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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Should a taxpayer be alarmed when an adviser to a state enterprise works “for free”? After all, such philanthropy can sometimes hide certain business interests tied to public procurement. The StopCor editorial team drew attention to an investigation by colleagues from the Spilno project concerning former Secretary of State of the Ministry of Information Policy Artem Bidenko and his long-time business partner Andriy Rudenko.
As Spilno writes, in September 2025 an IT company whose co-owner, according to journalists, was Andriy Rudenko until 2018 won a tender from the state agency PlayCity for an online gambling monitoring system for 25,9 million UAH. The authors of the Spilno piece expressed doubt that rejecting the competitor’s cheapest offer (19,9 million UAH) was justified, and also suggested some influence through Bidenko’s network.
To understand why this story raised questions for journalists, it’s worth rewinding a bit and examining Bidenko’s and Rudenko’s histories.
Artem Bidenko was deputy minister and later Secretary of State at the Ministry of Information Policy in 2015–2020. His activity in these roles is the subject of the NGL.media investigation “The Bidenko Case.”
After his dismissal he, as he noted on his own blog on the Ukrainska Pravda site, became a freelance consultant to the state enterprise “Multimedia Platform of Ukrainian External Communication” (MPIU) — without a salary and without a staff position.
According to NGL.media, Andriy Rudenko is a close friend and business partner of Bidenko. He heads the neuromarketing research direction at the NGO Institute of Information Security, of which Bidenko is a co-founder, and together with Elina Vysokovska owns the advertising agency Prana, which Bidenko once left.
NGL.media’s calculations show that in less than three years companies and entrepreneurs connected to Bidenko by family or friendship ties received over 70,5 million UAH from the Ministry of Culture, of which nearly 51 million UAH came from MPIU.
The largest share went to Light Communication LLC, founded by Bidenko’s father-in-law Vitaliy Shapovalenko, a former deputy minister of Housing and Communal Services in Azarov’s government.
According to YouControl, the company signed contracts with Ministry of Culture enterprises for 47,7 million UAH, and since August 2021, NGL.media reports, it received orders exclusively from MPIU.
Dozorro analysts already in 2021 tried to find out what exactly the state paid 9,8 million UAH to the company for — a documentary project for Independence Day — when the videos from it averaged around a hundred views.
Yet that did not prevent Light Communication from receiving three series from MPIU in July 2023: “Homo amans,” “Content of a Sensitive Nature,” and the feature film “One and a Half Percent.”
It is known that the platform The Gaze was developed by an IT contractor previously affiliated with Rudenko. Prozorro records show that on 29 December 2022 MPIU signed an agreement with him for 12,56 million UAH, reduced the amount by 2,5 million UAH within a few hours, received a completion report the same day, and on 30 December paid over 10 million UAH. The company’s head told NGL.media that work began before the tender — “at their own risk.”
A separate episode concerns an EEG helmet for neuromarketing research, which Bidenko, by his own admission, promoted. Entrepreneur Roman Peresunko, who received 2,2 million UAH from MPIU to promote The Gaze in the United Kingdom, rented the helmet from Bidenko. Neither Peresunko nor Bidenko could provide NGL.media’s journalists with confirmation that the British audience research actually took place.
In an interview with Detector Media, Bidenko called the NGL.media investigation’s headline “clickbait,” said that the actual amount received was 54,5 million UAH rather than 70,5 million UAH, and said he sees no conflict of interest: all contracts were signed after his dismissal, and in his words he was a persona non grata at the Ministry of Culture.
According to NGL.media, in a year The Gaze signed contracts worth 90,8 million UAH, and its website saw about 16,6 thousand unique users per month.
Bidenko distanced himself from the project, and since 2025 he has headed a publishing association, stressing that the crisis in the book industry cannot be overcome without state intervention.
Can an informal consultant who holds no official position influence decisions of a state enterprise that pays money to his relatives and friends? And isn’t it time for anti-corruption authorities to answer these questions? We will continue to follow this story.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "”Позаштатний, безкоштовний, незамінний”: як оточення Артема Біденка освоювало бюджет Мінкульту?". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: NARDEP 24.
