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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Just a few years ago “NIBULON,” the creation of Hero of Ukraine Oleksiy Vadatursky, was called a symbol of the Ukrainian agricultural miracle — a company that received an award from the EBRD for sustainable development and was trusted by the largest international banks. Today the brand may take on a very different “sound”: a criminal case, debts approaching 600 million dollars, and a question that the investigation will now seek to answer — was the company’s financial abyss a consequence of the war, or the result of decisions by the person who took charge of the business after the tragic death of the founder father? And could the story of the notorious agribusiness collapse “Mriya” or the flight of debtor-billionaire Oleh Bakhmatiuk repeat itself?
As the editorial staff of the online media outlet “Stop Corruption TV” learned from a response to an information request, on 3 September 2026 the investigative division of Police Department No.1 of the Mykolaiv District Police Department of the Main Directorate of the National Police in Mykolaiv region entered information into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations. Criminal proceeding No.12026152020001*** under Part 2 of Article 212 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine — tax evasion.
As follows from the relevant extract from the URPI, during the period from 01.07.2017 to 31.03.2021 the officials of LLC SP “NIBULON” responsible for financial and economic activities, accounting and tax accounting, and preparing tax reports may have intentionally used the reflection of business transactions in tax accounting to understate tax liabilities and/or overstate VAT figures.
According to the findings of the documentary scheduled on-site inspection report dated 22.09.2021, the controlling authority determined an understatement of profit tax and an overstatement of the amount of VAT claimed for budget reimbursement, which led to the actual non-receipt of funds to the budget in large amounts.
Behind this dry wording — months of joint work by a team from the investigative journalism project and a well-known anti-corruption organization, which were the first to draw attention to the striking situation around the agricultural giant.
On 26 August 2026, the All-Ukrainian NGO “Stop Corruption” sent an appeal to members of parliament, members of the relevant Verkhovna Rada Committee on Law Enforcement, outlining circumstances that may indicate criminal offenses by officials of LLC SP “NIBULON” — in particular CEO Andriy Vadatursky.
The matter immediately concerned four articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine: Part 3 of Article 212 (tax evasion), Article 219 (causing bankruptcy), Part 2 of Article 364-1 (abuse of authority by an official of a private law legal entity) and Part 5 of Article 191 (misappropriation or seizure of property by abusing official position).
What lies behind this case and why is the situation around “NIBULON” critically important for the economy and national security?
To understand why this is not just a story about “another company with probable tax troubles and debts,” it is worth recalling the scale of “NIBULON.”
For many years “NIBULON” within the Vadatursky family’s orbit was a leading Ukrainian exporter of grains and oilseeds, an operator of one of the largest grain storage and transportation networks in the country. In land relations, according to the company itself, about 14 000 landowners cooperate with it — thousands of families whose incomes are tied to the holding’s stability.
So when in 2024–2025 years a consortium of international creditors — IFC, ING Bank, Crédit Agricole, the EBRD, FMO, DEG and the EIB — sat down to negotiate restructuring the company’s financing for a total amount of up to 500 million USD (the company itself reported on some individual agreements, for example, here and here), it looked like a rescue story rather than the bankruptcy of an agrarian giant.
Separately, Raiffeisen Bank JSC agreed to restructure another loan of 45 million USD, which the company also reported on its official website.
Thus, together with other obligations, the group’s debt burden, according to preliminary estimates by the All-Ukrainian NGO “Stop Corruption,” approaches 600 million dollars.
At the same time, the importance of “NIBULON” for Ukraine’s economy means that its financial incapacity could have negative consequences not only for the enterprise itself and its creditors but for the country’s economy as a whole.
The question the investigation may now answer: was the restructuring a way out of an objectively difficult situation caused by the full-scale war, or part of a model by which the company for years covered old debts with new ones, postponing repayment?
Telling numbers: what does a comparative analysis of the company’s financial statements under both Vadaturskys indicate?
NIBULON’s financial statements published in open sources (data from the Opendatabot and YouControl platforms) read like the story of two different companies — before and after 4 August 2022, when, after the tragic death of founder Oleksiy Vadatursky, leadership passed to his son Andriy.
Here are just a few figures:
2021 — the last “normal” year: revenue 40,615 billion UAH, profit 1,336 billion UAH, liabilities 15,195 billion UAH;
2022 — collapse: revenue fell to 15,181 billion UAH (down 62,6%), loss 10,175 billion UAH, liabilities — 22,691 billion UAH;
2023: loss 1,612 billion UAH, profitability minus 7,04%;
2024: loss 646,381 million UAH, liabilities — 18,375 billion UAH;
2025 — turning point: revenue 18,458 billion UAH, loss 5,750 billion UAH, liabilities 23,875 billion UAH — for the first time exceeding assets (21,814 billion UAH).
Current liquidity ratio as of 2025 year — only 32,8% (0,33). Simply put: for every hryvnia of current liabilities the company has only 33 kopecks of current assets.
Another detail stands out: in 2019 the company paid 833,6 million UAH in taxes, while receiving VAT budget reimbursement of 4,893 billion UAH — almost six times more. In 2020 the proportion was similar (824,1 million versus 4,320 billion UAH), and in 2021 the gap reached 6,4 times (829,38 million versus 5,3 billion UAH).
VAT reimbursement itself is a legal procedure, but the scale of the disproportion raises the logical question: where could these funds have gone if the company was simultaneously increasing debts to foreign creditors? And in 2017, long before current events, the General Prosecutor’s Office, as reported by Politeka, was preparing to notify Andriy Vadatursky of suspicion in a case regarding the creation of corruption schemes.
As one can infer from the fact that a criminal proceeding was opened, part of the unpaid profit could have been funneled into the shadow economy through tax manipulations.
Who will repay the multi-million debts to international banks if the agrarian giant goes bankrupt?
It is worth asking the question that is usually lost behind financial tables: what will happen if “NIBULON” really cannot service these obligations? Among the company’s creditors are not only private capital but also international financial institutions, whose willingness to invest in the Ukrainian economy during wartime already rests on a thread of trust.
Every instance in which a large borrower fails to meet obligations raises borrowing costs for other agribusinesses and banks — and ordinary depositors, whose deposits banks convert into loan portfolios for such giants, end up in that chain.
In their appeal to the Verkhovna Rada Committee, representatives of the All-Ukrainian NGO “Stop Corruption” put this question directly: if it is proven that the company’s collapse was caused not only by the war but also by conscious decisions of the management, the consequences could go far beyond the corporate interests of the company and affect Ukraine’s agricultural, credit, and export sectors.
The main intrigue ahead is not legal but behavioral. Ukraine’s recent history knows many examples when the subjects of high-profile cases chose not the courtroom in Kyiv but a villa in Monaco, from which justice for years could not secure either extradition or the return of assets. It is enough to recall the fugitive Oleh Bakhmatiuk, against whom NABU opened several criminal cases, one of which concerns the misappropriation of 1,2 billion UAH of a stabilization loan provided by the National Bank, and who still avoids returning the funds.
The question to Andriy Vadatursky is simple: is he ready to go through this process openly, ensure a transparent restructuring of debts and cooperate with the investigation?
At present, proceeding No.12026152020001** is at the pre-trial investigation stage. StopCor keeps the case under public and media scrutiny and insists: the company’s scale should not be an argument for a softer check. On the contrary — the bigger the business, the higher the price of a mistake for its employees, creditors and a country at war.
Restructuring in 2024–2026 years: what open sources confirm, and what remains only a version?
As we already wrote above, in 2024–2025 years NIBULON indeed carried out a large-scale restructuring of almost its entire loan portfolio. According to Andriy Vadatursky, quoted by Forbes, at the start of the full-scale war the company had debts to 26 banks totaling $570 million, and as of the beginning of 2024 about 89% of creditors agreed to restructuring — the company was to pay only interest on these loans for 2024–2026 years.
In December 2025 the finance director of NIBULON, Mykola Hrubov, confirmed to borg.expert: the restructuring of the entire loan portfolio was completed, but due to a blocked port and fleet in Mykolaiv the company effectively directs all available resources to paying interest, and therefore has already begun working with a financial adviser on a new, balanced debt servicing model.
However, according to information available to StopCor, already in the first quarter of 2026 the company unilaterally stopped servicing debt to all creditors — both international and Ukrainian banks. If this information is confirmed, the question arises: what reasoning justified this decision? Is it glaring managerial incompetence or deliberate driving of the company into bankruptcy?
And how are other agribusiness holdings doing? “Kernel” and MHP are going through the war without public defaults
The thesis that the war equally hit the finances of all large agribusiness holdings is hardly correct here — because the results have differed.
For example, “Kernel” during the war did negotiate temporary moratoria and payment deferrals with creditors in 2022–2023. But already in October 2024 the company fully repaid a eurobond issue of $300 million on the original schedule, publicly stating that it had sufficient liquidity to fulfill obligations in full and did not plan to change the terms of the issue (Interfax-Ukraine reported this in October 2204).
MHP also had to repay eurobonds of $550 million maturing in April 2026. Instead of restructuring with a discount, in January 2026 the company issued new eurobonds of $450 million at 10,5% per annum specifically to fully buy back the previous issue (Forbes wrote about this), and demand from investors exceeded 60% of the volume already at an early stage of the buyback (according to Minfin portal data).
This does not mean that the factors shaping the financial condition of all agribusiness holdings are the same: the scale of NIBULON’s losses due to asset occupation and the blockade of the port in Mykolaiv is indeed one of the largest in the sector. But against that background the logical question arises: why were some large agricultural players able to retain creditors’ trust and even attract new financing, while NIBULON allegedly reached the point of unilaterally stopping payments? How much of this is explained by the logic of war, and how much — by poor management decisions of a specific management team?
Among the questions about Andriy Vadatursky circulating in the public space since 2018, one interesting point is raised by the piece “The vicious circle: How financing from IMF and other financial institutes feeds corruption in Ukrainian agricultural sector,” published on EU Reporter on 11 June 2018. We note that the EU Reporter editorial marks this text as an opinion column by journalist Robert Lewis, originally published by WISC24, and disclaims responsibility for the accuracy of the content.
The article cites a confidential source — a BNP Paribas interlocutor — who claimed that several years before publication Andriy Vadatursky, using the experience of the agribusiness “Mriya,” could have concealed NIBULON’s losses of about $100 million. It goes on to say that this allegedly led to an extraordinary meeting of the company’s largest creditors, who insisted that Vadatursky Jr. no longer work at NIBULON, and the author suggests ("perhaps") that this is why the father sent his son to parliament and hired a BNP Paribas financial adviser as a replacement.
This version has at least three caveats to consider. First, it relies on a single anonymous source and the publication provides no documents — audit conclusions, court decisions or official statements from creditors; we have not yet been able to find independent confirmation of this sum or of removal from management in other sources. Second, according to publicly available biographical data, Andriy Vadatursky served as deputy general director for trade at NIBULON since 2003, and became a member of parliament only in 2014 — that is, six years after the alleged incident in 2008. Third, according to US Daily, NIBULON allegedly sent the EU Reporter author a letter denying the facts presented, but he refused to withdraw the piece.
Two questions that suggest themselves from the overall picture
A comparison of facts — the formally completed restructuring in 2025, information about the unilateral cessation of payments at the start of 2026, successful refinancing cases in other agribusinesses, and the version about hidden losses and a conflict with creditors in 2008 circulating in the media since 2018, albeit without documentary confirmation — leaves two questions whose answers should be provided not by journalistic investigation but by competent law enforcement agencies.
First. Is NIBULON’s financial collapse solely a consequence of the war and the maritime blockade, or — at least partially — the result of management decisions taken after 2022 that could have pushed the situation toward a greater discount for creditors than justified by objective circumstances?
Second. Whatever the answer to the first question, the situation around NIBULON already affects Ukraine’s reputation as a borrower in the eyes of international financial institutions — IFC, the EBRD, the EIB and others — which invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the company during the war, relying on public statements about the conscientious fulfillment of obligations. Therefore, regardless of the outcome of the criminal proceedings, a transparent and public report from the company — not only corporate press releases — about the real reasons for the possible halt of payments would serve the interests not only of creditors but of the state.
Recall that StopCor previously wrote about tax stories, wealth and other reputational issues regarding NIBULON’s heir Andriy Vadatursky.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "”НІБУЛОН” у боргах: як накопичена Вадатурським заборгованість у $600 млн може підірвати фінансову систему України". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: NARDEP 24.
