Kivalov, Urbanski and Kivan: Hundreds of thousands of documents on offshore companies in the Bahamas published

Four hundred thousand documents from the Bahamas' register of legal entities have been made publicly available. The data set includes information on citizens of more than 100 countries who have applied to this Caribbean jurisdiction to register their own business here.

Among them are Ukrainian and, in particular, Odesa political and political figures, according to Schemes.

The data was published by the Distributed Denial of Secrets initiative, or DDoS for short. One of its founders are American journalists Emma Best and Lorax Horne, the rest of the team are anonymous techies and Internet activists.

Among the directors and secretaries of the Bahamian company Real Estate Holding Ltd, the documents list only Odessans. According to published data, its founders as of 2014 were: Borys Kogan, Borys Kolisnychenko, Yuriy Makhlaichuk, Ihor and Oleksandr Urbanski and a woman named O. Bohdan.

Here is what is known about them.

Boris Kogan is an Odesa-based businessman who was credited by the media with international arms trade and the purchase of a yacht from the heirs of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Boris Kogan was a shareholder and member of the board of RT-Logistics, a 51% Russian-owned company. In October 2017, a number of news sites, citing sources close to the businessman, reported that Boris Kogan had died due to heart problems.

In the published documents, there is a note "Government post - PEP" (government post - public figure) opposite Boris Kogan's partner in the Bahamian company, Igor Urbansky. In 2006, Ihor Urbanskyi was elected as a People's Deputy of Ukraine of the fifth convocation from the Socialist Party, and served as the First Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Fuel and Energy Complex, Nuclear Policy and Nuclear Safety. And from December 2007 to July 2009, Ihor Urbanskyi worked as Deputy Minister of Transport and Communications under Yosyp Vinskyi.

Ihor Urbanskyi's son Oleksandr also appears in the documents of Real Estate Holding Ltd. He is also a politician; in 2014, he won the 143rd constituency in Odesa region and became a member of the Parliament of the eighth convocation.

He is remembered for his declaration: in August 2017, together with his brother Anatolii (who was then the head of the Odesa Regional Council), they bought cryptocurrency (bitcoin cash) worth 73 million hryvnias. In May 2019, Odesa police reported that MP Urbanskyi was shot because of a conflict with the director of the hotel where he was staying. Currently, Oleksandr Urbanskyi is the chairman of the Danube Charitable Foundation, and in the 143rd constituency, Oleksandr's brother Anatolii Urbanskyi won the last parliamentary elections. He is a member of the For the Future parliamentary group.

The YouControl platform identifies the conditional group "Urbanskyi Family Group", which includes Ihor, Oleksandr and Anatolii Urbanskyi. Their sphere of influence includes Dunaisudoservice Ship Repair Enterprise LLC, Dunaisudoservice Port PJSC, Prime Transport LLC, Rivertransservice LLC, and others.

"Schemes managed to talk to Igor Urbansky. He stated that Real Estate Holding Ltd is an old company, and the published information is no longer relevant. He also explained the need to open companies in the offshore zone.

"If we are engaged in shipping, almost the entire fleet is located in the so-called offshore zones. Why? Because very often there are troubles with ships - grounding, collisions. This is actually the practice. Why did we do this? I need to give you a lecture to understand. One ship - one company is a variant that started in the post-war period. Because the fleet began to grow massively, and accidents in tanker fleets were a big problem. And the steamers needed to be insured. And it was almost impossible to find an insurance company that would insure the entire company with 100 tankers. I know that all companies in Germany, for example, are offshore, meaning that all ships are registered offshore. Now, during the crisis, companies are going bankrupt, but given that the ships are offshore, they don't even stop. They are simply transferred to another company for management," said Igor Urbansky.

The Bahamian company Golden Gate Bay Limited can be found in the Ukrainian register of legal entities. There it is the founder of a number of companies that are somehow associated with the infamous former head of the Central Election Commission and former MP Serhiy Kivalov. These are the International Humanitarian University, the International University, and Trk Akademia LLC.

Despite the fact that information about the owners of Bahamian companies cannot be obtained by anyone from the Bahamian registry, Ukrainian law obliges the owners to disclose this information. Therefore, the official Ukrainian register now states that the owner of the Bahamian Golden Gate Bay Limited is a company of the same name registered in Astana, Kazakhstan. But this was not always the case.

A leak of documents from the Bahamian registry allowed us to see documents indicating who was directly related to Golden Gate Bay Limited among Ukrainians.

In the "Register of Directors" section, there are: Sergiy Kivalov himself, Zakharia Kivan, Adnan Kivan and Irina Orekhova.

Adnan Kivan is a businessman of Syrian origin, Odesa-based developer and owner of the English-language KyivPost and Odesa-based Channel 7.

His main business is construction. The Kadorr group, owned by Adnan Kivan's family, has built more than 40 residential complexes in Odesa and Kyiv, including in violation of construction standards in historic districts.

In July 2016, together with President Petro Poroshenko, he donated seven apartments to military sailors in his company's new buildings. Kiwan is listed in the public database as a director of another Bahamian company, Tafas Company Limited.

Iryna Orekhova is the head of the Kyiv organization of the Ukrainian Maritime Party, whose leader is Kivalov himself. In addition, according to Nashi Hroshi, Orekhova was the owner of the famous Kivalov Castle on the coast of Odesa.

Serhiy Kivalov refused to talk to journalists and did not respond to questions in the messenger.

"Skhemy" sent a request with questions to Adnan Kivan to Kadorr group, the company whose leader and founder is the businessman. By the time of publication, the journalists had not received a response.

In recent years, there have been a number of massive data leaks from offshore jurisdictions - Offshore Leaks, Bahamas Leaks, Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, and others.

It is not a crime to register companies in offshore jurisdictions. It is a global practice that has developed for a number of reasons. For some, it is a matter of convenient structuring of their business, while many are attracted by the developed service in offshore jurisdictions - registering a company here is usually quick and easy to administer. There are two major magnets: low taxation and the ability to remain completely anonymous.

In 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published a database based on the Panama Papers. The database allowed to study the data of offshore owners for each specific country. The data shows that 165 Ukrainians and 195 companies own offshore accounts. The then President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko was also listed in those documents.

Several members of the Verkhovna Rada registered a draft resolution "On the establishment of a Temporary Investigation Commission of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to investigate the facts published in the media about the use of offshore companies by the President of Ukraine and other senior officials authorized to perform state functions," but other parliamentarians did not support the initiative.

Later, Kyiv's Pechersk District Court upheld a complaint filed by Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, leader of the Spravedlyvist social and political movement and former head of the SBU, against the inaction of the Prosecutor General's Office and ordered the opening of criminal proceedings against the offshore companies.