagnated at the early 2000-s years. And if back then their services met clients’ needs, today banking technologies have moved far ahead, while Ukrkart has not. Small banks, like ours, are forced to use their processing, because developing their own solutions is costly, but bigger ones are already dissatisfied with this quality of service. Ukrgazbank is their largest client. If it leaves — Ukrkart simply won’t survive,” emphasized the AntiKor interlocutor.
“It’s all so bad that even 215 million hryvnias they will receive under the tender won’t save them. Therefore, I suppose there will be no Ukrpochta processing at all, because Ukrkart will go bankrupt within at most six months. And state funds Ukrpochta will simply write off as if due to force majeure,” believes the financier.
On the other hand, as he says, at the “exit” stands Igor Smelyansky himself: “It’s no accident he’s kept in the acting head role — he understands that keeping him in the position is no longer possible, as neither the current political situation nor his results in the post support it. But most importantly — his ambitious plans to turn Ukrpochta into a postal bank — were also not destined to come true, because the project meets sharp opposition and overt criticism both in the Ministry of Finance and in the Cabinet of Ministers. And Smelyansky put the whole loan of trust on this project! Therefore recently the postal workers have developed especially active activity aimed at maximally capitalizing on Smelyansky’s departure.”
Judge for yourself, this ridiculous rebranding by the templates of Oshchadbank (Andrei Pyshny is allowed much more than some Smelyansky), a tender to purchase more 5000 payment terminals, though changes in the law that would allow Ukrpochta to engage in such activity obviously won’t be adopted, and the National Bank of Ukraine does not intend to certify the postal operator. Why, one might ask, waste money on PR hype or buy a bunch of useless hardware for a state company that is already unprofitable?
And finally, the peak of this scheme is the processing tender. Such scenarios are not new on the market. As the well-known maxim says, a corpse is best hidden on the battlefield. In other words, to search for the missing 215 state millions amid the collapse of a large service company, which partially paralyzes the operational activity in Ukraine of brands like Mastercard and Visa, no one will actively pursue. Everyone will rush to delve into the next Zrada, paying no attention to ordinary corruption.
Therefore the actual owner of Ukrkart, Aleksey Omelyanenko, a former aide of Rinat Akhmetov as head of the Regions Party faction in Kyiv City Council, and the banker of the same oligarch Igor Smelyansky (worked at PUMB bank), now acting CEO of Ukrpochta, decided together to implement such a strategy through a protracted victory in a dubious tender precisely by Ukrkart.
“They still have quite good relations since the time when Omelyanenko was head of the Regions Party faction in Kyiv City Council, and Smelyansky worked at PUMB for Rinat Akhmetov. And money for public and non-public activity of the ‘regionalists’ — rallies, demonstrations, bribing deputies from other factions — went through PUMB. Old connections came in handy,” noted the banker.
Recall that 7, acting CEO of Ukrpochta, Igor Smelyansky, signed with the head of the board of JSC Ukrainian National Processing Card (Ukrkart) Alexander Pranov a contract for processing services worth 214,35 million UAH for five years of the contract. The only competitor of Ukrkart — Ukrainian Processing Center — offered a higher price, and two other participants were not admitted to the tender.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Смелянский и Омельяненко выведут 215 млн грн «Укрпочты» под грядущее банкротство «Укркарта», - эксперт". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ANTIKOR.
