Between 2020 and 2021, a corruption scheme allegedly operated around Ukraine’s state-owned United Mining and Chemical Company (UMCC), managed by the State Property Fund.

Journalistic investigations from that period identified Pavlo Prysyazhnyuk — a board member of Swedish company Milsen Energy AB and a partner at the Kyiv-based law firm AIM Group (office at 6 Andriyivskyy Descent) — as a key figure. Sources claimed this office served as a “shadow headquarters” from which Prysyazhnyuk coordinated the operations.

Media reports state that Prysyazhnyuk influenced UMCC product sales through his associate, acting board chairman Artur Somov (former CFO of Karpatygaz LLC, a Milsen Energy AB subsidiary).

In summer 2020, Somov reportedly involved the “German” company ITS International Trade, managed by Oleg Tsyura, to supply ilmenite to occupied Crimea. Allegedly, $88–108 was diverted per ton of raw material, enabling the siphoning of approximately $2.3 million.

The Czech company EPI Group, which at that time was owned by Prysyazhnyuk (30% of shares), also participated in the scheme. On August 6, 2020, ITS transferred about 472.89 thousand euros to EPI as “agency fees” through UniCredit Bank. The contract between EPI and ITS had been signed back in March 2020. In March 2021, EPI sent offers to consumers to buy UMCC’s products.

For regular supplies, according to investigations, another Czech intermediary company, Belanto, was used, through which ilmenite from the Irshansk Mining and Processing Plant was supplied to Crimea from October 2020. Simultaneously, Denys Kudin, the curator of UMCC at the State Property Fund, was engaged in “whitening” Belanto’s image in the media.

Against this backdrop, the State Property Fund publicly demonstrated a fight against corruption: its head, Dmytro Sennychenko, made videos about exposing bribe-takers, while in the shadows, according to journalists, a complex “multi-move” scheme with kickbacks and offshore accounts was at work.