Skyrocketing salaries in the top management of the unprofitable "Ukrenergo" are a tradition
How much does it cost Ukrainians to maintain the management of "Ukrenergo"
Corruption cases in which "Ukrenergo" got bogged down
What Volodymyr Kudrytsky's family acquired during the war

Even during the war, "Ukrnerego" continues to sign possibly fictitious contracts for state money, and during the war, Kudrytskyi's family purchased a plot of land within the boundaries of Kyiv, built a house without proper registration and acquired a brand new TOYOTA Highlander 2022.

The deficit of the Ukrainian budget for the first three months of 2024 amounted to UAH 257.4 billion. With the beginning of the invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine, naturally, we manage to earn much less than we have to spend: the state budget adopted for this year is a third empty. If it were not for the help of international donors and partner states, the Ukrainian economy would have fallen to the bottom long ago. But even this aid, as we have seen in recent months, is not endless: the size of the tranches is decreasing, and the USA has not been able to approve $60 billion in aid to Ukraine for almost six months.

In such conditions, it seems logical to reduce all possible state expenditures in all possible state institutions and enterprises. War is a time when the entire state machine must work for defense, it is a time when all resources and money must go to the defense of the state and people, it is a time when it is necessary to save on everything in order to survive. What is happening in reality? While volunteers collect 100 hryvnias for the needs of the military from Ukrainians with salaries of 10-15 thousand hryvnias, top state officials in the national energy company "Ukrenergo" continue to accrue salaries of up to half a million hryvnias per month, despite the fact that the company's affairs , to put it mildly, are going very badly.

Skyrocketing salaries in the top management of the unprofitable Ukrenergo are a tradition

Skyrocketing salaries in the top management of "Ukrenergo" are not a new thing. Back in 2018, the then head of the company, Vsevolod Kovalchuk, declared his official salary in the amount of 6 million 160 thousand hryvnias per year, i.e. 513 thousand hryvnias per month. But even this was not enough, so Kovalchuk still received charitable assistance in the amount of one more month's salary - 511 thousand hryvnias. That is, in total, the maintenance of just one person, the head of Ukrenergo, cost the state 240,000 US dollars per year. In 2019, the state decided that against the background of its other employees, the head of "Ukrenergo" earns little, so for 2019, Vsevolod Kovalchuk already received 10 million 300 thousand hryvnias in salary, i.e. about 400 thousand US dollars at that time, i.e. almost 900 thousand hryvnias per month - about 33 thousand dollars.

In the same year, according to the company's financial plan, the average monthly labor costs of one ordinary employee at "Ukrenergo" amounted to 11,736 hryvnias. That is, on average, people in the company received almost 12 thousand hryvnias, and at that time the head of the company received almost a million hryvnias per month. 75 times more.

It is not surprising that the topic of the enormous salary gap at Ukrenergo causes a lot of indignation among ordinary employees. The employer review portal vnutri.org is teeming with angry comments. “The director's salary is 800 thousand hryvnias! The installer's salary is 8 thousand. Why?”, ”The company is in a complete mess, young specialists are being fired, pensioners are being left behind. The company is a mess, the managers are a mess, they get 3-4 times more than ordinary workers at substations”, ‘Managers get millions in salaries, the staff is a consumable for them’, ‘It's all about money laundering, the staff is not appreciated, substations are being destroyed both with missiles and personnel policy’.

The number of employees at Ukrenergo has actually been decreasing over the years. Today, according to the YouControl system, the NPC employs 7480 people, although in 2020 the company had 8371 employees. The profitability of the main strategic enterprise of Ukraine in the energy sector is also rapidly declining, despite the fact that over the past 3 years, the financial results of the company's activities have shown a steady trend of positive growth in turnover. Simply put, the company's revenues are growing, but profitability is falling.

While in 2021, Ukrenergo's net profit on revenues of UAH 71 billion amounted to a modest UAH 163 million, in 2022, with revenues of UAH 82.3 billion, the company suffered a sharp loss of UAH -7.3 billion. In 2023, the loss amounted to UAH 267.9 million, while revenues increased slightly to UAH 82.9 billion.

Of course, the full-scale war and missile attacks on the energy infrastructure led to huge losses and expenses. But did this somehow affect the policy of Ukrenergo's management to pay themselves millions in salaries?

Not at all. With an annual decrease in the number of employees, the cost of labor at Ukrenergo is only growing: from 2021 to 2023, this item of expenditure increased by UAH 260 million and amounted to UAH 3.26 billion last year. And the salaries of the NPC's management are growing in the first place.

How much does it cost Ukrainians to maintain Ukrenergo's management?

Why did we refer to the 2019 figures above and not the current ones? Because in 2019, the Cabinet of Ministers decided to reorganize the state-owned enterprise National Energy Company Ukrenergo into a private joint-stock company with the Ministry of Energy as the majority shareholder. The essence remains the same - the company is owned by the state in both versions, but now Ukrenergo has become a private entity, and therefore its top managers have fallen off the list of civil servants who are legally obliged to declare their property status. That is why the last declaration of Ukrenergo executives is dated 2019.

The public has been outraged by this more than once - the country's main energy company has been allowed to exist in the shadows. At the end of 2023, political expert Taras Zahorodnyi called on Ukrenergo CEO Volodymyr Kudrytskyi not to hide his income and wealth, as he runs a company that makes money on the bills of all Ukrainians. “Taxpayers have the right to know how much the manager they hire earns and whether his or her expenses correspond to the salary,” Zahorodny wrote.

And he is right. “Ukrenergo earns money by transmitting electricity from producers to consumers. And the salaries of Ukrenergo's employees, including, first and foremost, Kudrytskyi and his board, are included in the tariffs approved by the National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission. A good example: On November 16, the NEURC approved draft resolutions on electricity transmission and dispatching tariffs for Ukrenergo for 2024 at the level of 528.57 UAH/MWh for the first (an increase of 9% compared to the 2023 tariff) and 100.37 UAH/MWh for the second (an increase of 5%). However, on December 9, the Commission decided to raise the dispatching tariff by another 4.5% to 104.57 UAH/MWh. And this increase was due to an increase in two of Ukrenergo's cost items: UAH 100 million was added to the “loan repayment” expense item, and another UAH 42.5 million was spent on the payroll.

That is why it is important to understand how the money collected from Ukrainians for electricity is distributed. And they are apparently distributed in such a way that while the company is losing money, its managers are only getting richer.

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi was appointed Chairman of the Board of NPC Ukrenergo on August 2, 2020. Prior to that, he was the first deputy chairman, and his last declaration was filled out in this position, according to which he received a salary from Ukrenergo in the amount of UAH 3.8 million in 2019, which at that time was equivalent to $140 thousand.

Already in 2021, according to expert Tetyana Lupova, the company's board received almost UAH 26 million in salaries. The salary of the Chairman of the Board Kudrytskyi in 2021 averaged more than UAH 1 million per month!

What is happening today, during a full-scale war? According to the reports of Ukrenergo's board, in 2023, its maintenance cost the state UAH 29.2 million. These are just the members of the board, which currently includes Chairman Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, as well as Oleksii Brekht, Serhii Halahan, and Oleh Skrypnyk. In December 2023 alone, they received a total of UAH 7 million 934 thousand.

“According to the agreements, the remuneration of the supervisory board members is UAH 288 thousand each. The chairman of the board has UAH 540 thousand per month. The members of the Management Board receive between UAH 228 thousand and UAH 330 thousand per month. The salaries of directors of structural units are UAH 170-210 thousand (in particular, in June 2022, the directors of structural units were accrued and paid UAH 2.2-2.3 million, together with a quarterly bonus, an allowance for length of service in the energy sector, vacation pay, financial assistance for health improvement, remuneration based on the results of work for the year),” said Alla Basalaeva, Head of the State Audit Service, last summer.

It turns out that the company's losses and its difficult situation due to the war do not motivate Ukrenergo's management to try to live more modestly at least for the time being. In addition, Andrii Nemyrovskyi, director of Ukrenergo Digital Solutions LLC, a subsidiary of NPC Ukrenergo, received an annual bonus for 2023 in the amount of UAH 4.4 million, and his monthly salary was about UAH 350 thousand. By the way, bonuses must be approved by the Cabinet of Ministers.

Perhaps the above-mentioned people are distinguished by some outstanding managerial talents, for which the state rewards them so generously? But the reality shows otherwise: “Ukrenergo is mired in a multitude of corruption scandals and cases in which it suffers losses precisely because of managerial negligence. Conscious or unconscious.

Corruption cases in which Ukrenergo is mired

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi is the successor of the former head of Ukrenergo, Vsevolod Kovalchuk, whose leadership left the company with only criminal proceedings, including Kudrytskyi. For example, the criminal proceedings opened in October 2018 under 5 articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine - “fraud”, “forgery”, “forgery of documents”, “abuse of power” and “obtaining undue advantage”. Kudrytskyi, then Ukrenergo's investment director, signed a UAH 24.3 million contract on behalf of Ukrenergo to perform work at Ukrenergo facilities with a certain Yevhen Mykhailiuk from Vizyn Rich LLC. As the investigation later revealed, Yevhen Mykhailyuk is a Lviv pensioner, and the authorities did not know that he was the director and founder of this company and that he was entering into large-scale transactions with the state energy company: unknown persons, accomplices in the crime, hired him, clearly realizing that the elderly man did not understand the essence and content of the documents he was signing.

Vizin Rich, a company with a registered capital of one hundred hryvnias, which constantly changed its founders and residence (Lviv, Poltava, etc.), won a number of tenders from Ukrenergo. After receiving an order from Ukrenergo in its “portfolio,” the dubious commercial structure collected contracts worth UAH 300 million in other public tenders. According to the testimony of pensioner Mykhailiuk, Ukrenergo officials made transactions involving Vizin Rich between October 2018 and January 2020 in order to obtain undue benefits for themselves and third parties.

The scandal with Vizin Rich came to light when Ukrenergo filed a lawsuit with the Commercial Court of Dnipropetrovska oblast on July 31, 2020, to recover UAH 8.8 million from Concord Bank for non-fulfillment of a bank guarantee issued to Vizin Rich under an agreement dated October 30, 2018, for the reconstruction of the external fence of the Zakhidna substation.

In its response to the claim, the bank, relying on the materials of the above criminal proceedings, stated that “the contract No. 08-4/2635-18 of October 11, 2018 concluded between the plaintiff and a third party contradicts the interests of the state and society, its moral principles”, i.e., it directly accused Ukrenergo of deliberately consciously colluding with Vizin Rich LLC to launder budget money.

In other words: “Ukrenergo enters into an agreement with a front company under a bank guarantee, knowing in advance that the agreement will not be fulfilled: the money is transferred to the company, and then, to pretend that Ukrenergo is trying to restore its interests, it sues the bank demanding that the bank guarantee be honored.

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi decided to implement exactly the same scheme as chairman of the board of Ukrenergo with the energy trader United Energy, which is in the orbit of Ihor Kolomoisky's interests. In September 2021, Alliance Bank provided a bank guarantee in the amount of UAH 1.85 billion to NPC Ukrenergo to ensure the fulfillment of United Energy LLC's monetary obligations to Ukrenergo under the agreement for the settlement of electricity imbalances to pay for electricity purchased by the energy trader from Ukrenergo.

In March 2022, in the midst of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, United Energy LLC purchased electricity worth more than UAH 716 million from NPC Ukrenergo. But it was not going to pay for it. And despite the company's debt to the state-owned company, the head of the relevant department of Ukrenergo did not stop the sale and did not grant the default trader the status of a trader with the subsequent blocking of its accounts, allowing United Energy to resell the electricity to real market participants and withdraw the proceeds to the accounts of a foreign company controlled by the organizer of the scheme, who is also Kolomoisky's business partner. NPC Ukrenergo did not receive the money for the electricity supplied, and then turned to Alliance Bank with a request to fulfill the bank guarantee issued to United Energy LLC. The bank, of course, refused, relying on the fact that Ukrenergo had allowed the scheme to take place.

Thus, for two years now, a private company has been actually using a billion hryvnias of the state energy company Ukrenergo, which, in turn, has to spend these funds on repairing and restoring its facilities and equipment after the Russian missile attacks. We hope that NABU detectives and SAPO prosecutors, who reported on March 26, 2024, that the pre-trial investigation in this case was completed, will determine what reward Volodymyr Kudrytskyi received for this.

These are not all the corruption cases in which Ukrenergo is mired. On March 7, 2023, another one was opened under the article “Fraud”. According to investigators, in the period from October to November 2022, i.e. during the martial law in Ukraine, NPC Ukrenergo made purchases from a number of companies without using the electronic public bidding system with prices overstated by more than 65% with the aim, according to investigators, of embezzling and misappropriating budget funds. Doubtful agreements were concluded with Agrolink Ukraine LLC, Capital Trading Company LLC, Polygran-Trade LLC, VELPAX LLC and others.

And some small schemes. In the summer of 2023, the head of the State Audit Service, Alla Basalaeva, discovered that Ukrenergo was using a so-called outsourcing scheme, where the company subcontracts tasks to third parties, and these third parties are the company's employees who are supposed to perform these tasks. This way, the company successfully spends the same money twice. For example, this is what happens in the IT department of Ukrenergo.

Or the story of Ukrenergo's purchase of Microsoft software for UAH 80 million in October 2023, which the developer made free for Ukrainian companies. This transaction, by the way, was carried out through Ukrenergo Digital Solutions LLC, a subsidiary of NPC, whose director is Andriy Nemyrovsky, the same one who received a bonus of almost UAH 4.5 million from the state afterwards.

What Volodymyr Kudrytskyi's family acquired during the war

It is not surprising that Volodymyr Kudrytskyi is characterized at Ukrenergo as a corruption-tested replacement for his predecessor Vsevolod Kovalchuk. We can safely say that the student has even surpassed his teacher. And in this sense, the description of the duties of the chairman of the board of Ukrenergo on the company's official website looks like a brazen irony, which states that he is responsible for combating and preventing corruption, as well as implementing the anti-corruption program. For which, by the way, he receives a salary of millions of hryvnias. For which he builds houses and buys luxury cars during the war.

By the way, even here, there was some fraud. According to the Register of Real Property Rights, Kudrytskyi's wife, Oleksandra Yastremska, on December 22, 2022, completed a transaction to purchase a land plot in Kyiv on General Pavlenko Street for UAH 559,902, or USD 14,000. At the same time, the real market value of such a plot is about USD 75 thousand, which indicates that the official purchase price is understated by more than 5 times.

On this land plot there is a newly built house, the cost of which can reach 300-400 thousand US dollars. And, according to available information, the house is not officially registered and is not properly registered.

Unlike millions of Ukrainians, Kudrytskyi's family was very successful during the war. On September 13, 2023, Kudrytskyi's wife became the owner of a 2022 Toyota Highlander for UAH 2 million 339 thousand 709. Kudrytskyi has already made 11 trips abroad during the period of martial law. In addition to private visits to Poland, there were 5 trips to Belgium, 2 to Switzerland, and one trip to the United States.

One can only imagine how much money the chairman of the board of Ukrenergo has in savings, given the level of his salary and bonuses, as well as the scale of corruption at the state-owned company. Although ordinary citizens are deprived of the opportunity to know about Kudrytskyi's property status, which undoubtedly only facilitates his path to personal enrichment, law enforcement and regulatory authorities have this opportunity. Hopefully, they will use it, because what has been happening for many years at the national energy company does not stand up to any criticism.