Alexey Anatolyevich Orzhel
Official biography
Ukrainian public figure and politician. Expert in the field of fuel and energy complex. Head of the Energy Sector of the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO).
Member of Parliament of Ukraine of the 9th convocation from the Servant of the People party. From August 29, 2019 to March 4, 2020, he was the Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Graduated from the Institute of Energy Saving and Energy Management of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, received a master’s degree in Energy Management. He has participated in specialized conferences and seminars.
From 2006 to 2014, he held various positions at the National Energy Regulator. Since 2014, he has been working in the private sector.
Chairman of the Ukrainian Association of Renewable Energy.
Candidate for parliamentary election from the Servant of the People party in the 2019 parliamentary elections, No. 16 on the list. Non-partisan, lives in Kyiv.
Since August 29, 2019, Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection in Honcharuk’s government[7].
Member of the National Investment Council (since December 24, 2019).
On March 4, 2020, he was dismissed from his position.
Personal life.
Oleksiy Orzhel is married. His wife is Kateryna Andriivna, his daughter is Anastasiia.
Compromising material
Oleksiy Orzhel is a completely non-public person, still known only to a very narrow circle of experts in his field.
After being elected as an MP, when asked by journalists how he would live on a salary of 30 thousand hryvnias, Oleksiy Orzhel replied that he would sell his personal property to avoid poverty, and also believes that the issue of raising salaries should be raised in the Verkhovna Rada.
The combination of the ministries of energy and environment has already been criticized by various experts, as these two sectors are counterbalances to each other and should largely control each other. At the same time, the current Minister of Energy and Environment has experience in both sectors.
Energy Minister Orzhel concealed data on joint business with Russians
Minister of Energy Oleksiy Orzhel concealed information about his joint business with a citizen of the Russian Federation, which he conducted in 2016-2017. The editorial board of 368.media found this out by analyzing the declarations and biography of the top official.
Orzhel’s biography on the Cabinet of Ministers’ website is rather scanty: he was born, studied, worked — just a few sentences. He graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute with a master’s degree in energy management.
From 2006 to 2014, he worked in various positions at the National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission, after which he went into private business. He headed the Ukrainian Association of Renewable Energy, was a member of the public council at the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry, and was the head of the specialized sector of the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO).
Here, he worked with Oleksiy Honcharuk, deputy head of the Servant of the People faction Olena Shulyak, and Andriy Zablotskyi, who is now running for the post of head of the State Forestry Agency. Orzhel ran for parliament on the list of the Servant of the People party, where he was in more than a passable 16th place. At the end of August this year, the Verkhovna Rada appointed him Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection.
All this information is replicated on every news site, but there are serious gaps in his biography that Orzhel prefers not to mention. But first things first. While graduating from the university, in the summer of 2004, Orzhel worked as an intern at Kharkivenergoremont-2004 LLC. At the National Commission for State Regulation, the future minister held the position of head of the department for combined heat and power generation.
Orzhel’s «finest hour» came after Euromaidan.
He began to actively promote alternative energy sources. He received grant money from the EU like all activists, registering as an individual entrepreneur in 2015.
Orzhel was engaged in consulting on commercial and management issues. He stopped his activities on August 19, 2019, almost a week before his appointment. According to his declaration, last year alone, he earned more than one million hryvnias from consulting.
It can be assumed that Orzhel got access to EU grants through his mother Olena, the head of the Department of Higher Education Policy and Management at the Institute of Higher Education of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She devoted her career to Ukraine’s European integration.
However, we are not interested in this, but in Orzhel’s connection to Honcharuk. The latter stated in his declaration that he owns one-third of the authorized capital of the Dutch company Global Health Resolution (GHR) Participation B.V. (founded in 2014, the website is disconnected from the hosting). The fact is that Orzhel himself was associated with it, but carefully conceals this fact.
GHR Participation was part of the GHR Holding, headquartered in Nijmegen, along with GHR Medical Investment and GHR Financial Services. The capital amounted to UAH 55.86 million.
The holding was represented by three areas: medical investments (development of a disease prevention system, laboratory diagnostics, installation of X-ray equipment), processing (biogas processing, installation and maintenance of equipment for biogas plants) and financial services (relations with international investors in the field of agriculture and healthcare).
Orzhel was specifically involved in biogas processing and tried to get the company into landfills in Western Ukraine. In 2016, the future Energy Minister was the head and co-founder of Ozone Biogas Investment LLC.
It might seem like a good thing to help European investors build renewable energy facilities in the harsh Ukrainian reality, but the problem was different. GHR Holding was represented by German Thomas Brettschneider and his wife Natalia, who is also a citizen of the Russian Federation. These individuals had key stakes in all Ukrainian divisions, including the one where Orzhel worked.
Moreover, Brettschneider was a member of the board of directors of the Russian Primsotsbank (a troubled bank that has been repeatedly caught in dubious transactions) and is still a member of the board of NBD-Bank (Nizhny Novgorod).
It turns out that Orzhel cooperated with representatives of Russian business at a time when clashes with separatists were taking place in the ATO zone.
According to the declaration, it was during his work with the «foreigners» that Orzhel accumulated his capital. The minister and his wife Kateryna own more than 0.2 hectares of land in Obukhiv district and almost 0.13 hectares of land in Kyiv. In addition, Orzhel owns two dachas in Obukhiv district and Kyiv with a total area of over 200 square meters, and his wife owns a dacha in Kyiv with an area of over 214 square meters. Oleksiy Orzhel also owns 33% and 17% of two Kyiv apartments with an area of 73.2 square meters each, and his wife owns half of an apartment in Kyiv with an area of 57.5 square meters.
The minister’s car fleet consists of three cars: Peugeot 307SW (2003), Nissan Qashqai (2017) and Nissan X-Trail (2017). He did not specify the cost of the cars. As for income, Oleksiy Orzhel earned more than UAH 450 thousand at his main job in 2018. Orzhel earned another UAH 78.8 thousand by selling his garage, and his wife received UAH 210.6 thousand from the sale of a car. In 2018, he spent more than UAH 104 thousand on insurance premiums.
In addition, in 2017, Oleksiy Orzhel took out a bank loan of UAH 446.8 thousand, and in 2018 — another UAH 346.5 thousand. It is interesting to note that the minister’s family did not have any bank deposits, according to the declaration, and they did not make any expensive purchases in 2018, but they declared only $17 thousand in cash.
It is also worth noting that in 2016, Oleksiy Orzhel acquired shares in Kyivenergoremont PrJSC. The company is controlled by Ivan Plachkov, the former Minister of Fuel and Energy of Ukraine and former head of the Odesa Regional State Administration, and his son Hryhoriy, who is known for his ties to Rinat Akhmetov, and over 38% of the shares are also owned by Oleksiy Brusov, a person from Ivan Plachkov’s entourage.
It should be reminded that Orzhel is currently leaning toward businessman Ihor Kolomoisky. It is no coincidence that Stanislav Kovalevsky, who is associated with the oligarch, became Deputy Minister for Coal Industry.
Sociologists have compiled an anti-rating of energy industry leaders
According to sociologists, respondents were most critical of the activities of Andriy Gerus, chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Energy and Housing and Communal Services.
«58% do not know anything about the work of the Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection Oleksiy Orzhel: 20% assess his work negatively, 14% — neutrally, 3% — positively.
Police uncover scheme of money misappropriation during liquidation of mines in Donbas
In Donetsk region, law enforcement officers uncovered a scheme to misappropriate funds for the liquidation and restructuring of idle state-owned mines. The press service of the Strategic Investigations Department of the National Police of Ukraine reported this on Facebook on August 15.
«In 2019-2021, more than UAH 160 million was transferred to two contractor companies alone to carry out liquidation and restructuring of mines,» the release said.
To legalize the excess funds, the criminals transferred them to the accounts of fictitious companies under their control.
Context:
In March 2020, the then Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection of Ukraine Oleksiy Orzhel said in an interview with UNIAN that four out of 32 state-owned mines were profitable. According to him, they plan to close 21 mines, which will take up to five years.
“Closing one mine and transferring it to an environmentally safe facility costs between UAH 200 million and 500 million. Plus the social package that will have to be provided to the miners. We estimate that the reform will cost UAH 14-15 billion in total,” Orzhel explained.
Orzhel’s maniacal desire to buy gas directly from Russia should be of interest not to economists, but to the special services
Insight into the obvious — especially for Orzhel and the rest of the Ze-team: Putin is grinding Belarus so easily in the issue of creating a unified state precisely because of the so-called domestic “low price” for Russian gas and oil, which Lukashenko has been “seeking” from Putin every year with fanfare.
As a result, Belarus is currently unable to get off the «gas needle.» Switching to energy supplies from other countries threatens Belarus with an economic catastrophe. And it pays the highest price for the «low price» — the loss of the state.
Orzhel’s maniacal desire to buy gas directly from Russia should be of interest not to economists, but to the intelligence services, which should find out the true motivation behind the minister’s short-sighted actions.
Scandalous assistant
Oleksiy Orzhel’s Deputy Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection for Coal is Stanislav Kovalevsky, a man with a murky past, either from businessman Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, or businessman Serhiy Kurchenko, or former Party of Regions MP Nurulislam Arkallayev and businessman Serhiy Tron. How he rejoined politics with such a past is unknown. Apparently, it is of great benefit to Orzhel.
Wiretapping
In September 2019, Vitaliy Syhydyn, an employee of the National Agency for Finding, Tracing and Management of Assets Derived from Corruption and Other Crimes (ARMA), recorded a meeting of the then Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk. This is reported by Glavkom, citing the investigation.
This is a meeting of September 27, 2019. It was attended by Honcharuk, then-Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection Oleksiy Orzhel, Minister of Community and Territorial Development of Ukraine Alyona Babak, Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture Tymofiy Mylovanov, Deputy Minister of Finance Vasyl Shkurakov, Chairman of the Board of Naftogaz of Ukraine Andriy Kobolyev, Head of the Gas Department of Naftogaz of Ukraine Andriy Favorov, Head of the Asset Management Department of the ARMA Vitaliy Reznik, and Head of the Department for Monitoring the Efficiency of Asset Management of the ARMA.
According to the publication, the meeting discussed the country’s readiness for the 2019/2020 heating season, in particular, the consequences of a possible cessation of natural gas transportation through Ukraine and the conclusion of a new contract between Naftogaz of Ukraine and Gazprom (Russia), certain aspects of ARMA’s activities, management of state-owned CHP plants, issues of cooperation between the state and the International Monetary Fund in the context of gas payments, etc.
The publication also clarifies that no media representatives or other unauthorized persons were invited to the meeting to prevent the publicizing of information that could cause irreparable damage to the interests of the state, including in the field of energy security.
However, as the investigation found out, Sigydyn, fulfilling the request of the then Head of the ARMA Anton Yanchuk, secretly recorded the meetings using an Apple Watch.
On the same day, at approximately 22:00, Syhydyn, being near the ARMA administrative building, handed over a copy of the audio recording of the meeting to the Head of the ARMA Legal Department for listening, analyzing and expressing his opinion on the meeting. The audio recording was later distributed among ARMA employees.
In January 2020, a transcript of the meeting was published on the website of the Stopkor media outlet. The publication explained that it had received the recordings by email from an unknown recipient.
Summary.
Oleksiy Orzhel has a joint business with Russians, which he naturally hides, creates frauds with the closure of mines, has an assistant with an incredibly criminal past, and also tried to “rob” the people of Ukraine together with Alyona Babak and other officials for UAH 2 million. Orzhel is also on the list of officials with a high anti-rating. And despite all these actions and obvious crimes, Oleksiy remains in his position to this day.