TAMAZ SOMKHISHVILI: THE BRITISH INVESTOR'S UKRAINIAN GOLGOTHA
Another "Budapest Memorandum" instead of real security guarantees from Great Britain is what you get when you plunder British investors
Today, when every dollar and every pound of Western partners’ aid is worth its weight in gold for Ukraine, when every batch of weapons from the United States and Great Britain helps the Armed Forces of Ukraine to hold the defense, when the political, financial and military support of the West is important for the very existence of the Ukrainian state, it is of paramount importance to protect Western business investments in Ukraine from raiding, arbitrariness of officials, law enforcement officers and judges, and slander of corrupt media workers.
The last visit of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak revealed what would happen if Ukraine does not provide such protection. Instead of security guarantees and assistance, we were given another Budapest Memorandum. An empty declaration, which even Sunak himself defiantly called ‘assurances of security’. This looked especially humiliating against the background of the pathetic, like a PR mantra, repeated phrase by President Zelenskyy.
There are no guarantees, Mr. President, and you understand this despite your acting career. Why? You know the answer to that question very well.
The thesis is simple. If Western entrepreneurs are scorned in Ukraine, if their basic rights protected by interstate treaties are blatantly vilified, if the money they have invested in the development of Ukraine is stolen, and at the same time they are thrown mud in commissioned articles in the media, it is very naïve to think that all this will not affect political relations between Ukraine and its partners. What other impact could it have? As you can see, it is already having an impact. Politics is an extension of the economy. One should not be surprised that today the amount of aid is being reduced, requests are being made to stop the offensive and think about negotiations. Also, fatigue is accumulating from Ukraine and from its ‘cowboy’ foreign policy as well as its ‘gangster’ domestic policy towards investors.
No one wants to support robbers and corrupt officials who rob investors. And these robbers will be punished, probably by the next government. Yet, the facts for this punishment should be publicly presented today. Investors are usually patient for a long time, but at a certain moment, their patience breaks down and they start talking. The facts start coming out of the darkness to reveal the true disgusting faces of corrupt officials and their crimes. We are a group of honest journalists who will cover them on this page and website.
So, the first case is one of the most egregious. Tamaz Somkhishvili is a British investor who was first robbed, and then slandered and bullied in Ukraine.
Tamaz Somkhishvili's history of investments in Ukraine is long, but simple and very revealing.
Deceiving, robbing and slandering is a recipe for international investment cooperation from the Ukrainian authorities
In 2007, Kyiv Terminal won the investment competition for the reconstruction of Kharkiv Square in Kyiv. Investments were planned in the amount of $165 million. The company paid the city the equivalent of $14 million at the time. After that, the city authorities canceled the reconstruction and investment project, and later refused to reimburse the investor for costs and losses. The investor's expenses were estimated by independent international appraiser Baker Thiley. In 2019, the court of first instance ordered the Kyiv City State Administration to compensate for the losses of Somkhishvili's company. Currently, the case is again in the Northern Economic Court of Appeal of Kyiv. In view of the Russian aggression, in 2022, Somkhishvili proposed an amicable agreement to the capital's authorities. In particular, the investor was ready to refuse the awarded funds, but officials rejected this proposal. From that moment on, an information attack on the businessman began.
A huge number of ‘bloggers’ and ‘journalists’ like the notorious Serhii Ivanov and the no less odious right-wing radical Oleksandr Aronets published dozens of commissioned materials. The British entrepreneur was accused of everything – repairing Russian planes, having ties with the Russian mafia, and partnering with Russian oligarchs. All these accusations were refuted by Taras Dumych, a well-known Ukrainian lawyer, managing partner of Wolf Theiss, the international law firm.
The lawyer dotted the i's and crossed the t's and brought an objective picture to the public. Tamaz Somkhishvili was born in Georgia and lived in Siberia since 1978, where he saw the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the region of Russia, where probably every third employee of the oil and gas industry was Ukrainian, he also began his entrepreneurial activity with the extraction and export of oil, and he himself often worked directly in the fields. Subsequently, his oil company became part of the LUKOIL group, which was and remains the largest Russian oil company not owned by the state, of which the American Conoco Philips, one of the largest American oil companies, was a significant minority shareholder at the time.
By 2007, Somkhishvili had completely retired from the oil business, and the money he had earned from it began to be invested in other countries, including his native Georgia and Ukraine. In particular, he invested about $30 million in Ukraine alone.
Tamaz Somkhishvili's company TAM Management was indeed engaged in aircraft construction, but had nothing to do with the Russian aircraft industry. Quite the opposite. One of the counterparties of TAM Management is Ukroboronprom.
Goebbels' descendants attack
However, no one was interested in the inconvenient truth. Moreover, it caused new waves of lies. Now Taras Dumych has begun to be persecuted, and new players have been brought to the media stage, namely Viktor Hleba, defender of many scandalous developers, the ex-Deputy Chief Architect of Kyiv and NV journalist Dmytro Tuzov, who published ‘investigations’ guided by Goebbels' recipe – 20% of the truth and 80% of lies.
20% of the truth is, for example, the thesis that the investor tried to implement the project without a ton of bureaucratic permits and the decision of the Kyiv City Council on a larger area than the contract provided. Yet, if you add the other 80% to this 20%, it turns out that Ukraine is not Great Britain, and in a country like Ukraine, it is impossible otherwise. Because if you pay for each permit and decision of the Kyiv City Council, the price of the project would at least double. As for the larger area of the project, it was a requirement of the time: due to the increase in traffic on Kharkiv Square, the new interchange required a larger area, i.e. the increase was solely in the interests of Kyiv residents.
Another "killer" thesis that whistleblowers trump is the 2016 trial, in which specific figures of the investor’s losses were recorded. For example, the Kyiv Terminal LLC received a loan from Somkhishvili’s Cypriot company for the reconstruction of the square, and there is no sensation here. This is a necessary step for the legal protection of the allocated funds, because it is known what Ukrainian banks and Ukrainian courts are. In order to record the validity of the claims, one investor company sued another just to legally prove that there were expenses, and the expenses were considerable, and they were aimed specifically at the needs of the city. Otherwise, it does not work in Ukraine. Hundreds of investors, including Ukrainian ones, are forced to do the same, because such rules are offered to them by the state, and they have to survive. You cannot count on the support of the state.
"Deafness" of the President and the Cabinet of Ministers
It should be noted that the investor has repeatedly addressed open letters to the President and the Cabinet of Ministers and reminded them of the existence of the Agreement between the Government of Ukraine and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on the Promotion and Mutual Protection of Investments, within the framework of which the investment dispute should have been resolved long ago.
However, perhaps, someone was more interested in the Great Construction project and funny videos, and the central government ‘did not notice’ the Briton and was not going to comply with the international agreement. Moreover, the investor received an openly hostile position from the Ministry of Justice, which aggressively refused to negotiate a settlement, repeating the ‘convenient’ mantra about ‘Russian citizenship’. There is more to come. The State Migration Service deprived the investor of a residence permit in Ukraine and this was a deliberate move to complicate the possibility of obtaining a positive decision in court proceedings.
On the other hand, Kyiv city authorities maintained a certain neutrality and did not try to politicize the issue, although at the same time they did not make any necessary efforts to resolve the dispute. However, recently, the Public Council at the Kyiv City State Administration, controlled by the current mayor, intervened in the dispute on the side of the opponents of the British investor, voicing exactly the same narratives voiced by ‘journalists’, ‘bloggers’ and ‘experts’. Kryvosheia, Head of the Public Council, even appealed to the Prosecutor General, the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine and the mayor with a call to "intervene in the situation" (which is actually illegal). In addition, the British London Insider published an article with the same theses. All these events indicate that the mayor and his team nevertheless made their choice in favour of the latter, i.e. in favour of the mayor and together with the central government decided to promote themselves on the high-profile case.
However, both the posts of the Public Council and the London Insider article about the real role of the mayor and his team in the case are undeservedly little written.
However, it is better to learn what it really was like from the first-hand accounts from those who have remained silent until now. Yet, every silence and every patiences have their limits. After the terror organized by the government and the mean and greedy position of the Mayor’s Office, it is time to find out the truth!
Real story of Tamaz Somkhishvili (first-hand accounts)
So, as we have already said, in a thoroughly corrupt country, which, unfortunately, was and is Ukraine, just to survive, any foreign investor is forced to act according to the wild rules that exist in the wild land.
This concerns establishing communications with those who are able to ensure decision-making and provide the protection, we emphasize, of the legal rights of the investor. At the end of 2017, Tamaz Somkhishvili entrusted the provision of this protection to an influential Ukrainian entrepreneur and friend of the mayor of Kyiv, Vadym Stolar, who introduced the British investor to the mayor of the capital. An initiative was agreed, and the money for the reconstruction of the square and compensation of the debt to the investor should have been allocated by the Cabinet of Ministers. The corresponding appeal, initiated by friendly deputies, was adopted by the Kyiv City Council in March 2018.
https://kmr.gov.ua/uk/content/proekt-rishennya-kyyivskoyi-miskoyi-rady-4488?
However, Vadym Stolar turned out to be unable to deliver what he had promised, and at the end of 2018, the investor filed a lawsuit with the Kyiv City State Administration demanding the return of the money essentially stolen from him. After that, at the beginning of 2019, the investor had a series of meetings with the mayor, at which he recognized the Briton's demands as legitimate, but constantly complained about political instability due to Zelenskyy's victory in the presidential election and the difficulties of the upcoming 2020 election campaign.
In total, there were five such meetings. The mayor assured the investor that he should achieve justice in his demands and at the same time emphasized that it was good to be "useful for the interests of the city." Moreover, in order for the Briton to better understand these interests, at the last meeting, Klychko singled out two lawyers for communication – Serhii Aleksieiev and Serhii Boiarchukov.
These two explained and demonstrated how the mayor sees the ‘interests of the city’. It was necessary to finance the ‘mayor's election fun’" in cash for a certain amount. The investor transferred the deposit to the fund, as requested by the mayor.
Then Klychko's lawyers ‘resolved the issue’ with Serhii Mudryi, judge of the Economic Court of Kyiv, and on December 23, 2019, he satisfied the requirements of the Kyiv Terminal LLC, but only partially, obliging the city to pay only a quarter of the claims, i.e. about $25 million. As Aleksieiev and Boiarchukov ‘described’ to the investor, of this amount, $10 million is allegedly the real debt of the city, another $10 million is ‘compensation’ to the investor, and $5 million will again go to the ‘election fund’. As they said, it was a ‘compromise from the mayor’, according to which the city was ready to sign an amicable agreement.
Of course, the investor was not satisfied with such a ‘compromise’, and he directly called the mayor's lawyers scoundrels and fraudsters. The response from the mayor was not long in coming. In 2020, Ihor Miroshnychenko, a well-known fake activist, ex-deputy of Svoboda and owner of a fleet of premium cars and a luxury estate, who was close to Stoliar, began to slander the investor. He bombarded the Kyiv City Council Commission on Law and Order with his appeals, saying that the recognition of the investor's losses by the city, which was recorded in the agreement on the termination of the investment agreement for the reconstruction of Kharkiv Square in 2013, was allegedly illegal, and allegedly no losses were incurred by the investor who developed the project and paid the city $14 million. Then Miroshnychenko's words were picked up by hired corrupt journalists, in particular, Dmytro Tuzov, argued about the ‘nullity’ of the investment agreement.
Against the backdrop of the inflated scandal, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision of the first one. The investor was forced to seek justice at the highest levels of the judiciary, the leadership of which turned out to be much more responsible than the local authorities, the Cabinet of Ministers and the President, to whom Tamaz Somkhishvili addressed public letters. So, against the background of the fact that the British Embassy in Ukraine had already begun to take a public interest in the problem, the investor was received through the mediation of entrepreneur Volodymyr Banko by the then Chairman of the Constitutional Court Serhii Tupytskyi and one of the heads of the Supreme Court.
The latter body made a fair decision and returned the case to appeal. It would seem that a legal decision could finally be made, especially since the investor, given the war against Russia, agreed to postpone and even replace the monetary form of compensation with a non-monetary one. Nevertheless, in response, the opponents decided to use the war as an excuse not to repay the debt and unleashed an unprecedented discrediting campaign in the media.
Fraudulent officials and blackmailers are in for a "surprise" from British lawyers
Here the question arises – who and why organized this campaign? Klychko's joining it today is obviously a political move and reluctance to repay debts. But who plays the ‘first fiddle’ and why? Aren't these pro-Russian forces and Russian special services, given that the commissioned journalist Ivanov published personal documents of the Federal Migration Service in 2007 from the Siberian city of Kogalym, to which only the FSB can have access? Aren't we dealing with sabotage against British-Ukrainian relations, because representatives of the embassy are present at every hearing in the case in the Northern Economic Court of Appeal. Besides, each new inconclusive meeting is another landmine for relations with the key ally.
The Ukrainian authorities are already sending all too obvious signals about this. Zaiwalla & Co, one of the key companies close to the British Government, took up the defense of Somkhishvili, which publicly stated that it would represent Tamaz Somkhishvili as his English legal adviser and representative in order to defend his rights as an investor in Ukraine in the English courts and authorities of the United Kingdom in connection with the landmark case in Ukraine concerning the city authorities of Kyiv.
We will keep this story under control and give new exclusive insights. Stay, it will be interesting.
