Smelyanskyy Igor Yukhymovych
Biography
Ihor Smelyansky was born on October 6, 1975, in Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky, Odesa Oblast. At the age of 20, Smelyansky emigrated with his mother and father to the United States, where he became a citizen.
Related parties
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Education.
Igor Smelyansky was born on October 6, 1975 in Odesa.
In 1999, he graduated from the Lubin School of Business at Pace University (New York, USA) with a degree in accounting and auditing.
In May 2005, he graduated with honors from Georgetown University’s Robert McDonough School of Business (MBA) and The George Washington University Law School (Washington, DC, USA).
Mr. Smelyansky is a licensed attorney in New York and New Jersey, a member of the American Bar Association and a licensed CPA in Illinois.
Family.
Mr. Smelyansky is married to Natalia Myshkina, a U.S. citizen. The couple has two sons: Maxim and Igor.
Career.
From July 1998 to February 1999, he worked as a tax accountant at Cantor Fitzgerald L.P.
From February 1999 to July 2001 — Senior Tax Specialist at KPMG.
During his studies, from May 2002 to August 2004, he completed internships at the following companies: “Lockheed Martin, International Launch Services (JV with Khrunichev State Research and Development Center and RSC Energia, McLean, USA); Coudert Brothers, LLP (Washington, USA); Citigroup Global Corporate and Investment Bank (New York, USA).
From September 2005 to January 2008, Mr. Smelyansky worked at The Boston Consulting Group as a Senior Consultant/Project Manager. In this position, he participated in mergers, acquisitions, and restructuring projects for financial sector companies.
Since February 2008, he has been working at Promsvyazbank as Director of Asset Integration.
Most recently, he worked in New York (USA) at KPMG.
In April 2016, he was appointed CEO of Ukrposhta.
On August 17, 2018, the Ministry of Infrastructure signed a three-year contract with Ukrposhta CEO Ihor Smelyansky. Smelyansky will remain in office until June 30, 2021.
The dirt
The story of the appointment of an American citizen, Ihor Smelyansky, who had neither the slightest experience in this field nor corporate governance experience in any company, to the post of Ukrposhta CEO is a classic example of the introduction of representatives of foreign stakeholders into the Ukrainian public administration system, who perform the function of a comprador administration of the West in our country.
Selected in April 2016 in an unprecedentedly closed and non-transparent competition held by the «nomination committee» under the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers, Smelyansky, the CEO of Ukrposhta, has not only failed to reform the state-owned company, but has also significantly worsened the financial, economic, operational and technical state of the enterprise.
The degradation of Ukrposhta’s traditional functions (delivery of pensions, correspondence and periodicals, landline communications) that has occurred during Smelyansky’s tenure shows that he is unable to ensure the competitiveness of the state-owned enterprise in relation to Nova Poshta, Mist-Express, Autolux and other private postal operators.
All the efforts Smelyansky has made over the past 4 years to “reform” Ukrposhta, whether it is optimizing the lease of real estate, selling “extra” square meters of premises, “unnecessary” buildings and structures, or turning Ukrposhta into a bank, are ultimately aimed at reducing the capitalization of the state-owned company and selling it to Western “investors” at a lower price.
All attempts by Smelyansky to take loans from the European Bank for Development and Reconstruction or any other international financial institution to reform Ukrposhta under the current management of the state-owned company doom it to irrecoverable debts, for which the state will have to pay Western “partners” with shares of the company.
Smelyansky’s further experiments to transform Ukrposhta into something fundamentally different from its core functions may lead to the final destruction of the state-owned company as a state-owned communications enterprise that unites the country and glues it together.
The 200-fold gap between the salaries of Ukrposhta’s CEO and ordinary production staff discredits the state in terms of social justice and demoralizes the employees of the state-owned enterprise.
In terms of its consequences, Smelyansky’s deliberate “policy” of actually destroying Ukrposhta as a socially important state-owned enterprise that holds the country together from top to bottom is equivalent to the activities of Western representatives to destroy domestic medicine with the “reform a la Suprun”, attempts to sell land to foreigners, undermine the sovereignty of the Ukrainian banking system, and bring Naftogaz and Ukrzaliznytsia under their control.
NABU opens case against Ukrposhta CEO Smelyansky
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, following a ruling by the High Anti-Corruption Court, has launched an investigation into possible abuses by Ukrposhta CEO Ihor Smelyansky, Ukrainian News reported.
«The applicant notes that the beneficiary of the possible illegal receipt of funds by Ukrposhta JSC through the increase in postal tariffs is the management of Ukrposhta JSC in the person of the CEO and deputy CEOs. The NABU refused to open a case, but the court ordered the bureau to start an investigation,» the website reports.
Ukrposhta director admits to having two passports
Thus, Ihor Smelyansky has dual citizenship, while in Ukraine, according to the law, there is a single citizenship.
This was written by Svitlana Myalyk, a journalist at the National Public Radio Company, on her Facebook page.
She noted that Smelyansky said that his salary was UAH 743,000. When asked where he spends his salary, the Ukrposhta CEO said that he pays taxes in two countries.
Head of Ukrposhta and Zelenskyy’s aide join Supervisory Board of Ukroboronprom
The decree also terminates the powers of MP David Arakhamia, a member of the Supervisory Board of Ukroboronprom
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appointed his aide Andriy Yermak and Ukrposhta CEO Ihor Smelyanskyy to the Supervisory Board of Ukroboronprom.
The scandal of overpaid salaries
When the scandal of exorbitant salaries of ministers and heads of state-owned companies broke out and they were summoned to the Rada for a “conversation,” Smelyansky prepared a presentation that was supposed to prove that he was worth his money.
In fact, the presentation was primitive, based on the principle of “was-is”. And there is something to complain about in terms of content.
Where did Ukrposhta’s profit come from, if the State Audit Service, on the contrary, says it is a loss? Why are the tariffs for Ukrposhta’s services constantly rising? Why does the report state that the number of deliveries has increased, but in fact they have decreased several times?
Scandal with the delivery of pensions
In 2018, a postal scandal broke out. Then-President Petro Poroshenko gave the head of Ukrposhta, Ihor Smelyansky, a “blowout”.
The reason for this is the allegedly impending mass closure of post offices, including rural ones, as well as an increase in pension delivery rates. Earlier, Ukrposhta reported that as part of the «optimization» they plan to close about 7,000 post offices (by laying off people who work there) across the country, and this process is actually already underway. In addition, Ihor Smelyansky claimed that the tariffs for the delivery of pensions are extremely unfavorable for the company, which raises the question of the performance of this service next year.
For example, Poroshenko again ordered to «stop firing postmen» and to resolve the issue of pension delivery. In addition, he promised Ukrposhta UAH 500 million, which was allegedly included in the budget for the next year on his initiative.
He also strongly recommended that Ihor Smelyansky «reconsider his own salary» (the director’s salary is more than UAH 333 thousand per month, plus bonuses and allowances — ed.) The fertile topic of someone else’s «space salary» was quickly spread by the media and social networks, leaving the real situation around Ukrposhta virtually untouched. And it is, according to Strana’s source (one of the company’s former top managers), «catastrophic.»
600 hryvnia per leaf-blower
«It is a lie that pension delivery is unprofitable. On the contrary, Ukrposhta has always made money on pensions. In previous years, it provided up to 40% of the company’s profit. Now the tariff is up to 1.6% of the amount. It turns out that as pensions grow, Ukrposhta receives more money (according to the Pension Fund, this year Ukrposhta will receive UAH 1.4 billion for delivering pensions — Ed.) And no special labor costs are required — postmen deliver pensions «at the same time», delivering mail along the same route,» the expert said.
But, according to him, the main problem now is that there is no money to pay postmen’s salaries, and they are quitting en masse. «They are constantly increasing the standards, but their salaries are miserable. People are leaving in whole departments,» confirms Yuriy Bogdanov.
The Facebook group «Public Council of Ukrposhta» is full of complaints from postmen about the hardships of life. «I am both a boss and a postman, and my salary is 2 thousand hryvnias a month,» writes Oksana Klym. Postal workers complain that they are not even paid the minimum wage — they are employed part-time, but have to work full-time.
Strana has obtained an order from the head of Ukrposhta, which refers to a cut in staff salaries.
Smelyansky and Krykliy exposed in love affair
The fact that there is a conditional quota for representatives of non-traditional sexual orientation in the leadership of government agencies is hardly surprising. In this case, the situation with the former Minister of Infrastructure Vladyslav Krykliy and the head of Ukrposhta, Ihor Smelyansky, is a ready-made image for posters and banners of the Ukrainian LGBT community. The day before, immediately after Krykliy resigned from the ministerial post, Smelyansky posted a photo with his lover on his Facebook page and could not resist writing him a few warm words in connection with his dismissal from a high position.
However, everyone around both the young former minister and the slightly more experienced head of the country’s “main post office” has long known that in reality, “calling” or “writing” at 2 a.m. is just a figure of speech. Because in most cases, “some urgent issue” can be resolved right in the kitchen in Vladyslav’s luxurious four-room apartment at 58-A Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street in Kyiv, in an elite high-rise near the capital’s bicycle track. And, as you might guess, you don’t even have to wear underwear.
Evil tongues say that the relationship was initiated by Smelyansky, who was already working as Ukrposhta’s CEO when Krykliy joined the ministry. He saw in the new young boss an opportunity to strengthen the partnership between the state-owned enterprise and its de facto shareholder, as well as to diversify his personal life in the absence of his wife and children, who live in the United States, as they are citizens of that country, just like Smelyansky.
The minister and the head of the state-owned enterprise did not publicize their tender relationship until almost the beginning of 2021. Moreover, neither Smelyansky’s wife nor Krykliy’s common-law wife knew about this relationship. But her well-known demarche with the publication of accusations of beating by her partner, as well as photos of Kryklii walking at Yuriy Kosiuk’s “reform party” with a bag of cocaine, is just an emotional reaction of a psychologically traumatized woman who learned that her fiancé is actually oriented to a completely different gender.
Illegal removal from office of the head of the Transcarpathian postal service
From an interview with the head of the Transcarpathian Postal Service, Viktor Voitko:
— We have had some misunderstandings with the central leadership, and I can explain why. Since July 1 last year, Igor Smelyansky has been the head of Ukrposhta. He may be an expert in our industry, but later his actions began to cause surprise and rejection. During this time, the staff of the general directorate was significantly “bloated”, including many former SBU employees who could not continue to work in the agency after the events of 2014. A simple example is that there used to be one HR department, but now there are three. What is even more surprising is the salaries they receive — starting at UAH 35,000, and with all the allowances, the amount exceeds one hundred thousand hryvnias per month.
You see, it’s not normal for ordinary postmen to be on the minimum wage, while the staff of the post office receive six figures. It shouldn’t be like that. I started to pay attention to this, and in return, we received a number of different inspections. It started in September 2016. They were checking our activities as far back as 2013, and they tried to shift the mistakes they found onto me. We finished the audit and seemed to have sorted it out. But in November, another one came. This time it was from the internal security service of Ukrposhta. We were done. And suddenly, two weeks before the New Year, another inspection. This time it was a comprehensive one, meaning they checked everything they could.
It is worth noting that each such audit really paralyzes normal work for a long time. Goods are collected from all branches, brought to the warehouses, re-accounted for, people get nervous, etc. But what to do? There is an order from above…
Finally, everything was completed. I have the inspection report in my hands. Everything seems to have settled down, and no serious violations, let alone any theft or abuse, have been found. In the new year, we started working and developing, and on February 28, a new inspection was conducted, this time with my suspension from my duties. Why? On what grounds?
This time, the employees themselves could not stand it and literally staged a small protest.
And by the way, one more amendment — despite the media reports, no one locked themselves in the office, I don’t even know where this came from or who started spreading such rumors. On the contrary, we invited television and the press ourselves.
An April Fools’ Day joke that went too far. «Ukrposhta is involved in an intimate scandal
On April 1, the World April Fools’ Day, Ukrposhta published an advertisement stating that the best leisure products are books and intimate toys. The ad was posted on the company’s Facebook page by Ihor Smelyansky, the company’s director. The banner advertising Ukrposhta depicts a girl in a short dress, with the straps down and a book in her hands.
However, there was a scandal. For example, non-partisan MP Anna Skorokhod did not appreciate Smelyansky’s joke, which she wrote about on her Telegram channel.
The story of how Ihor Smelyansky got scared of Strana
Not so long ago, Dmitry Raimov wrote a post criticizing the salary of Ukrposhta CEO Smelyansky and suggested that he give an interview to Strana as a stress test of his readiness to take a hit. Smelyansky immediately showed courage and expressed a spartan willingness to meet. Since he showed determination, I decided to do the interview. You must admit that a brave man with a million-dollar salary is always interesting.
A week later, Smelyansky’s PR manager said that they had changed their minds and took the boss’s word back. The man gave the word, but he sent a young woman to take back the promise. And then he wrote a post: “I won’t go, you have a bad manner of presenting information about Ukrposhta and salaries.”
The American winner of the Ukrposhta CEO competition wants to privatize the state-owned enterprise
In his application, the American winner proposes to privatize Ukrposhta, and judging by Smelyansky’s work record, this is exactly why he was selected. It is noteworthy that in the previous competition for the post of Ukrposhta head, Infrastructure Minister Pyvovarsky pushed former banker Artemiy Yershov (read more about Artemiy Yershov in the article Artemiy Yershov: Participant in Financial Fraud and Protege of Lovochkin), who organized the disastrous privatization of Ukrtelecom in the noughties.
“This bill is in that version.” Smelyansky is either connected to Tyshchenko or a psychic
Last night, Ukrposhta CEO Ihor Smelyansky reacted to his mention in our series of articles. And he accidentally revealed secret knowledge that we do not yet possess. So many questions, so few answers.
The fact is that Ihor Yukhymovych publicly stated that the article incorrectly referred to draft law No. 4353 «On Postal Service» because it had already been amended. However, the draft law remained unchanged on the website of the Verkhovna Rada. And since November 2020.
Either Mr. Smelyansky has a much closer connection with the authors of the bill (MPs Tyshchenko, Zuyev and company), or he is just a great psychic.
Smelyansky is deliberately destroying Ukrposhta as a socially important state-owned enterprise
The recent initiatives of the Ministry of Infrastructure to amend the law “On Postal Services”, which have caused a great deal of publicity and are intended to introduce the exclusive right of the National Operator, headed by Ihor Smelyansky, to deliver international mail up to 10 kg, indicate that the head of Ukrposhta is making another attempt to solve the problems of his state-owned enterprise accumulated during his tenure by monopolizing the most profitable niches of the postal services market.
The draft law “On Amendments to the Law of Ukraine ‘On Postal Service’” published on the website of the Ministry of Infrastructure of Ukraine on October 26 not only proposes to secure the exclusive right to deliver letters, parcels and parcels up to 10 kg by the national postal operator in Ukraine, but also to secure its right to set tariffs for these services for all those who provide them through the National Commission for State Regulation of Communications and Informatization. This means that players such as Nova Poshta, Mist-Express, Autolux, and others will lose the right to set their own prices.
The authors of the draft law are well aware that the introduction of such norms will automatically violate Article 110 of the Association Agreement with the EU, which deals with the prevention of monopolistic practices in the postal and courier services sector, as well as the Preamble and Article 7 of the European Directive.
“No, I didn’t oh…l”. The head of Ukrposhta advises branch employees to buy masks and sanitizers with their own money.
Ukrposhta employees in different regions complain about the lack of masks, disinfectants, and glass barriers in all Ukrposhta branches that have not been quarantined. “Now, not only are the operators not separated from sneezing and coughing customers, but anyone can freely take anything on the tables,” one postal worker complains in one of the state-owned company’s employee groups on social media.
In response to the postmen’s complaints on Facebook, the company’s CEO, Ihor Smelyansky, promised to return the glass barriers dismantled earlier on his instructions and to provide employees with protective medical devices. For now, the CEO advised employees to buy masks and sanitizers at their own expense, keep the receipts, and then Ukrposhta will allegedly reimburse these costs. However, he did not specify where to make such purchases.
Ukrposhta does not care about the destruction of the ancient facade of the Odesa Main Post Office
According to the protection agreement, Ukrposhta is obliged to carry out current and major repairs of the architectural monument, but no one is carrying out repairs and the facade of the building is currently in a terrible state.
Ukrposhta CEO Ihor Smelyansky, whose salary is estimated at $30,000 per month, refused to answer questions from the Monitor about plans to repair the building, claiming that this is allegedly not public information.
According to Ihor Smelyansky, Ukrposhta can only provide information on the terms of delivery of goods, services and prices for them. The situation is rather strange: Smelyansky and his deputies receive exorbitant salaries at the expense of Odesa residents’ taxes, which are incomparable to the average standard of living in Ukraine, but when Odesa residents want to know about the fate of the building, they are turned away at the gate.
I was wrong by $750: Smelyansky apologizes for the postman’s salary embarrassment and embarrasses himself even more
In an interview with NV Business, he said that the average Ukrainian postman could earn $1,000 a month if he fulfilled overtime orders and took tips, and when his words were ridiculed by everyone who was not too lazy, he apologized and said that he had mixed up the figure.
At the same time, Mr. Smelyansky did not forget to praise himself and talk about the “improvements” he had made to the postal company.
“But I made a mistake with the salary (including bonuses) of $1,000. The salary of postmen did indeed increase more than 2 times during my tenure (from $110 to $250 + without bonuses), but it has not yet reached $1000. My mistake was that our best (not all) postmen do not receive $1,000 (or UAH 28,000), but sell goods and services worth this amount per month, and with bonuses they receive UAH 10-11 thousand. Therefore, I apologize if this quote offended one of the postmen,” he wrote on Facebook.
This should have been a good place to stop, but no, Smelyansky continued.
“Yes, it is our, and my personal, pain to pay more for less, “taking away” from city operators, where volumes have grown disproportionately to salaries. But all post offices have the same problem. We know how to fix it in three steps to get to the $1,000 salary I was talking about,” he suddenly blurts out.
The three steps are simple and straightforward: the introduction of mobile branches, digitalization, and the development of self-sufficiency in the village, which will no longer depend on city subsidies in the future. Let’s sit back and wait.
By the way, Smelyansky also lied about the 10-11 thousand including bonuses. Look at the vacancies at Ukrposhta. The maximum salary a postman can expect is 6500 UAH. What kind of bonuses are there supposed to be?
«Ukrposhta by concepts
The situation with the thousand-dollar salary did not pass by the former “servant of the people” Oleksandr Dubinsky. He analyzed in detail the fakery of the head of the postal company: in fact, Smelyansky said in no uncertain terms that his employees receive UAH 6,000, and the remaining 20,000 are collected by extortion from the old.
«In other words, Smelyansky and Ukrposhta are a gang that steals from Ukrainian pensioners,» Dubinsky summarizes.
In response to this, Ihor Yukhymovych could not keep silent and laid it all out:
Declaration
The last time the head of Ukrposhta filed a declaration of his income was in March 2018. Smelyansky noted that he rents an apartment in Kyiv (70 square meters). His wife also rents an apartment (200 square meters), but only in the United States. Among his valuable movable property, the top official owns a Cartier Roadster wristwatch, which cost him UAH 175 thousand. Ihor travels around in a rented Nissan Murano made in 2011.
Smelyansky has 31200 KPMG 401K shares with a nominal value of UAH 810 thousand. Nataliia Myshkina has 100 shares of FIDELITY NAHB RETIREMENT PLAN with a nominal value of UAH 1.8 million and 100 shares of CHARLES SCHWAB PENSION PLAN with a nominal value of UAH 1.1 million.
Conclusions:
Everything Smelyansky does for Ukrposhta is for the sake of his own welfare. He does not care about ordinary employees. Naturally, the staff suffers from this, hence the eternal conflicts, rudeness and theft. But who cares how ordinary mortals live there, the main thing is that Smelyansky’s salary is over UAH 10 million a month.