The Weekend Intelligence: Operation Midas

0:00Did you know the SIBO VIX Index at its core is a measure of market uncertainty? The VIX Index could be rising because of bullish positioning in the underlying SIBO SBX Index Options market due to fear of missing out rather than fear of downside. Download our white paper at SIBO.com slash VIX Insight. There are risks associated with SIBO Company products. Review the disclosures and disclaimers at SIBO.com slash US underscore disclaimers.

0:30Ollie Carroll:To grow beyond limits and even beyond your aspirations, you need the London Business School MBA. Ranked fourth in the world by the Financial Times, the programme delivers academic excellence and unlocks access to leading global businesses and a network of over 58 ,000 professionals. 86 % of the most recent class accepted a role within three months of graduating, and the returns continue beyond today. Search Discover London Business School MBA to find out more.

1:10Ollie Carroll:The timing couldn't be worse. The war in Ukraine has been dragging on for nearly four long years. America and Russia abandoning a peace plan that Ukraine had little part in composing. And now the president's closest confidant is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. And that's just one part of the giant crisis now engulfing the country. Ukraine's history of corruption is long and torrid. When Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in 2019, he campaigned as an anti-establishment figure who promised to root out fraud. Things did seem to be getting better. But now detectives have unearthed the biggest corruption scandal in Ukraine's history.

1:56Ollie Carroll:Today, we're going to track that scandal and that of Operation Midas, the multi-agency probe, into how$100 million, probably more, was stolen from a country at war by its own elite. This story has everything. Crazy code names like Che Guevara, Alibaba, and Rocket. It has bribes, bugs, spy cams, and luxury villas. And like all good oligarch dramas, it has a golden toilet. It might be salacious, but for the bigger picture, an existential war in Europe, a president who will not bend, government bodies that fear being branded traitors if they act, and traitors if they don't.

2:45Ollie Carroll:I'm Rosie Blore, and today on The Weekend Intelligence, my colleague Oliver Carroll takes you inside Ukraine to the core of the rot. Ollie is among the few reporters who was on the trail of this scandal months before it hit the news, exhaustively following leads, talking to sources and trying to untangle the many tentacles of the investigation. You'll need to listen carefully. We've voiced some tapes of leaked conversations so they're in English, but there are lots of names here and lots of government agencies. And of course, the jigsaw is not yet complete. This story is still unfolding. and it could yet spell the end for the man who stands as a figurehead of the values the West claims to uphold.

3:44It's July 2025. We're in Kiev, eavesdropping on a conversation. between a government advisor codenamed Rocket and a security manager at the state nuclear energy company Energa Atom, codenamed Tenor. Speaking in coarse Russian, sprinkled with profanities, they're discussing something pretty galling for a country at war. What they're suggesting is skimping on protecting Ukraine's energy grid from Russian missile strikes. Strikes that have plunged much of the country into the dark and cold for three winters in a row. But these men? They're more interested in pocketing millions in kickbacks. It's a waste of money, says Rocket.

4:43By grim coincidence, the same locations they intentionally neglected were hit just two days before this tape was made public.

5:29This tape, as others, were recorded on secret listening devices in flats and back rooms around the Ukrainian capital over the course of the last year and a half. I first heard rumours of Operation Midas this summer. I was told by my sources, spooks, government officials, people close to the investigation itself that things were about to get very embarrassing for Ukraine's leadership. But truth be told, no one, myself included, realised just how seismic the revelations would be. Now the curtains are being pulled back and it is proving to be the biggest, most consequential corruption investigation in the history of Ukraine.

6:20And all of this is happening at the most delicate of geopolitical moments, just as Russia and the United States are pressuring Ukraine into accepting a poisoned peace.

6:38We will split it in three ways between you, me and the professor. Let me check what numbers we have. I wrote them down somewhere. I'll just deduct it right away. But we haven't gone through this whole thing to the end. Yeah, just let me calculate quickly. It's 62 ,000.

7:08At this moment, Rokit and Tenor have no idea that just five months after this conversation, they will contribute to bringing down the central pillar of Volodymyr Zelensky's administration. His chief of staff, Andriy Irmak. The man who was Zelensky's unofficial vice president, chief advisor, chief negotiator, a Rasputin-like figure at Zelensky's shoulder, now gone.

7:42This is the story of Operation Midas, an investigation that wasn't supposed to happen, one which powerful actors all the way along did their best to thwart. It is based on the testimony of officials, detectives and witnesses. Not all of them allowed to speak publicly. Some afraid to. And it is a story that is only just beginning. What is the most important thing?

8:19What is the most important thing? First of all, it is important to know that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau is the public face of this investigation. As you can imagine, he is a busy man these days. So he is answering my questions by recording voice memos as he is being driven around Kyiv.

8:44Abakumov is an unassuming guy with a big job. He's chief detective at an organization called NABU, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. Now, this is the investigative branch of the anti-corruption package established in the wake of the Maidan revolution of 2014. It's a trifecta. Stay with me now. You'll need to hold on to another two acronyms aside from NABU. First, SAPO, which is the anti-corruption prosecutors, and second, VAX, which is the high anti-corruption court. All three were created under Western pressure as a check on government. They ran in parallel with Ukraine's existing, objectively corrupt justice system.

9:34When we realized the amount of money passing through the office, we understood that this was perhaps the case unlike anything Naboo had dealt with before. It is very large in scope and it covers many directions. Operation MIDAS, the investigation into the Energa-Atom scheme, began in the summer of 2024.

10:00The energy sector has always been an area in which there is a lot of talk about various unlawful actions by different actors. And many people publicly exposed corruption, but our task was not just to investigate an isolated incident reported by an individual, but to uncover systemic corruption. They called it BARRIER, a scheme that skimmed millions of Energa Atom's public contracts. The deal was simple enough. Suppliers to the nuclear energy agency were made to pay an extra 10-15%, or be shut out of lucrative tenders. As it's a nuclear agency responsible for the majority of Ukraine's power, contracts are huge.

10:52Abakumov and his colleagues followed along in real time for months, listening in on the grifter's recordings. It was a gradual accumulation of knowledge that revealed how important this investigation was. Certainly, part of that was listening to the conversation where such cynical things were being discussed. things like underspending on protection for energy facilities and about persuading contractors to deliver goods of inadequate quality. The criminal group worked under aliases, names they chose for themselves. This is common practice among criminals and even among the detectives who pursue them.

11:35It makes it hard to pin down identities and harder still to assign guilt before a court. After all, a murky tape means nothing if you can't link a voice to the crime. So Abakumov and his team had to triangulate.

11:54When we heard a nickname like Rocket in a conversation, we tried to determine who that was. But subject of that investigation helped us themselves through their discussions about where someone was when they were meeting them and how they referred to them. The scene inside the NAB operation is exactly as you might imagine. Special rooms with whiteboards, photos, notes and bits of string connecting the suspects bit by bit. For the detectives involved, it became an all-encompassing affair. For example, with one nickname, it was mentioned several times that this person was abroad. We checked everyone who could be connected to the group and looked for those who were abroad at that time.

12:46Then they would say, I met him here and there. We checked who was in those places and the indicated times. And this way, through a combination of objective indicators, location, meeting details, we established which nickname corresponded to which person. Of course, things become easier if someone slips up. Which eventually they did. Remember Rocket and Tenor? The government advisor and security manager we heard discussing a three-way split? Well, in one take they reveal the names of some of the managers they were giving kickbacks to.

13:36I suggest we start going over the financials right away. Yeah, I do your normal now. Constructions, it's 105. And this is the military. Okay, and five, and five. That's one grand. Ten is yours. Three goes to the... Did I forget anyone? And again, for the closet matters. 19. That comes out of 20 ,000 minus$100. Minus$100, so that's 20 ,000. Looks like everything.

14:16Naboo's investigation of the Energa atom scheme has traced at least$100 million of kickbacks. And that is only what investigators have been able to prove so far. The number is likely to rise as the investigation continues.

14:34And, to be clear, this was not a few bad actors. For this to go undetected for so long, it required the participation of vast numbers of people. It was a corrupt cancer running through the state.

14:56The Energa Atom investigation may have been the case that brought the criminal syndicate down. But it's not actually where the story begins. That all started two years ago, in late 2023, with a corrupt property developer making an approach to a Ukrainian politician, Oleksandr Kubrakov. Back then, Kubrakov was a rising star of Zelensky's government, minister for infrastructure, and talked of as a future prime minister. The developer offered a kickback deal to wink through land rights. What he didn't know was that Kubrakov was talking to anti-corruption investigators at the same time, and the transaction he was about to enter was, in fact, a sting operation.

15:44When they arrested the developer, Naboo detectives tried to get him to cooperate to see how many other figures in government had taken the money before Kubrakov entrapped him. The developer refused. He even threatened detectives, flaunting his dangerous high-level contacts. But his seized devices were the key to opening the next door in the investigation. It was there that detectives found compromising messages that led to the secretary of Oleg Seyed Chernozov, a deputy prime minister. The detectives understood they were entering dangerous territory. The deputy prime minister wasn't just powerful, he was part of the president in a sanctum.

16:29A close friend. First Lady Olena Zelenska is even godmother to one of his children. Chernyshov was put under surveillance. And it was this, it seems, that led detectives to stumble across the existence of a secret money laundering office. The office that was running the money for the Energa Atom ruse. Don't worry. No, no, I'm not worried. Chernyashov features heavily in the Energa Atom tapes. He goes by the alias Che Guevara, a curious choice for the soft-faced, gangly, awkward-looking bureaucrat who has a predilection for expensive suits. Here he's speaking with Sugarman. Sugarman is the less playful pseudonym for businessman, Olegzandr Cukerman.

17:27Cukerman is discussing the best ways of directing funds to Chonishov. Look, this is the situation. Here I have$300 ,000. Here$200 ,000 and 96 ,500 euros, which is the equivalent of$100 ,000. Everything is now here. Yeah, I suggest we just distribute it into this. meaning count them not as the same but as. I withdrew this from the cash desk. You get it? I understand that. I appreciate that. There are no other sources for now. In time, detectives eventually worked out that Chornoshov was in charge of funding the development of four ostentatious villas in an elite district just to the south of Kiev.

18:23One of the four was owned by Churnashev himself. The others? I'll come back to that. As for Kubrikov, the original whistleblower, once whispers spread of what he'd done, his luck in government began to run out. On 9th May 2024, Ukraine's parliament, under the instruction of the president's office, voted to dismiss him. But there was no putting this particular genie back. Detectives at Naboo and Sapo already understood the scale of what was to come.

19:07Oleksandr Klimenko is the head of that second branch of Ukraine's anti-corruption infrastructure, Sapo, the prosecution's body. His job was to make sure there was enough evidence to prosecute. and he was part of the investigation from the get-go. From an operational sources, we received an information that within one of the energy companies of Ukraine, there existed a so-called back office in Kiev. And we started verifying that information. Klimenko is an understated guy, a career detective. He's known for being calm and focused.

19:50I was the only one at SAPO who knew about this operation from the very beginning. At the final stage, another prosecutor was involved. I didn't dare involve anyone else yet in the development of the Midas operation. The circle was kept tight. At the start, just a couple of people, then half a dozen.

20:12We didn't even dare to use the phone bags of the suspects, since we could only do that through the security service of Ukraine and that leads to information leaks. So without the wiretapping fonts, that means we had to use no methods from the 50s and 60s. First, we would locate someone, then we would need to plant a bug physically where they are. So we carried out a case this complex without any 21st century technology. Someone with knowledge of the investigation explained to me that planting the bugs usually required cooperation from people on the inside. The source said it's not that much different from spycraft in the sense that they are usually using three main ways of getting cooperation.

20:57One is to blackmail with compromising material. The second, to pay cash. The third is to get people on board ideologically. The last method is best, the source said. Likely, they tried all three. Many people identify Kilimenko as one of the main engines of the probe, constantly pushing it forward. His part is another one of those improbable moments. He won the competition to head Sapporo in late 2021, but vested interests did everything to block that appointment. It was only half a year later, and with the West threatening to withhold funding at a key stage in the war, that the system relented.

21:44For his detractors, Klimenko is trouble, a man who doesn't take the hints. He certainly made a lot of enemies of those in power since he took the job. Not only Chernyshev, another man, codename Carlson, would certainly be on that list too. Carlson, also known as Timur Mindich, is a longtime friend of the president, and the co-founder of Quartal 95, the media company that predated Zelensky's move into politics. A mogul, TV producer, and a Machiavellian operator behind the scenes, Mindich's influence extended across the world of politics and business. He's been accused of being the co-organiser of the syndicate behind the Enedgar Atom ruse.

22:36And if you're wondering how he spent some of his ill-gotten gains, well, photographs showed some clues, with one showing a golden toilet bowl in one of his apartments. The tapes contained plenty worse. At one point, money guy Shugroman complains of back pain from lugging all the millions of dollars to laundry points around Kiev.

23:04And how did you carry the box? To him? What the issue, just carry it. No, I mean the guy who brought it to you. What did he give you to, Ian? The box had a handle, like how a laptop is packaged. That's it. I packaged it later for **** because I took the million out. Then it's the same box, gave back 1.6. But yeah, carrying around 1.6 million isn't exactly pleasant. Extraordinary cynicism, when viewed by ordinary Ukrainians entering their fourth winter of war, many in cold and dark apartments, some in even grimmer trenches. The greatest test of the detective's creativity came when the criminals caught wind of their efforts.

24:01Fuck, I want to see the expert who will be decoding this in future. I'm the one checking all of it myself. Why are you doing this? What are you being so active about? Well, I wrote down some questions or whatever. they might be able to answer some of them. I'm telling you, they've decoded everything. All those codes. Leave it here. No, look, listen. We already talked about this. If there's a rat among us. Yeah, but even those rats don't know your codes. And this is my water. Drink your own, for God's sake.

24:46They started taking measures to cover their tracks. They began deleting and destroying some documents. The day before the surge, we know that one of the offices where the laundering of funds took place conducted a thorough cleaning and began wiping fingerprints to make it impossible to establish criminal responsibility. Over at Sapo, Klimenko learned that the criminal network had gained access to secret government's CCTV feeds. The tables had turned. Now they were able to spy on the detectives from afar.

25:23There was a conscious surveillance. During searches of their offices, we found materials showing that operatives more or less understood which unit might be investigating them. They collected reports, had photographs of a monobo vehicle moving around Kiev. So they were doing some digging too. And now that our operation had been made public, we will investigate who in the service was helping them. In the tapes, Timur Minnic, the man with the golden toilet, is heard telling a junior operative that work on Cernesha's villa estate would have to stop while the detectives were sniffing around. freeze it for the winter for a year

26:09oh for god's sake fuck i put my whole damn soul into that place just fucked up just to freeze it and leave what a nightmare we just can't you understand it's a nightmare for me and not for me stupid fucker. If he gets exposed in that case, we are all fucked.

26:37Naboo made their first overt move in June 2025, charging the deputy prime minister Chernychev with abuse of power and accepting bribes of an especially large sum. This was a result of evidence that flowed from the first Naboo sting operation with whistleblower Kubrakov, not directly from the Energa Atom scheme. With law enforcement closing in on Othello Corruptionier, you might have expected the stealing to stop, but in a further sign of their audacity, it actually continued for several more months. There appears to have been an assumption that they would never be brought to account. They were very nearly right.