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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The Odesa Port Plant (OPZ) has again come under scrutiny — this time due to another failed privatization attempt. This is the sixth attempt. Maintaining the mothballed plant costs the state approximately 62 million UAH per month.
On 19 October 2026 an auction to sell 99,5667% of the company’s shares with a starting price of over 4,3 billion UAH did not take place: no participant submitted a bid.
Head of the State Property Fund Dmytro Natalukha explained the auction’s failure by saying that some American investors decided to wait for the results of the U.S. midterm elections on 3 November.
Against the backdrop of financial difficulties and repeated sale attempts, names previously appearing in journalistic investigations into opaque gas tenders and OPZ export contracts are being mentioned again: Ukrainian-Swiss businessman Oleg Tsyura, crypto-entrepreneur Serhiy Tron, and the “resurrected” Dmytro Malynovskyi. Publications from 2024–2025, as well as fresh materials from 2026, record that these individuals have been actively trying to clean mentions of the schemes from the information space.
Opaque tenders in 2024 and links to Loginov.
In July 2024 OPZ held a tender for gas supply won by the little-known Kharkiv company “Agrotorggroup.” The company appeared only in 2022 and previously participated in a dubious auction to sell seized Russian ammonia. A second tender in August was won by the Lviv LLC Ukrnaftohazburinnia, which received its license only in September 2023. The company had no official website, although that is a mandatory condition for obtaining a license. The firm’s beneficiary is listed as Lviv biker and FC Luzhany co-owner Mykhailo Mazur.
According to the investigators’ version, these tenders were backed by Vitaliy Loginov — an informal adviser to the head of the United Mining and Chemical Company, who also had influence over Sumykhimprom and OPZ. Olga Balyuk was registered as the general director of Agrotorggroup; she previously led LLC LT-Resource, where Loginov himself is listed as the beneficiary. Agrotorggroup appears in the NABU criminal proceeding No. 7202200041000000 concerning tax evasion on an especially large scale. Loginov himself was previously a suspect in the 2016 case about the misappropriation of property through abuse of office and was on the wanted list for a time. The case never reached a conviction.
According to the investigations, the winning companies did not have sufficient funds to pay for the gas, attempted to obtain gas from the GTS without an advance payment, and recorded prices below market levels. This created risks for the stability of the gas transmission system.
Oleg Tsyura, who holds Swiss citizenship, appears in the materials as a person linked to shell companies in the schemes around OPZ and UMCC. Through structures such as Phoenix Resources AG and German firms, journalists say, the country of origin of raw materials (including ferrochrome) could have been falsified to circumvent sanctions in favor of Russian beneficiaries connected to Dmytro Firtash.
Serhiy Tron, who is associated with White Rock Management AG (registered in Switzerland in 2018, registration documents were submitted, among others, by Oleg Tsyura), presents himself as a crypto investor and publisher of Bitcoin Magazine. At the same time, publications from 2025–2026 recall his role in the CityCommerce Bank story, from which, in 2014, investigators say tens of millions of euros disappeared. According to those materials, the funds later “surfaced” in mining farms and crypto structures. Tron and Tsyura, the authors claim, actively file DMCA complaints and use other mechanisms to remove materials about the schemes from search results.
Dmytro Malynovskyi, who was previously declared “dead,” is also mentioned in connection with these schemes. Several outlets have recorded attempts to cleanse the internet of mentions of him, Tsyura and Tron during 2024–2026.
Despite numerous publications, criminal proceedings against the key figures in the scheme around OPZ are progressing slowly. The plant remains mothballed, accumulates losses, and costs the budget tens of millions of hryvnias each month.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "ОПЗ шостий раз не продали: Цюра, Тронь і Логінов фігурують у розслідуваннях про тіньові схеми навколо заводу". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: HAB Media.
