Balykin Roman Alekseevich

Official biography

Roman Balykin is the owner of the ATL car service network and the founder of the ATL Trophy race, once popular among the Ukrainian political elite. He is a co-organizer of an intermediary scheme with Turkish suppliers of goods for the army at inflated prices.

Related parties

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Business.

According to the registers, Balykin Roman Oleksiyovych is mentioned in relation to the following companies: “T.L. AUTO” ‘TRADE LINE’ ‘STEVENA’ ”ATL”

Compromising evidence

One of Ukraine’s main tire dealers is covered with a tire and what does Balykin have to do with it

2011.

The Kyiv Commercial Court declared bankrupt the capital’s Trade Line Ltd, once the country’s largest importer of automobile tires. The liquidation of this entity with total debts of UAH 538 million was initiated with the consent of its main creditor, Delta Bank’s Mykola Lagun.

According to DS, the bankruptcy case against Trade Line Ltd. was initiated in June last year. The initiator of this process was Nesco LLC, a Kyiv-based company that owed the automotive trader UAH 465 thousand. In December, the Kyiv Commercial Court approved a register of creditors’ claims against the debtor totaling UAH 538.5 million. Most of it — about UAH 272 million. — was due to the capital’s Delta Bank, owned by Mykola Lagun, the former head of the treasury of Ukrsotsbank. The remaining debts were distributed among a number of Ukrainian and foreign entities. Among them are Astvex Trading, a London-based company registered last fall, to which Trade Line Ltd. owes UAH 117 million, and a group of Ukrainian banks: Ukrprombank (UAH 23.3 million), Astra Bank (UAH 21.2 million) and Ukrgasbank (UAH 15.5 million). And in February, with the approval of Delta Bank, which had a majority in the creditors’ committee, the company was declared bankrupt. The company will be liquidated over the next year by Erika Artamonova, an insolvency officer from Kharkiv .

Just a few years ago, few could have believed that Trade Line Ltd, founded by prominent Kyiv businessman Roman Balykin, would end up in such a bad way. By the end of 2008, which was the most successful year in the company’s history, its sales reached UAH 700 million and its net profit exceeded UAH 8 million. However, at the same time, with the onset of the financial crisis, Mr. Balykin’s structure was on the brink of collapse. The focus on importing foreign products into Ukraine (Trade Line Ltd. was one of the largest importers of automotive products before the crisis, supplying Goodyear and Amtel tires, as well as Bosch and Monbat batteries), which had previously provided the capital’s LLC with steadily increasing returns, became an unbearable burden with the depreciation of the hryvnia. As a result, Roman Balykin’s structure was unable to service the huge debts accumulated in the pre-crisis period, when the ambitious trader was willingly lent by a number of banks, led by Ukrprombank, which resulted in its bankruptcy.

However, this process turned out to be very specific, as shortly before the moratorium on satisfying creditors’ claims, Trade Line Ltd. lost its regional network. It was done in a very simple way: in early 2010, the company sold its subsidiaries in Chernivtsi, Lutsk, Chernihiv, Luhansk, Vinnytsia, Lviv, Donetsk and some other cities to a little-known Kyiv-based Optmihmash LLC. Subsequently, these assets were resold to another Kyiv-based LLC, Akt 2010, which was not a stranger to the original owner. As a result of this simple transaction, the debtor actually turned into a “dummy”, the chances of receiving money from which most of the current creditors can be considered zero. The only exception is the aforementioned Delta Bank, which received the bulk of Trade Line Ltd’s debts from Ukrprombank last year. In an interview with DS, the owner of Delta Bank, Mykola Lagun, said that his financial institution is cooperating with its debtor. “We have reached an agreement with them, settled all issues and restructured the debt,” he said.

The fact that the two parties managed to find a common language is not surprising, as Mr. Lagun has extensive experience in debt recovery, having controlled one of the largest collection companies in Ukraine, Credit Collection Group. It is likely that one of the entities close to Mr. Balykin undertook to return the money to the owner of Delta Bank, having secured the banker’s consent to liquidate the company and clear it of the claims of “unnecessary” creditors. In addition to Ukrprombank, Astra Bank and Ukrgasbank, these include Laska Leasing LLC, a member of the Parex group (its claims against the debtor amount to UAH 13.35 million), and the American corporation Delphi (UAH 7.7 million). As for the owner of the bankrupt company, he has reason to be optimistic. Recently, the market for cars and related products in Ukraine has been gaining momentum, and the assets withdrawn from Trade Line Ltd. together with a related business (ATL car dealership chain, which was also founded by Roman Balykin) allow him to count on a significant return in the future.

How Balykin’s ATL car service left the state without money

“Businessman Roman Balykin’s ATL owes Delta Bank and VTB Bank three quarters of a billion hryvnias, which it has used to develop its car service centers under the ATL brand over the past ten years. Now the banks will be able to recover only 9 million hryvnias for the two.

In early June, the Kyiv Commercial Court of Appeal denied Delta Bank and VTB Bank ‘ s request to cancel the disputed results of last year’s auction for the sale of a network of three dozen car repair shops and auto stores under the ATL brand, which is being developed by Kyiv businessman Roman Balykin (the appeal decision was published only on June 18). As a result of that deal, the banks currently managed by the Deposit Guarantee Fund will lose more than UAH 800 million in total.

In 2010 and 2011, the network actively borrowed from these banks, when they were still managed by banker Mykola Lagun and the Russian VTB Group, respectively. And in 2013, the collateral for ATL’s loans from Delta Bank even became part of a UAH 7 billion pool of guarantees for a UAH 3.5 billion deposit placed with Lagun’s bank by the State Mortgage Institution. In the event of something happening, the SMI would receive claims on the bank’s debts from these businesses.

The “in case” came in the spring of 2015. The National Bank declared Delta insolvent. The SMI immediately made its claims, but it turned out that the deposits were left without collateral. The creditors, which included, in addition to ATL, Taras Barshchovsky’s Yablunevyi Dar, Konstantin Zhevago’s AvtoKRAZ and several others, pulled off an interesting special operation: they sent the bank a request to close the debt, allegedly by offsetting counterclaims under letters of credit purchased from Cargill Financial Services, which was a shareholder in Delta itself, along with Lagun.

The SMI ultimately lost the lawsuit against the bank and its debtors, which is why it was not included in the list of ATL’s creditors approved by the Kyiv Commercial Court in 2018 — three years after the company itself filed for bankruptcy in 2015.

Delta Bank became the largest creditor with UAH 572 million. The second largest was VTB Bank with UAH 272 million. Several other little-known firms tried to claim UAH 200 million in bills of exchange issued by ATL on the eve of bankruptcy, but the court rejected their claims. As a result, the two banks concentrated more than 99% of ATL’s accounts payable. It would seem that for Roman Balykin, all this meant a verdict as the owner of the country’s largest car service network business. However, in reality, it turned out the other way around.

In 2019, the DGF approved the sale of pledged property with an initial value of UAH 480 million to Delta Bank at an auction. However, as a result of a series of auctions and price reductions allowed by the bankruptcy law, the property — almost three dozen car service centers in different parts of the country (including two large ones in Kyiv with an area of up to 9 thousand square meters) — was sold under the hammer in September 2019 for UAH 9614710. 67 kopecks.

“Delta Bank and VTB Bank protested the results of the auction, arguing that they had agreed to the first attempt with a different price tag. However, in February 2020, the Kyiv Commercial Court and, in June, the appellate court rejected the bank’s appeal, thus legalizing the results of the disputed auction.

It seems that this was the intention from the very beginning — to leave the banks, which were taken over by the state, which took over their losses, without money. According to OLIGARCH, the buyer of the assets is Kyiv-based Invest-Energy LLC. Two weeks before the start of the controversial auction in September 2019, 100% of its capital was registered in the names of Kirill Kudinov (former head of investment projects of the Kyiv Metro) and Igor Nimak (former head of the bankruptcy department of the Ministry of Justice in Kyiv).

Kudinov is listed as the head of the Borshchahivskyi business center at 36 Symyrenko Street, where a new legal entity was registered several years ago, which now manages the entire car service business — ATL-Autoservice LLC, registered in the name of Balykin’s wife and children. Kudinov himself lists his current place of work on his Facebook profile as Khimneftomashproekt JSC, whose supervisory board in 2018 included lawyer Dmytro Pashkovsky, who also appeared for some time among the co-owners of TLA Kyiv and ATL-Autoservice. Balykin and Kudinov did not respond to our written questions during the preparation of this article.

The criminal case of the Shyrokyi Lan landfill

The High Anti-Corruption Court reduced the bail of Roman Balykin, the beneficiary of the Rost company, from UAH 2.1 million to UAH 780 thousand, of which UAH 1.1 million was transferred to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Balykin is accused of misappropriating funds for the construction of the Shyrokyi Lan landfill. This decision was made on November 3 by a panel of HACCJ judges, according to Slovo i Dilo. “To partially satisfy the request of the lawyer in the interests of the accused (Roman Balykin — ed.) to change the amount of bail.

Reduce the bail amount for the defendant from UAH 2,102,000 to UAH 780,000. To return to the pledgor of Trade Center LLC the funds in the amount of UAH 1,102,000 and, with the consent of the pledgor, to transfer such funds to a special account to raise funds to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the decision reads. The remaining amount of UAH 220,000 was returned to the other pledgor. As a reminder, during the pre-trial investigation it was established that in 2017-2018, the Head of the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (hereinafter — the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine), the Head of the Department for Construction, Reconstruction and Overhaul of Military Facilities of the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (hereinafter — the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine), the Head of the Department for Construction, Reconstruction and Overhaul of Military Facilities of the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (hereinafter — the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine), the Head of the Department for Construction, Reconstruction and Overhaul of Military Facilities of the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine).

It is worth reminding that during the pre-trial investigation it was established that in 2017-2018, the Head of the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (hereinafter — the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine), the Head of the Department of Construction, Reconstruction and Overhaul of Military Facilities of the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Head of the Department of Technical Supervision of the Main Housing and Maintenance Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in collusion with the director and beneficial owner of a private company, organized the acceptance of works and services for the arrangement of the Shyrokyi Lan field camp in the village of Ulyanovka, Mykolaiv region.

Despite the fact that the works on the field camp were not actually performed, the Armed Forces officials still “assisted” in transferring funds to the company’s accounts.

As a result, the state suffered damages in excess of UAH 37 million, which is confirmed by the conclusion of the State Audit Service and the examinations conducted in the case.

The actions of the former members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and representatives of the private company were classified as crimes under Part 5 of Article 191, Part 1 of Article 366 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

The Turkish trail of Balykin and Reznikov

The corrupt procurement of winter and summer jackets and dry rations for the Armed Forces of Ukraine from Turkish companies is not accidental.

Read more on the topic: Reznikov’s department bought cheap Turkish jackets for the Armed Forces, overpricing them by 4 times

Reznikov’s friend and business partner Roman Balykin, the owner of the ATL car service network and founder of the ATL Trophy race, once popular among Ukrainian political elite, has been living in Turkey for more than a year. Reznikov participated in them on a regular basis and had a blast.

Balykin was convicted in a criminal case of misappropriation of more than UAH 37 million in the construction of the Shyrokyi Lan military training ground, and he is also the main participant in the scheme to squeeze money from Delta Bank and VTB Bank, which were taken over by the state in 2020.

He is a co-organizer of an intermediary scheme with Turkish suppliers of goods for the army at inflated prices, in which he has already bought sports cars, an apartment in Istanbul, and a house in Bodrum. He does not hide this at all, bragging about it to everyone he knows.

This is the style of the Defense Ministry’s rebuttal to the scandal of Reznikov’s purchase of summer jackets for the frontline from the Turkish company Vector avia hava araçlari through his business partner Balykin, which were disguised as winter jackets and tripled in price on the way to Ukraine.

The denial already refers to some kind of uniform, a purchase for the TRO, suspicion of some director of a private company, a garment factory, and the Ministry of Defense actively denies all this. In general, the denial is very universal — no name, title, date, or identification of the procurement is possible, and the lawyers advised well.

Connection to Hrinkevych

Hrynkevych had all his tenders and contracts thanks to Reznikov’ s godfather Roman Balykin, and now they are working with Oleh Tatarov and Andriy Yermak to solve their problems.