Anyone who, say, walked into an Apple store and took a new iPhone or any other merchandise without paying for it would be accused of stealing.
But if an exiled billionaire oligarch takes $326 million worth of gas without paying for it, state officials euphemistically call it “unauthorized offtake” and claim they can’t do a thing to stop it.
Such is the absurdity now playing out between the state Gas Transmission System Operator (GTSO) and Dmytro Firtash. The Ukrainian, who many believe to be a Kremlin agent, has co-opted the Austrian judicial system for years now, avoiding extradition to the United States, where he faces criminal bribery charges that he denies.
The GTSO was spun off from the state-owned oil and gas company Naftogaz, which had troubles of its own collecting bad debts of $3.6 billion for gas supplied but not purchased by customers such as Firtash.
Not only that, Firtash, for inexplicable reasons, faces no criminal charges or civil lawsuits in Ukraine for anything. His business empire remains intact, decades after first enriching himself through the needless Russian-Ukrainian gas intermediary known as RosUkrEnergo.
It is ridiculous to say, as GTSO officials insist and Naftogaz did before them, that nothing can be done. The state can seize his bank accounts, remove licenses and resell Firtash’s gas distribution franchise to other investors. The fact that the state does nothing shows inexplicable political surrender to Firtash at the expense of Ukrainians.
These and other moves show that Ukraine is re-oligarchizing, not de-oligarchizing. This year, GTSO says, Firtash started to ramp up his “unauthorized offtake” of natural gas from the transmission company, roughly coinciding with the government’s decision to regulate prices at 30% below the market. The regulation was defended so that Firtash couldn’t use his monopoly position to gouge customers.
Olga Bielkova, the former member of parliament who now works for the GTSO, says the solution is a draft law introduced in parliament that would allow the state company to recoup money from deadbeats like Firtash by creating special accounts that collect utility payments directly from customers and transfer them to the GTSO.
Bielkova says the state has exhausted all legal remedies, the courts can’t force payments, and the national energy regulator doesn’t have the legal powers to impose sufficient fines.
As for why they just don’t call it what it is — stealing — Bielkova said: “That is not how it is being treated by the criminal code and the gas code.” She said the company simply is powerless.
Also unanswered also is why a person like Firtash is allowed to amass a dominant position over such vital infrastructure.
Can anybody governing this nation please wake up?
So there we have it. Yet another in an endless number of examples of how oligarchs, double-speak bureaucrats, and a nation with too many politicians on the take keep bankrupting Ukraine.
