Igor and the Hungarian washing machine
This is not a story about transit fee price fixing
This is not a story about transit fee price fixing
Foreword
Dozens of Donetsk clan families with ties to disgraced former President Viktor Yanukovych are hunkered down in Monaco while their factories churn out god knows what in Kremlin-controlled Donbas — that’s the pitch for this evolving story about two Ukrainian businessmen who became fabulously wealthy and legalized their family’s fortune in Europe and North America.
Mykola and Igor Yankovsky, known as the former king and prince of Ukraine’s chemical industry, respectively, exported billions of dollars worth of Concern Stirol fertilisers from eastern Ukraine to Europe during the 2000s. The gigantic enterprise is located in Horlivka, a Kremlin-controlled area of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The population of Horlivka reached 300,000 by the turn of the century. That’s ten times more than the population of Monte Carlo.
The Yankovsky family’s …