The Ukrainian oil and gas industry was rocked by a scandal in the summer when the Horizons company of Czech entrepreneur Karel Komarek and Ukrainian businessman Zinoviy Kozitsky started geological exploration in the Poltava region. Passions were aroused around Karel Komarek’s background related to his long-term cooperation with Gazprom and other Russian oil and gas companies. On the one hand , there were statements about the inadmissibility of allowing investors with such experience into Ukraine, while on the other hand, there was an information attack on law-abiding businesses. Karel Komarek’s Czech company MND denied any current ties with Russians. However, a new round of scandal arose after the publication of a column by the former head of the Luhansk Regional State Administration, Georgiy Tuka, in which he accused Komarek of having an active business in Russia – the Samara oil terminal. The day before, the Czech company said that it had sold the Samara terminal back in 2022. Therefore, Komersant ukrainskyi 
Why does it matter whether MND has a Russian trace?
After a number of accusations thatthe companies ofCzech entrepreneur Karel Komarek – MND and KKCG – co-operate with Gazprom structures, and after MND denied any ties with Russian companies, the editorial board started its own research into the assets of Komarek‘ s companies.
Now Komarek ‘ s Czech MND Ukraine a.s. in Ukraine owns 80% of Horizons LLC, which develops gas fields in Ukraine and pays taxes in partnership with Ukrainian businessman Zinoviy Kozitsky. He owns 20 per cent of the producing company.
The Association of Gas Producers of Ukraine stood up for Horizons LLC. It said that during the full-scale Russian invasion, the company invested more than UAH 1.5bn in the sector and paid more than UAH 2.4bn in taxes and fees to the state budget. Over the last ten years , the company has drilled 31 wells, conducted 3D and 2D seismic surveys over an area of 320 square kilometres and laid 87 kilometres of gas pipelines.
However, questions remain about the involvement of the main investor in business with the Russians. After all, the existence of actual ties obviously goes against the interests of the Ukrainian state. The timing of the breakdown of relations with the aggressor country is also no less important .
Who bought the Samara terminal in 2022?
We contacted MND’s Ukrainian office to find out “first-hand” what exactly happened to Mr Komarek’s assets in the Samara oil terminal, because of which he is under pressure from the media. Namely, what were the specifics of this deal with the Russians, and whether Mr Komarek’s companies really no longer do business with Russia’s Gazprom.
The data from the Russian registers do not answer these questions. According to them, until 5 October 2022, the terminal was owned by the Dutch offshore company MND Samara Holding B.V., and then by the Dutch company Fratron Invest B.V., also registered at the same address.
Even more questions arise after examining the Czech and Dutch registers. In particular, according to the latter, at least until 2018 Fratron Invest B.V. was called KKCG Director 1 B. V. and its director was Karel Komarek. And the company was headed by managers of Komarek’s parent holding KKCG Pavel Schwarz, Pavel Sarosz and Alena Bastis. In September 2022, they were dismissed and the company was renamed Fratron B.V. Dutch registry aggregator sites do not provide any more data.
In the spring of the same 2022 , Fratron Invest s.r.o was established in the Czech Republic, headed by KKCG manager Pavel Schwarz.
Official earlier comments from MND (a subsidiary of KKCG, which manages Komarek’s oil and gas assets) explain little.
“The terminal was sold in 2022 in a transparent way. Furthermore, the Samara terminal has not been fully operational, let alone considered a strategic asset,” MND said in a statement.
There is no information about the sale of the terminal in open sources. As well as informationon the preparation for the sale, on the transaction itself, on the buyer, price, lending banks, etc.
At the time of publication of the above material, MND had not yet responded to Komersant ukrainskyi .
Sources close to the Czech side note that the Dutch company owning the terminal was sold in autumn 2022 to the Czech company Fratron invest s.r.o., which renamed MND Samara Holding B.V. to Fratron Invest B.V. This is what MND explains by the fact that the previous and current owners of the terminal are registered at the same address in the Netherlands. In its turn, MND refers to the Czech Fratron invest s.r.o. as the owner of the terminal’s “management”, insisting that the terminal was “sold to Schwarz”.
According to the Czech registry, Fratron Invest s.r.o. was established in April 2022. And its founder was Pavel Schwarz, at the time of the company’s creation – the current director of strategic projects of Karel Komarek’s main holding KKCG. Important: at the time of the terminal purchase deal in September 2022, it was Schwarz who was the owner of the acquiring company.
Based on this data and the data of the Czech State Register, it turns out that the terminal was bought in September 2022 by Karel Komarek’s manager Švarc. More precisely, his former manager. And for this purpose, apparently, a whole special operation was carried out. A few months before the transaction (in April 2022) , Schwarz registered a Czech company to which the asset would later be registered (Fratron Invest s.r.o.), and almost immediately afterwards, for some reason, he resigned from Komarek’s holding (May 2022), where he had worked since 2009.
The above chronology raises many questions, but sources close to the Czech side refused to name the price of the deal and other details. Mr Schwarz, to whom the editorial board also sent an enquiry, also declined to comment. No response was received.
Russian media, meanwhile, point out that Pavel Shvarts “has indeed been CEO of Itera-Samara since 2011”. This is also confirmed by an entry in Shvarts ‘ Linkedin account, which states that he “managed the Russian branch”, but the period of such work is listed as “2011-2016”.
These data are also confirmed in Russian registers. According to which Shvarts left the post of general director of MND Samara in the summer of 2016. He was replaced by Czech Novak Libor, and in the summer of 2019 Libor was replaced by Svetlana Migunova. This change took place when Komarek’s ownership of the asset was unqualified, so Migunova, as a representative of Komarek’s management, should have been changed after the sale of the terminal in autumn 2022. However, according to the Russian register, Migunova did not leave her position until a year later, in November 2023. Thus, it was at the time of the asset sale that the CEO of the terminal did not change.
Therefore, the question of the authenticity/fictitiousness of the transaction, as well as the ability/inability of the terminal’s CEO (whoever he/she is) to buy such an asset, the cost of which was estimated by analysts at $100 million , and finally the expediency of this acquisition by the Czech top manager against the background of the intensification of the sanctions process – remain unanswered.
What is known about the asset in general?
Karel Komarek has been looking for opportunities to gain access to the Russian oil production market since the mid-2000s. It is known from open sources that in early 2011 Komarek obtained ownership (details of the deal are unknown) of an oil terminal in the Samara region. The then existing LLC was renamed MND Samara (current name of LLC Oil Terminal Samara). The core business is transshipment of crude oil and oil products. The 18-hectare oil depot is located on the right bank of the Volga River in the town of Oktyabrsk, not far from Syzran. Design and reconstruction of the oil depot was carried out as soon as possible. The design capacity of the oil receiving, storage and loading complex of MND Samara LLC is up to 5 million tonnes per year. Including 3 million tonnes of oil per year by rail and 2 million tonnes per year by river transport. The complex is located at the intersection of railway and waterways, which allows access to the Caspian and Black Seas.
The oil complex was built by the ITERA energy group, which in particular operated the Druzhba oil pipeline . In the 2010s, it was losing market positions and as a result its assets were absorbed by Gazprom and Rosneft. It is possible that it was in co-operation with Gazprom that Komarek managed to obtain ownership of this facility. Also, MND’s partnership with the Russian Continental Hockey League can probably be explained by obtaining ownership of the asset in the Russian Federation.
The main question is: who owns the asset now?
The fate of the Czech Fratron invest s.r.o., to which its Dutch namesake-owner of the terminal is credited, is no less mysterious. Pavel Schwarz owned it for more than a year, and on 9 October 2023 a certain resident of Spain “Andrei Viktorovich Gordeev” became the new owner . MND never explained who this person was.
The light on this question could have been shed by the mentioned Pavel Schwartz, but, to repeat, he did not respond to the enquiry. Nor does Google know who “Andrei Viktorovich Gordeev” is. There is no information about him in open sources. Therefore, Mr Gordeev is most likely a nominal director of the company that now owns the oil terminal in Samara. Whose interests he represents, Czechs or Russians, remains unknown.
MND denies that it has ties with the Russian Federation
MND said in an official statement that “MND and its shareholder Karel Komarek have no business or other ties with Russia” and that “the gas storage facility was built together with the Russian gas giant at a time when the entire European energy sector co-operated with Gazprom”.
Such statements look somewhat dubious, given the numerous publications in Russian and Czech media that it was Karel Komarek who initiated co-operation with the Russians in the late 2000s. MND had an office in Moscow, and the then head of the company, Larisa Taborová, provided commentary for the Russian press.
MND spokesman Dan Polivayko talked about a memorandum to build a refinery that would process 3.5 million tonnes of oil and 3 billion cubic metres of natural gas in the Middle Urals, which was comparable to “the largest oil and gas refinery in the Czech Republic”. The same Pavel Schwarz in 2011 announced MND’s investment of $700 million in a Russian refinery.
However, Komarek’s key joint project with the Russians was Moravia Gas Storage (MGS), a company equally owned by Gazprom and MND, which built a gas storage facility in the Czech town of Damborzyce (Damborice), according to various estimates, worth about half a billion dollars. Russian media referred to the UGS as one of the largest Russian investments in the Czech Republic.
Cooperation with Gazprom after 24 February 2022
The main claim to Karel Komarek by Ukrainian and British (the Czech billionaire develops lottery business in this country) media was that cooperation with Gazprom was not terminated after 24 February 2022.
“Karel Komarek’s business empire was linked to Kremlin-backed Gazprom until last month, despite promises from the UK government that he would sever ties with the company,” The Telegraph wrote, among others, on 9 November 2023.
The remaining Gazprom shares were not finally bought back until June 2024.
In July, MND said it became the sole shareholder of the Damborice underground storage facility in the Czech Republic in 2024.
“The gas storage facility was built together with the Russian gas giant at a time when the entire European energy sector was co-operating with Gazprom.” After the outbreak of the war, MND took all necessary measures to retain ownership of this asset without Gazprom, and this year MND became the sole shareholder of the gas storage facility, which is confirmed by an extract from the Czech registry and other official documents,” the company said.
However, why MND denies that its co-operation with Gazprom was of strategic nature and continued for a long time (in fact – until June 2024) after the Russian full-scale invasion is unclear.
Reputable media outlets, in particular Radio Liberty and the Financial Times , have noted the depth of Komarek’s ties with Gazprom and attributed the flourishing of his business empire to it. In turn, The Guardian pointed out that Komarek’s lottery business in the Czech Republic and the UK was financed by Russian state-owned banks VTB and Sberbank (in particular, these banks were part of the consortium that provided Komarek’s lottery company SAZKA with a €640m loan in 2020).
Now the Czech gas storage facility is operated by Karel Komarek’s company Moravia Gas Storage (MGS). As it claims – already without Gazprom.
When Russian managers finally left the company’s management bodies
According to the Czech state register, four Russian top managers (Sergei Trigub, Alexei Miroshnichenko, Andrei Borisov, Andrei Krutko) were dismissed only on 22 March 2024.
Interestingly, at the same time, Dietlif Weidemann, former head of GAZPROM Germania GmbH, who moved to Moravia Gas Storage from Gazprom’s German subsidiary in 2018, was successfully re-elected on 1 March. It is known that the quotas on the board of directors of the joint company were equally divided. Whose quota – Russian or Czech – was represented by the almost ex-head of GAZPROM Germania, who ran this company for almost 10 years, the question is rhetorical.
Why the SBU accused MND of financing terrorism
Recall that Mr Komarek and his asset in Ukraine LLC “Horizons” have already been the object of attention of law enforcers before.
In 2018, the State Agency for State Geo-enforcement of Ukraine rejected the applications of Horizons LLC to participate in auctions for special permits for the development of gas condensate fields. At that time it was about the Lipovetska and Chernitska areas in Lviv region. The company was suspected of financing terrorism in the LPR and DNR on the basis of letters from the State Financial Monitoring Service and the Security Service of Ukraine.
The letter from the Security Service said at the time that “one of the main markets for MND Group NV and KKCG SE activities in recent years is the Russian Federation”.
The SBU believed that MND Russia at the time was the owner of a number of complexes designed to receive, store, spill oil products, and the owner of a number of large enterprises engaged in gas and oil production, in particular Belisar LLC, Itera Holding LLC, Saratovneftedobycha JSC, MND Samara LLC and others.
The SBU informed Gosgeonedra that these assets fulfil the function of sustainable functioning of the oil and gas system on the territory of the Russian Federation, “including near the part of the state border of Ukraine, which is temporarily not under the control of the Ukrainian authorities, and on which the so-called DNR and LNR operate”.
However, the Czechs then managed to defend themselves against these accusations in Ukrainian courts and continue their work. Recently, in response to a media enquiry about the continuation of work in Ukraine of companies owned by Karel Komarek, the SBU replied that this information would be taken into account “in the official activities of SBU units” and that since the beginning of the war on the initiative of the agency “sanctions have been imposed on more than 12 thousand individuals and legal entities that directly finance the military invasion, help the aggressor state to purchase materials, military equipment and weapons components in other countries”.
Whether this means that sanctions measures may also be applied to Karel Komarek’s assets remains unknown.
The current owners of the Russian oil terminal are also unknown. From the information obtained during the research of the topic, it follows that managers and structures close to Karel Komarek controlled the asset through the Czech Fratron Invest s.r.o. for at least a year after the official sale of the asset, while the current “owner” of this company is a complete no-name, which in no way corresponds to the definition of “transparent sale”. The company’s official comments are general and somewhat inconsistent with the registers. Ukrainian law enforcers also do not provide substantive comments on MND’s activities in Ukraine.
We will have to watch the development of the situation further. After all, we are talking about really strategic gas reserves of Ukraine, which should be used precisely in the interests of the Ukrainian state.
The editorial board is ready to publish the positions of all the parties mentioned in the text and will supplement the material if we receive responses to earlier requests.