In mid-November 2023, the Ministry of Justice declared the actions of state registrar Yurii Kozlov aimed at replacing the director and changing the seat of Olimpex Coupe International LLC, part of the GNT Group holding, to be illegal. The Ministry blocked the registrar’s access to the Unified State Register for two months.
Based on the opinion of its grievance review panel, the Ministry of Justice issued an order to that effect on November 13, 2023.
The Panel was able to examine the case after the courts concluded that Kozlov unlawfully re-registered a company seated in Odesa (where GNT’s port facilities are located) to a new seat in Lviv and replaced its director Vitalii Marchenko with Ihor Kulak, a lawyer acting on behalf of the creditor Argentem Creek Partners. The case was examined based on the grievance raised by Olimpex Coupe International.
According to Hryhorii Pavlenko, the attorney representing GNT Group’s owners, the management replacement and the change in the registered address of Olimpex Coupe International undertaken by state registrar Yurii Kozlov marked the beginning of a hostile assault by Argentem Creek Partners (ACP) Fund against GNT Group’s business assets.
“The Ministry of Justice’s decision confirms statements made by the GNT Group earlier that the ACP fund, under the pretext of debt collection, began to re-register illegally the entire port business of the international holding company founded by Sergiy Groza and Volodymyr Naumenko. Engaging the services of a state registrar in this arrangement may be indicative of the pressure from authorities in the interests of the ACP,” the lawyer indicated.
It was reported that GNT Group, an international holding company that owns a grain terminal in Odesa Commercial Sea Port, took two loans — US$ 75 million from the ACP and US$ 20 million from Innovatus Capital Partners — secured with the company’s corporate rights with the value being a multiple of the loans’ amount. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021 and a full-scale war against Russia in 2022, GNT Group faced difficulties repaying the principal amount of the loan.
As stated by GNT Group, the opening of the “grain corridor” opened up stable prospects for debt repayment. In December 2022, GNT was negotiating debt restructuring with both ACP and Innovatus and, at the same time, strategic investments with foreign companies. However, on December 20, the ACP suddenly announced that it would enforce the debt, leaving only a few hours for effecting a transfer. Notably, on December 19, a day before announcing the debt enforcement, the creditor had already initiated replacements of the management of Olimpex Coupe International and other group companies managing the grain terminal. Registration actions that the Ministry of Justice found illegal were carried out by registrar Yurii Kozlov.
The GNT Group’s spokesperson stated that the company had never refused to honor its obligations but, by all appearances, the creditors had begun a hostile takeover of the company and were trying to devalue its business in order to opaquely resell its assets to an interested third party.
According to investigative journalists, these attempts to take over the port business enjoyed behind-the-scenes support from David Arakhamia, the head of the Servant of the People faction, and Hillmont Partners, a law firm with a long-standing close network of connections in Lviv and Ukrainian authorities, including the judicial system (for instance, its former partners became members of the Rada on the Servant of the People’s ticket). Ihor Kulak is a lawyer working for Hillmont Partners.
A month and a half before the conflict, David Arakhamia had a meeting with the ACP in Vienna; according to journalists, he allegedly discussed the possibility of Argentem’s placing the GNT Group’s stevedoring asset under the control of the prospective buyer. Arakhamia refused to comment on the above information when talking to journalists.
On March 1, public notary Anatolii Huliiev restored Olimpex Coupe International’s legal seat to Odesa and reinstated Vitalii Marchenko as its chief executive officer on a legal basis according to a decision of the Western Appellate Commercial Court. At that time, the Ministry of Justice upheld Kulak’s complaint and canceled Huliiev’s registration actions with a single-handed ministerial order issued without the panel review, contrary to the procedure. However, being inconsistent, this order by the Ministry of Justice has never been implemented. To this day, Vitalii Marchenko has remained the company’s director.
However, an unsourced news item appeared in the media in October, stating that a National Police investigator issued Huliiev suspicion in a criminal proceeding for the latter’s alleged failure to implement a court decision.
According to the lawyer, “These potential actions by the National Policy are even more surprising because notary Huliiev was the one who had actually implemented the court decision in question. This is yet another indication of a potential trail of corruption and administrative pressure by authorities in favor of ACP, the American creditor. I wonder if law enforcement will be as fast and efficient in dealing with registrar Kozlov, whose actions were confirmed to have been against the law by courts of law and the Ministry of Justice’s grievance panel.
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