The Zlochevskyi Family’s Business Earned Over 20 Billion Hryvnias in a Year: Ex-Minister from the Yanukovych Era Avoided Prison for Bribe

The Zlochevskyi family’s business earned over 20 billion hryvnias in a year: ex-minister from the Yanukovych era avoided prison for a bribe

Fleeing abroad, criminal prosecution, and corruption scandals do not always mean losing financial influence. A striking example is the story of Mykola Zlochevskyi — the former minister of ecology and natural resources of Ukraine during Yanukovych’s presidency. Having left the country back in 2014, the ex-official not only did not lose his key business but also managed to build a highly profitable scheme that generates tens of billions of hryvnias each year.

Zlochevskyi’s business structures continue actively developing Ukraine’s subsoil, buying luxury real estate in the capital, and moving capital through offshore jurisdictions. All this happens against a backdrop of complete legal calm for the beneficiary himself, who managed to finally settle his problems with anti-corruption agencies.

OBOZ.UA is launching a series of publications about the activities of Mykola Zlochevskyi’s companies in Ukraine. The first piece covers what businesses the Zlochevskyi family owns and how they managed to avoid punishment.

Formal change of owners: Cypriot passports and billionaire daughters

The vast majority of Zlochevskyi’s Ukrainian assets are today not legally registered to him. The large-scale process of re-registering property began before international and Ukrainian financial monitoring was tightened. Until August 2020, Mykola Zlochevskyi personally appeared among the ultimate beneficial owners of his key companies. However, later the structures were rewritten in the names of his two daughters — Karina and Anna Zlochevskyi.

An interesting detail of the legal re-registration was the daughters’ use of foreign passports. Both daughters of the former official currently reside in Cyprus. When changes were entered into Ukrainian state registers, Cypriot documents were used, which is why even patronymics are absent from the registration data of the new owners. This step allowed not only distancing the business from the ex-minister’s surname but also creating a convenient system for further transferring dividends outside Ukraine.

According to the Opendatabot analytics system, in 2025 the combined revenue of the Ukrainian companies registered to Karina and Anna Zlochevskyi reached an astounding more than 20 billion hryvnias.

The central element of the empire is LLC Esko-Pivnich. This company specializes in exploration drilling, oil and natural gas production, and wholesale trade in energy resources. The dynamics of this enterprise’s financial indicators are striking: while in 2021 its net income was only 50,8 million hryvnias, in a few years it increased by 44 times. By year-end, Esko-Pivnich generated 13,8 billion hryvnias in total revenue, providing its owners with 2,2 billion hryvnias in net profit.

In addition to the flagship enterprise, the Zlochevskyi family’s assets include other large companies, each with annual turnover confidently exceeding 100 million hryvnias:

LLC Esko-Pivnich — the main gas production asset;

LLC Infox — a multi-profile company (known, among other things, for managing the Odesa water utility);

JSC ZNVKIF "Skyfall" — a venture investment fund through which financial flows are accumulated and transferred;

LLC Kompaniya "Tekhnokomservice";

LLC First Ukrainian Gas and Oil Company;

LLC Systemoilengineering;

LLC Nadragaz;

JSC Rodolit;

LLC Geounit;

LLC Pari.

Although the current scale of Zlochevskyi’s energy business has objectively declined compared to the levels seen before 2014, it remains one of the most powerful players in Ukraine’s private hydrocarbons market. The secret of the business’s stability and super-profits lies not so much in innovative technologies as in the portfolio of special permits (licenses) for mineral extraction accumulated over many years.

While serving as minister of ecology and natural resources, Zlochevskyi had colossal administrative resources. It was during that period that the foundation of his private energy empire was formed. Companies connected to his circle systematically gained access to the country’s most promising oil and gas fields.

A vivid example is the obtaining in 2010 of the license to develop the Proletarskyi field, located in Dnipropetrovsk region. According to the Association of Gas Producing Companies of Ukraine, this field, with confirmed reserves of over 1,5 billion cubic meters of gas, is among the top ten richest gas deposits in the country.

From a legal perspective, the procedure for granting such special permits was built to be maximally protective of the head of the ministry. All decisions were made collegially by special commissions and boards, so there is no direct personal signature of Mykola Zlochevskyi on key permitting documents. This created an almost insurmountable procedural barrier for law enforcement in the future: proving in court the fact of abuse of office, direct pressure on subordinates, or creation of preferential conditions for one’s own business turned out to be a legally extremely difficult task.

Record bribe, closed cases, and the “deal of the year”

Despite the formal absence of claims regarding the issuance of licenses, Mykola Zlochevskyi became the center of the loudest corruption scandal in modern Ukrainian history. This concerns the attempt to transfer a record bribe in the amount of 6 million dollars in cash.

Those funds were intended for the then-director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, and the head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), Nazar Kholodnytskyi. The goal of transferring such an astronomical sum was the prompt closure of criminal proceedings involving the company Burisma (owned by Zlochevskyi) and the "Real Bank" controlled by him.

The "Real Bank" case concerned a scheme to embezzle funds from the National Bank. The financial institution received a stabilization loan of 800 million hryvnias from the NBU secured by collateral — an oil depot. When the bank predictably failed to repay the loan and the regulator attempted to seize the collateral, it turned out that the asset’s real value had been artificially inflated, and in fact the oil depot was acquired for a price lower than 3 million hryvnias.

However, the attempted bribery of senior anti-corruption officials was documented and the intermediaries were detained. It seemed this case should have led to a real prison term and confiscation of property for the instigator. But the ending of the story turned out to be significantly different.

Mykola Zlochevskyi reached a plea agreement (admission of guilt). By court decision and with the agreement of SAPO prosecutors, the former minister was given a symbolic criminal fine of 68 thousand hryvnias. Additionally, under the agreement Zlochevskyi transferred 660 million hryvnias to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine (including to the "Army of Drones" project).

The law enforcement system interpreted this as follows: since the bribe did not reach its recipients, no direct financial damage to the state was caused by this episode, and therefore channeling significant funds to defense needs through charity is sufficient compensation for the offense. Officials and intermediaries who assisted the ex-minister in this case also avoided real prison terms, receiving suspended sentences and keeping their wealth.

Blocking open auctions as a strategy of capture

Recently, the biggest media outlets wrote again about Zlochevskyi’s business. The news hook was the State Service of Geology and Subsoil’s refusal to hold an open electronic auction for the Stynavska plot. This refusal plays exclusively into the hands of the Zlochevskyi family. All appeals and petitions from Ukrnafta for a transparent sale of the right to extract are blocked on various formal grounds, creating an artificial pause in field management.

By not announcing open tenders, the regulator effectively freezes the asset. This allows Zlochevskyi’s structures to pursue several favorable scenarios. While halted production causes losses to the state budget, LLC Pari Naftogaz uses the fact of the "overlaying of boundaries" of special permit No. 5398 as a lever of pressure, blocking any third-party initiatives to develop the deposits.

Delaying the auction gives Zlochevskyi’s companies the opportunity to regularize necessary land allocations, adjust the boundaries of their adjacent plot, or use other legal loopholes to later claim an expansion of their special permit’s boundaries or obtain the plot through a simplified procedure — without competition and without overpaying at auctions.

The Zlochevskyi family retains significant influence over officials. How that influence is exerted can be guessed by recalling the criminal proceedings against Zlochevskyi himself and the sizes of the bribes involved.