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Uzhva Igor Anatolyevich
Official biography
Igor Guzhva was born on May 23, 1974 in Sloviansk, Donetsk region.
From 1991 to 1996 he studied at the Faculty of Economics of Donetsk State University.
Career
1994 — started working at the Vesti newspaper founded by Leonid Tsodikov. Later, he worked at the newspaper “Donetsk Ridge” (founded by Boris Glotov and Tamara Zolotukhina) and the newspaper “Salon of Don and Bass”.
1997 — with Leonid Tsodikov, Oleksandr “Tems” Tymoshenko, Oleg Izmailov, Sergey Goloka and Yevgeny Yasenov, he revamped the newspaper Salon Don i Bass, turning it from a free classifieds newspaper into the first European-style publication in Ukraine. He headed the business and finance department at the newspaper. He actively developed the topic of protecting the rights of entrepreneurs from the arbitrariness of regulatory authorities, and launched ratings of industrial enterprises in Donbass.
1998 — Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper “Salon Don and Bass”.
Since 2001, he has been working in Moscow. Project coordinator at the Gleb Pavlovsky Foundation for Effective Politics.
2002 — Editor-in-Chief of the political expert network Kreml.org.
2003 — at the suggestion of Leonid Tsodikov, who at that time became the CEO of the Segodnya Publishing Group, moved to Ukraine, to Kyiv, and became the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, replacing Volodymyr Kornilov.
2004 — under the leadership of Igor Guzhva, the first redesign of Segodnya was carried out, and the concept of the newspaper was significantly updated.
March 2006 — Together with Leonid Tsodikov, Vitaliy Chirkov and the Innovations company, he redesigned Segodnya, transforming it into a modern full-color European-style newspaper.
In late 2006, the newspaper’s shareholder, System Capital Management (SCM), fired Tsodikov and Chirkov. Guzhva remained editor-in-chief and continued to work with the new CEO of Segodnya, Guillermo Schmidt.
In 2012. Guzhva was dismissed from the position of Segodnya editor-in-chief by the decision of SCM’s Supervisory Board. The staff of the newspaper and Igor Guzhva himself did not agree with this decision.
After leaving Segodnya, Igor Guzhva decided to continue his career in Russian journalism. After moving to Moscow, in March 2012, Guzhva became a member of the management of the Russian newspaper Moskovskie Novosti as its editor-in-chief. However, in January 2013, the newspaper closed due to financial difficulties, and Guzhva returned to Ukraine.
Family.
Former wife — Anna Solntseva, former presenter of the NewsOne TV channel, has a son.
Former wife:
Son of Ihor Guzhva:
Compromising evidence
All the activities of the Segodnya projects were funded by their owner, the System Capital Management (SCM) group of companies. The main shareholder of this company is Donetsk businessman Rinat Akhmetov. The company’s office is located in Donetsk. Due to the proximity of Rinat Akhmetov’s interests to the Party of Regions, Segodnya’s editorial board was often accused of publishing materials in their favor.
The dismissal of the head of Segodnya was preceded by the suspension of Igor Guzhva, which lasted almost a year. As a result, the owners of the project severed relations with him under the pretext of the end of the contract and his destructive position. According to the expert himself, the real reason was his disagreement with the censorship policy of the publications.
A partner in the Vesti holding was the news and analysis publication Rossiyskiy Reporter. This, as well as pro-Russian publications, distorted presentation of material and non-payment of income taxes, led to the criminal prosecution of Igor Guzhva.
Igor Guzhva distributes his own newspapers:
According to rumors, the real owner of the Vesti media holding is former tax minister Oleksandr Klymenko. This is indicated by the fact that after Ihor Guzhva’s dismissal, Oleksandr Klymenko’s wife took his place, and the former editor was accompanied to all the trials by lawyers who had previously worked in the ministry controlled by the former minister.
An attempt to enter politics:
He was caught in the process of transferring a bribe of ten thousand US dollars. The defendants in the case have different opinions about who gave the money to whom and for what. After that, he left Ukraine and was granted political asylum in Austria.
Attempts to capture Guzhva
The first attempt to stop Guzhva’s pro-Kremlin activities took place in May 2014. Tax authorities came to the Vesti office to search it. Among other things, they found UAH 1.5 million in a safe in Guzhva’s office.
He was accused of illegal conversion activities — a link was established between the money that went to the account of Guzhva’s holding and the company Torggazstream LTD, which is associated with Serhiy Kurchenko’s Real Bank.
From Mustafa Nayem’s investigation:
In September 2014, the SBU came to the editorial office with a search warrant. Laptops used by journalists and other staff members were confiscated. Subsequently, the SBU handed over the results of the searches to the Ministry of Justice, which appealed to the court to cancel the newspaper’s registration. But this did not happen — the newspaper is still being distributed.
Guzhva himself went to Moscow for a while, and he was put on the wanted list for tax evasion. Interestingly, even in Moscow, he continued to manage the editorial process and proofread and edited all the materials.
From the investigation by Mustafa Nayem:
The activities of the tax authorities and the SBU were accompanied by the blocking of some accounts of the holding and Guzhva himself. As his former employees told Espresso, at that time the newspaper had long since stopped paying «white» salaries and had problems with paying them at all.
Guzhva later returned to Kyiv. He was detained, but the court soon released him on bail of UAH 1 million. And in July 2015, he left the holding. Evil tongues claim that he took a tidy sum of money from the editorial office with him.
The editor of Novoye Vremya, Vitaliy Sych, expressed his opinion about Vesti:
Olga Semchenko, a former press secretary of Oleksandr Klymenko, became the head of Vesti Media Holding. In fact, this finally confirmed the version that the former chief tax officer finances the free newspaper. Although both Semchenko and Klymenko deny this.
A rally under the editorship of Vesti:
Thanks to the hackers
Guzhva’s activities are mentioned in the “Surkov letters” that were made public by patriotic Ukrainian hackers. In particular, there is an interesting letter from Guzhva himself, in which he asks his old friend Vitaliy Leibin for help and confesses to pro-Russian activities. The letter is very interesting in general: it mentions the schemes “built by Klim” (apparently, Oleksandr Klymenko — Ed.) and the materials in Reporter that were made “at the request of the top.”
In his letter to Surkov, Leibin calls Guzhva “our old friend” and explains that his value to the Kremlin is that he is “convincing and knows how to present the necessary information in a bright way and with the right sauce.” In another email, Leibin writes that Guzhva’s new project, the Strana.ua website, will be “a super-effective platform for Kremlin propaganda.”
Email:
Guzhva himself called these letters a fake and assured that he could not have used the address [email protected] because in 2015 he was still working at Vesti. However, the strana.ua domain was registered in 2004, so Guzhva could have used the corresponding email.
An email from the e-mail:
The Strana.ua project was launched in February 2016. Initially, Iskander Khisamov, another longtime friend of Guzhva, was involved in the project. He first wrote columns on the Vesti website, then headed the Reporter magazine, then the UBR TV channel, and even hosted a talk show there. This figure’s correspondence also fell prey to hackers. In particular, it turned out that Hisamov had left Guzhva’s website, which caused the latter to be confused. However, it seems that they remained friends. After all, Hisamov’s new project, Ukraina.ru, has now devoted half of its front page articles to Guzhva’s detention.
The Ukraine.ru project:
“Ukraina.ru has a clear pro-Kremlin orientation. In addition to texts about Guzhva, one can also find such amazing exclusives there: “Ukraine will be flooded with Middle Eastern guest workers”, ‘Secondary education reform: to amber, to the police or to the front’.
Igor Guzhva was spat on at a rally
After an unexpectedly lenient sentence was handed down to Yuriy Krysin, one of the murderers of journalist Viacheslav Veremiy, those who disagreed with the decision and opposed corruption in the courts in general gathered on Maidan. For some reason, the editor-in-chief of Strana, Igor Guzhva, also came to the rally, but he probably regretted his decision very quickly.
One of the participants of the action, C14 activist Yevhen Karas, accused Guzhva of defending the “titushky” during the Maidan, spat at the editor-in-chief and tried to hit him.
Guzhva posted this on his Facebook page:
«Segodnya and the second move to Russia
In 2003, Guzhva returned to Ukraine. He accepted the offer of Leonid Tsodikov, then CEO of Segodnya Publishing Group, to head the editorial office of the eponymous version of the newspaper in Ukraine.
Guzhva worked at the publication until 2012, when he was dismissed from the position of editor-in-chief by a decision of SCM’s supervisory board. Guzhva did not agree with this decision, so a scandal erupted around his dismissal.
Ihor Guzhva often visited Russia:
After his release, Guzhva moved to Russia again, this time for only a year. In 2012, he worked as the editor-in-chief of the Russian newspaper Moskovskie Novosti, but in January 2013, the publication was closed and Guzhva returned to Ukraine.
Separatists Guzhva Igor and Dmitry Vasilets at the OSCE conference:
Charges of tax evasion
On July 15, 2015, Vadym Melnyk, Head of the Main Investigation Department of Financial Investigations of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine, announced that Igor Guzhva was suspected of tax evasion in the amount of UAH 17,800,000.
Searches in the editorial office of Strana.ua:
At the same time, he was only served with the suspicion on August 1: before that, Guzhva was absent from the territory of Ukraine. On August 4, the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv imposed a pre-trial restraint on him in the form of bail of UAH 1 million 35 thousand 300 and ordered him not to leave Kyiv without the investigator’s permission and to hand over his passport to the prosecutor. On August 7, Guzhva posted bail and handed over his passport.
Searches in the editorial office of Strana.ua:
During the hearing, prosecutors showed a document according to which Guzhva received more than UAH 141 million in income in 2014. He denied having such funds, but found the money for bail. Ihor Guzhva’s interests were represented by the Prove Group, a legal group composed of former employees of the Ministry of Revenue and Duties under Oleksandr Klymenko.
Guzhva wrote a post on Facebook about what was happening:
Ihor Guzhva denied the accusations of tax evasion, as well as the pro-Russian orientation of the publication, and said that Vesti was being attacked and persecuted by the authorities for taking an objective position and not hiding problems in the country to please the authorities. He called the criminal cases that have been initiated fabricated for political reasons, as revenge from the authorities for the objective coverage of the situation in the country.
“Strana.ua”
On February 16, 2016, he announced the launch of a new online edition of Strana.ua. The website is accused of supporting Russian propaganda information policy..
In June 2016, Guzhva also became the host of the program “Subjective Results of Friday from Strana.ua” on the NewsONE TV channel. The latter is owned by MP from the Opposition Bloc Yevhen Muraiev.
Zelensky signs a decree tightening sanctions against Strana.ua
On Wednesday, February 16, 2022, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed Decree No. 57/2022, which toughens the sanctions imposed by the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) against the online publication Strana.ua. The proposal to amend the NSDC sanctions came from the Security Service of Ukraine.
The text of the decree was published by the Official Internet representation of the President of Ukraine.
According to the amendments, in addition to the main domains of Strana.ua, access to web resources and services similar in content is also blocked. In other words, the decree orders Internet providers to block all mirrors of the publication. The decree also amended the sanctions packages against Strana’s editor-in-chief Igor Guzhva, Anna Solntseva and Lyubov Lukashina.
As Ukrainian News previously reported, on August 20, the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions against the editor-in-chief of Strana, Igor Guzhva, and against publishing companies.
National Council takes on another TV channel of Igor Guzhva
The state regulator of the TV and radio market has caught another digital dummy TV channel red-handed. The Lviv-based Zahid Novosti channel (Multiplex Resources), which is part of a conventional media holding owned by Igor Guzhva, was inspected at yesterday’s meeting of the National Council.
The monitoring of the broadcaster’s airtime revealed an unauthorized increase in in-house programs and the absence of entertainment and music programs, which are prescribed in the license in the amount of three hours. In fact, the channel changed its format from an information and entertainment channel with a movie show to an information and cultural channel with a movie show. The monitoring showed that the broadcasts of September 9 and 13 were practically no different, which, according to the members of the National Council, may mean systematic violations. A representative of the TV channel agreed to the inspection, assuring that the broadcaster’s broadcasts now comply with the terms of the license.
Igor Guzhva’s company also had licenses to broadcast on the Zeonbud network in Kyiv and Kharkiv (the Kharkiv license was later revoked by two court decisions). The holding acquired these frequencies together with the UBR TV channel in June 2013. The channels received their digital broadcasting licenses in 2012: being fresh companies, they won the right to broadcast in digital from a number of regional TV channels that had previously operated there. These licenses were to become the UBR TV channel, which, in turn, was to become the Vesti channel. Guzhva and Co. did not have time to implement their plans last year, but, as you can imagine, everything can change.
The Gu%zhva case
On June 22, 2017, the editorial office of Strana.ua was searched. After Igor, Guzhva was taken to a pre-trial detention center. The Prosecutor General’s Office stated that through an intermediary, Guzhva demanded and received $10,000 for not publishing dirt on Radical Party MP Dmytro Linko.
On June 24, the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv took Guzhva into custody for 60 days with the possibility of release on bail of 544,000 UAH.
On June 27, Guzhva was released from the pre-trial detention center after being granted bail.
On August 1, it became known that the Security Service had found classified information from the Ministry of Defense on a flash drive seized from the editor-in-chief of Strana.ua editor-in-chief Ihor Guzhva, classified information from the Ministry of Defense. Guzhva himself denied the SBU’s statement that a flash drive with classified information from the Defense Ministry had allegedly been seized from him.
On September 22, the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv extended Igor Guzhva’s preventive measure for another 30 days. He is not allowed to leave Kyiv.
He later left Kyiv.
Then-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko later stated that law enforcement would seek to put Guzhva on the international wanted list. In June 2019, the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv removed Igor Guzhva from the wanted list.
Another case was opened against Igor Guzhva for interference in the life of Anton Gerashchenko
Igor Guzhva and his publication Strana.ua have gone through a truly black patch. As if there were not enough problems already, Guzhva reported another criminal case from the SBU. According to the editor-in-chief, it concerns the interference of the publication’s journalists in the personal life of MP Anton Gerashchenko.
“Another criminal proceeding has been initiated, which is being fabricated against us — this is a proceeding on interference in the personal life of a politician, MP Anton Gerashchenko,” Guzhva said at a press conference.
He also clarified that the MP was indeed the subject of several publications of the publication, in particular, about the apartment and car he had purchased. At the same time, according to Guzhva, politicians are public figures and their private lives are “limited by the principles of public interest.”
“It is interesting and important for society to know what level of expenses certain politicians have, what cars they drive, what apartments they live in, and how this correlates with their officially declared income. This is all socially significant information, and this is how it is perceived all over the world,” Guzhva said.
I don’t know how much of what Guzhva said is true, and how law enforcement actually explains their work. However, one thing is certain: Strana knows how to draw public attention to itself.
Ihor Guzhva is summoned for questioning in the case of the Maidan shootings
The extortion case is still very far from being resolved, and the editor-in-chief of Strana.ua is already being summoned for questioning in another case. According to Igor Guzhva on his Facebook page, he is going to be interrogated in connection with the shootings on the Maidan. The published documents state that the editor-in-chief is a witness in this case.
Igor Guzhva: the brilliance and poverty of the “hero of Russia”
06.08.2015 г.
Betrayal of the Motherland feeds. The former editor of the Vesti newspaper seems to have found new owners. Russia has once again become seriously concerned about freedom of speech in Ukraine.
The former editor-in-chief of the Vesti newspaper, Igor Guzhva (pictured above with the fraudster Arfush), has become a new, or rather, not forgotten old hero of the Russian propaganda machine. His high-profile dismissal from the newspaper and the media holding of the same name was immediately heralded in the pro-Kremlin press as the next round of the junta’s offensive against freedom of speech and all journalists who disagree with the pro-government camp in Ukraine. And while such attention from Lifenews to another “crucified boy” is quite understandable, the ardent support of Guzhva by a number of Ukrainian politicians and journalists who previously put their patriotic position on a pedestal is, frankly, surprising.
So, what is behind Ihor Guzhva’s latest “exit” from yet another Ukrainian media outlet, and who will actually fund his new project?
Why did Guzhva leave?
Is Ihor Guzhva so honest about his motives? And what is really behind his departure from the Vesti newspaper?
It was no secret to the media market that Igor Anatolyevich had never been the owner of the holding company he had pompously presented himself as. He was just a classic CEO. And the conflict in the holding, according to our sources, did not arise because of editorial policy or the investor’s desire to adapt to the Presidential Administration or the Kremlin, as is being talked about so much today.
Everything is simple and banal. It’s a matter of money. When the investor (according to a number of media outlets, Oleksandr Klymenko) decided to conduct a financial audit of the holding company that Guzhva had been running for more than three years, he was shocked. It turned out that Guzhva had set up a scheme of large-scale money laundering into his own pocket in the holding, which had been unprofitable throughout this period. And he did it so sloppily that he attracted the attention of the tax authorities. It is unlikely that if the holding’s finances had been managed by former tax officer Klymenko, he would have allowed such a clumsy scheme to be used, which was used by Ukrainian tax authorities.
By the way, according to Ihor’s Moscow colleagues, he did not hide the fact that he received up to $200,000 a month. It is unlikely that this was his fee, and this is against the backdrop of regular salary delays in the team. And Guzhva lives large.
Igor Guzhva drives a BMW of the executive class:
Guzhva’s house in the Kyiv region:
An amazing luxury for an “opposition Ukrainian journalist” who allegedly owned a media holding company that did not generate any profit, isn’t it?
So, Ihor Guzhva was caught between two fires — on the one hand, he clearly understood that after the audit results, he would not be able to work as the “owner of the holding” for long, and on the other hand, the tax authorities were building a case against him. He urgently needed a new patron, and the situation forced Guzhva to get creative.
At a meeting with a few trusted journalists from the staff, Ihor Guzhva announced that he was going to change the editorial policy of the newspaper, turning Vesti into an anti-Ukrainian newspaper and selling it to one of his Moscow partners amid the political crisis. He promised the trustees a high income. He said that they would now be paid according to the LifeNews grid.
Frankly speaking, even before that, Vesti had many complaints from the Ukrainian public and law enforcement agencies. They would call terrorists “republicans” or publish news based on the words of militant field commanders. According to the holding’s employees, the total level of criticism of everything that happens in the country has always been Igor Anatolyevich’s personal position.
According to our interlocutor, at the Vesti newspaper, Guzhva established strict authoritarianism in the team. He edited every text written by a journalist to such an extent that the most harmless news could turn into a monster of negativity. Journalists began to leave. The newspaper entered a period of turbulence.
Almost all media representatives turned their backs on Guzhva himself. Recently, he has not found support even among those colleagues with whom he has worked for many years. Even journalists of opposition publications openly spoke about his complete inadequacy. In his comments on Vesti’s criticism, he publicly called Ukrainian journalists the government’s lackeys.
There were practically no people among the media who were willing to publicly express their sympathy for Guzhva. Even Hryhoriy Shverk, who had remained quite friendly with Guzhva until recently, has recently spoken of him in private conversations, to put it mildly, with derision.
Guzhva has become an unwelcome guest wherever he goes. Except, perhaps, in Russia. It was from Moscow that Guzhva began to spread rumors that he had found new patrons who would be able to put pressure on the wayward investors of Multimedia Invest Group to keep him at the helm of the holding.
Summary.
Igor Guzhva, having the Kremlin’s roof, has been working for the destruction of Ukraine for many years. His biography includes several SBU suspicions, an arrest, obvious facts of cooperation with Russia, and still no one has imprisoned him. Now he continues to misinform the people, only from the territory of Russia.