Sergey Kurchenko appeared on the Ukrainian business scene at the end of 2012 almost out of nowhere. Over the next year and a half, the businessman, who was called “Yanukovych’s wallet,” bought the Kharkov “Metalist”, which was then one of the top 3 Ukrainian football clubs, the largest media holding UMH, monopolized the liquefied gas market in Ukraine, then destroyed everything, and after the Revolution of Dignity fled to the Russian Federation. In the Russian Federation, he does business in much the same way – “GORDON” tells about the adventures of a fugitive Russian oligarch in an aggressor country.
At the end of 2013, when Kurchenko entered the top 30 richest Ukrainians with a fortune of $650 million (according to Focus estimates), he was not even 30 years old. By that time, his VETEK group controlled the Odessa Oil Refinery, one of the largest media holdings in Ukraine UMH, Kurchenko himself was the president of the Kharkov Metalist. However, even before the Revolution of Dignity (Kurchenko fled to Russia at about the same time as Yanukovych), everything began to fall apart – the then Metalist coach Miron Markevich said that the players were not paid salaries for three months before the escape of the club president.
He began to conduct business in Russia in a similar style.
Almost immediately after fleeing, he began buying gas stations and oil depots in Russian-occupied Crimea, concentrating up to 25% of the market in his hands, and since 2021 his Development Service Company has been in bankruptcy.
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Later, in the wake of the popularity of cryptocurrencies, he created the Beribit crypto exchange. It collapsed in 2024, burying about $400 million in deposits (as the media write, among the victims was even the son of Russian State Duma deputy Valery Seleznev, who invested more than 120 million rubles, about $1.5 million, in the cryptocurrency).
Lenders are trying to recover even more than $380 million (about 28 billion rubles) from another enterprise owned by Kurchenko, the Revyakino Metallurgical Plant, which he bought five years earlier.
The Russian publication The Insider wrote that not paying salaries to employees is standard practice for Kurchenko. Several former employees of his other company, Gazneft Service, told the publication about this.
“I worked at Gazneft Service for two years. I left because they stopped paying. Kurchenko abandoned both those he recruited in Russia and those who came with him from Ukraine. There is almost no one in the office now: mainly the accounting and legal departments remain. Gazneft Service is not closing, but operates in a compressed format. He left those who were minimally necessary, and abandoned the rest. The work has been adjusted, and people are no longer needed. They threw 15-20 Russians, how many Ukrainians – I don’t know. One accounting department was Ukrainian, the other was Russian,” said one of the publication’s interlocutors.
Another ex-employee said that he was owed his salary for six months: “We were told: don’t expect a salary, do whatever you want. They made it clear that all attempts to sue are useless, and if they manage to get through, people who have nothing to do with this situation will be punished. Well, they will find a staff director, some woman… The guys say, sometimes they brought her to the office to sign documents. She was… Half-sober. Even if they put her in prison, what kind of Is this the point?”
One of the former drivers of the fugitive oligarch (who was also not paid the promised salary) said that “working for Kurchenko was creepy.” “He talks to himself, he’s aggressive. You can often hear from Kurchenko: “I’ll bury this one… I’ll set the FSB on this one…”
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The publication believes that it was because of his attitude towards employees that Kurchenko had an accident in December 2016 – his armored SUV overturned on the highway out of the blue (apparently, the driver, who was working without a shift, fell asleep at the wheel).
According to media reports, at least since mid-2015, Kurchenko has been accompanied everywhere by a resuscitator (in case of an assassination attempt) and more than a dozen armed guards – after he was “caught” in a restaurant by the Chechens with whom Kurchenko had “graters” (what these graters concerned, the publication does not specify).
One of the latest scandals involving Kurchenko is the “occupation” of a house in the center of Moscow. Residents of the building accused Kurchenko of turning the courtyard of the high-rise building into a private parking lot, taking up all the parking spaces. He added a ventilation outlet and a balcony to his apartment, which hang over the windows of his neighbors. They complain that appeals to law enforcement officers “do not yield results, and attempts to talk directly with him can have negative consequences.”
