As Ihor Mazepa, owner of a leading Ukrainian brokerage, tried to drive across the border into Poland on January 18, he was detained and later charged with running an illegal scheme to privatize land on the outskirts of Kyiv more than a decade ago.
The arrest of Mazepa -- a prominent figure in Ukraine's investment circles -- and the steep bail of 700 million hryvnyas ($18 million) initially imposed against him struck a nerve in the country's business community, where frustration has been mounting since early 2023 over what some say is rising corruption in law enforcement.
The 47-year-old had become one of the business community's most vocal critics of the security forces and the government after prosecutors last year seized his quarries and raided a company of his that was developing a natural-gas field.
His brokerage on January 24 rejected the allegations and called his arrest revenge for his public comments.
"We relate the groundless pressure to Mazepa's public activity and his criticism of the dubious methods that Ukrainian law enforcement bodies are using increasingly actively against local business," Concorde Capital said in a statement.
Concorde accused police of seeking to "present Mazepa in the worst possible light" by arresting him at the border, creating the impression he was trying to escape prosecution. Concorde claimed he was going to business meetings in Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum was coming to an end, and planned to return to Kyiv.
Concorde said law enforcement had every opportunity over the past few weeks to detain Mazepa in Kyiv, where he attended "a series of public events."
The brokerage also called the search of his office illegal.
'The Practices Of 2013'
In an interview with RFE/RL, Roman Waschuk, Ukraine's business ombudsman and Canada's former ambassador to Kyiv, expressed dismay over the raid at Concorde and said such actions against leading businesspeople damage the nation's investment climate.
"It is disturbing that we are returning to the practices not of 2016, but of 2013," he said.
Waschuk was referring to the period under President Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected in 2010 and fled to Russia when the Euromaidan protests pushed him from power in February 2014. His presidency was marred by evidence of large-scale corruption, one of the catalysts of the Euromaidan movement.
Others, including Mazepa, have drawn comparisons to the Yanukovych era. This perception is a blow to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is seeking to convince the United States and the European Union to approve tens of billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine as it struggles against the continuing Russian invasion and to accept the country into Western organizations, including NATO and the EU.
Western support and integration hinge in part on Ukraine showing progress tackling corruption a perennial problem in Ukraine since the Soviet collapse of 1991 -- as it has been for Russia -- and improving governance. Though Zelenskiy made rooting out graft a crucial part of his presidential platform in 2019, he has had mixed results over nearly five years in power.
He has curtailed the power of a handful of tycoons long seen by critics as fueling corruption, but he has been criticized for seeking to control independent, anticorruption agencies set up at the behest of Western governments and lending institutions and for pressuring the independent boards of large, state-owned companies.
Following the uproar over Mazepa's arrest, Zelenskiy held a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council to address law enforcement pressure on the business community, among other economic issues, and said the government would create a business support council.
In addition to Western government financial aid, Ukraine will need to attract tens of billions of dollars from foreign investors to rebuild its economy when Russia's war against the county ends or fighting subsides.
The full-scale invasion Russia launched in February 2022 has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, uprooted millions more, wiped out towns, and severely damaged energy and other critical infrastructure.
Experts have put the cost of rebuilding in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Luxury Village
Mazepa is accused of establishing a criminal group that illegally privatized 2.4 hectares of land located 12 kilometers outside Kyiv on a scenic stretch of the Dnieper River. He later incorporated the land -- equivalent to about 4 1/2 soccer fields -- into the 46-hectare luxury cottage community he opened in 2013.
The state's alleged loss is 7 million hryvnyas ($180,000), Concorde said. The initial bail of 700 million hryvnyas ($18 million) was unprecedented for the alleged loss in question, the brokerage said, and the court reduced the bail to 21 million hryvnyas ($550,000) amid the backlash.
Mazepa was released on January 23 after posting bail. The investigation is continuing, and no court date has been set.
Only 6 percent of investigations into suspected economic crimes end up in court in Ukraine, a sign that such probes are a tool to exert pressure, Waschuk told Forbes last year.
The timing of the arrest by the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) more than a decade after the land in question was sold intensified skepticism about the legitimacy of law enforcement's case.
"There is low trust in the SBI. They are known for their attempts to extort," Tetyana Shevchuk, a lawyer who serves as international relations head at the Kyiv-based Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC), a nongovernmental organization, told RFE/RL.
SBI spokeswoman Tetyana Sapyan defended the timing of the arrest, saying the land transactions were complicated.
"These machinations were only understood now," she told the news outlet RBK-Ukrayina on January 23.
'They Can Come For Anybody'
Serhiy Fursa, deputy director of brokerage Dragon Capital, a competitor of Concorde, said the arrest has unnerved entrepreneurs in the country.
"If [law enforcement] came after Mazepa to pocket some money -- and this is the main interpretation of the business community -- then it means they can come for anybody with the same aim. It doesn't matter if you did something bad or not. And that worries the business community," he told RFE/RL.
Mazepa's arrest could have been triggered by a commercial dispute, Fursa said, adding the businessman is known for his "aggressive" tactics.
It is not uncommon for individuals in Ukraine, Russia, and other former Soviet republics to resolve bitter commercial disputes by bribing law enforcement to intervene on their behalf.
Mazepa insinuated that is what happened last April when, he says, 23 investigators and eight prosecutors raided three locations in connection with his natural-gas business in the western city of Lviv.
Mazepa and his partners were in a commercial dispute with the former owner of the gas business when the raid occurred. They have won two cases against the former owner in civil court, and the issue is now being heard by the Supreme Court, Mazepa's lawyers told RFE/RL. While the police pressure on the gas company has ceased, the criminal case has not been closed, the lawyers said in a statement.
Two months earlier, a court seized Ukrainian quarries he and partners bought in 2021 for $2 million from Austrian construction company Strabag because sanctioned Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska owns a quarter of the Vienna-based firm. Mazepa appealed the ruling and won.
Under Pressure
Following those incidents, Mazepa became vocal in his criticism of the government and law enforcement. In May 2023, he was among the leaders of a group of 42 entrepreneurs who called on the government to protect the business community.
In interviews with media at the time, he appeared to throw down the gauntlet, saying he would speak out about corruption. A few months later, Manifesto 42, as the business group call itself, began publishing a list of allegedly corrupt officials.
"Business is under the most pressure from law enforcement agencies in 20 years. In some places the authorities have gone further than during the Yanukovych era," Mazepa told Forbes Ukraine in June.
In an opinion article for the prominent media outlet Ukrayinska Pravda in October, Mazepa expressed concern over the state's increasing role in the economy following the nationalization of assets belonging to Ukrainian and Russian tycoons loyal to the Kremlin.
He said corruption would flourish if the state did not sell off assets, something Western experts have been calling on Kyiv to do for decades, following the end of hostilities with Russia. Large-scale privatization would be a boon for Ukraine's investment banks.
Mazepa, who set up Concorde in 2004 after years in the brokerage industry, has weathered Ukraine's extreme market turbulence -- marked by political upheaval, war, and currency crises -- to earn a small fortune and build political influence.
He told Forbes last year his investments in Ukrainian businesses, including real estate, natural gas, amber, health care, and construction materials, amounted to tens of millions of dollars.
Following the Euromaidan protests, Mazepa became one of 18 economic advisers to Boris Lozhkin when the latter served as President Petro Poroshenko's chief of staff in 2015-16.
He has not escaped controversy over the years. In one instance, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2016 fined Concorde $4.2 million for allegedly trading stock on the basis of hacked and stolen press releases.
