Khmelnytskyi multimillionaire MP Kizlyar with a ’painted’ crypto: how imperfect legislation helps to legalise wealth

Rolex watches, Hermes bags and cryptocurrency worth about 10 million. All this wealth was shown by the deputy of the Khmelnytsky district council, Oleksandr Kizlyar.

One would think that he is one of the new wave of financial geniuses who managed to get rich in cryptocurrencies by investing in the newfangled phenomenon in time. But the nuances of his declaration indicate that “the king may find himself naked.”

Oleksandr Kizlyar was born in 1992 to a military man and a nurse. Information about this is contained in a number of promotional materials that began to appear in the media with enviable regularity. "Focus, TSN, and Interfax-Ukraine published articles about Kizlyar’s "financial genius" in early 2022, a month apart. They described how the MP was involved in charity work, helping Khmelnytskyi develop and feeding the homeless. It was also reported that almost everyone in the city knows about Kizlyar, and only good things.

The registers show that Oleksandr Kizlyar owns a number of companies involved in the restaurant business, construction and fuel trading. It is also important to note that he is a full namesake of his father, who is also Oleksandr Oleksandrovych Kizlyar. So they share this business between them.

In one of his interviews, Kizlyar Sr. said that he started his business in the 90s when he left the military. At first, he traded in the market, later he had the funds to open the Mriya restaurant, and then he developed into the construction business. According to him, he ran the business with his brothers Oleh and Valentyn.

His son, who now declares incredible wealth, is primarily known for creating a chain of pizzerias from the Mriya restaurant. Now there are five in Khmelnytskyi.

And in 2012, according to the declaration of Kizlyar Jr., he and his future wife purchased 100 bitcoins between them. Kizlyar notes that he bought them from a service provider related to the circulation of cryptocurrency - Trust Wallet. But this cannot be true, since according to open information Trust Wallet was registered only in 2017.

As a cryptocurrency market expert told our journalist, in fact, in 2012, only people close to the IT sphere were interested in Bitcoin. There were few such people in Ukraine. “ Bitcoin only appeared in 2009. And at first it was impossible to buy it at all, except perhaps to buy it. In 2012, only a real expert could buy Bitcoin, and even in such quantities as the deputy in question. It’s extremely difficult to believe that the owner of a pizzeria suddenly decides to invest money in a business about which nothing was clear at all, ” the expert notes.

According to him, it is possible to check whether the cryptocurrency in Oleksandr Kizlyar’s declaration is real or fake by using the wallet identifier. This information can be requested by an inspection body such as the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption. But so far, such checks are rarely carried out, so non-existent coins may be added to the declaration to legalise the proceeds of crime. "You can always say that I drive a Rolls-Royce and buy Hermes handbags for my wife with the money I earn on the crypto exchange. No one actually checks this, as the cryptocurrency market in Ukraine is still not fully regulated," the expert adds.

In 2023, a Kyiv court brought the former Deputy Minister of Infrastructure to administrative responsibility for false declaration. The court made this decision because the former official was unable to provide the identifier of the cryptocurrency wallet for authentication. According to the court, this indicates the lack of proper evidence of the fact of acquiring bitcoins. However, the funny thing is that the fine for false information in the declaration for this official was only UAH 17,000.

Oleksandr Kizlyar has been declaring his bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies since 2019. Not once have the inspection authorities been interested in whether he really has them.

From the social networks of Kizlyar’s wife Valentyna, you can find out that she got married in 2017. Moreover, they started dating in the same year, as evidenced by one of the woman’s messages.

However, in his declaration, Oleksandr Kizlyar states that both he and Valentyna bought bitcoins in 2012. Back when they hadn’t even met each other. So, it turns out that not only was MP Kizlyar financially savvy enough to buy cryptocurrency 12 years ago, but so was his current wife, who works as a lawyer and has an online store selling home diffusers.

It was not only bitcoin that Oleksandr Kizlyar should have remembered in 2012. In May of that year, the then-mayor of Khmelnytskyi, Serhiy Melnyk, publicly accused Kizlyar of hiding a slot machine hall under the guise of his Mriya café. However, we are talking about Kizlyar senior, who was a member of the Khmelnytskyi City Council.

At the time, Kizlyar made the excuse that his cafe was allegedly located in the basement, and he was not aware of what was going on upstairs. But as it turned out, based on a certificate of ownership dated 14.05.2010, the premises with an area of 663.3 sq m are fully owned by Oleksandr Kizlyar. So he actually voluntarily sheltered the illegal gamblers and their "one-armed bandits".

Gambling was banned in Ukraine from 2009 to 2020. Nevertheless, no matter how hard law enforcement officers fought against gambling halls, this business managed to bring considerable money into the pockets of "dealers". Given that Kizlyar dates his wealth, including bitcoins, from 2012, comparing this information with the family’s public accusation of covering up the gambling business in Khmelnytskyi, conclusions are self-evident.

Oleksandr Kizlyar’s declaration also reveals that his wife Valentyna became the owner of Rolex and Audemars Piguet watches in 2014. In 2014 and 2015, she also allegedly bought three Hermes handbags. It is worth noting that Hermes Birkin and Hermes Kelly bags are among the most expensive in the world. Since at the time of these years, Valentyna and Oleksandr Kizlyar were not only not man and woman, but had not met at all, the MP obviously wants to say that these expensive items were purchased by her at her own expense.

Valentyna Kizlyar, let us remind you, works as a lawyer in a law firm. Her official income from this work in 2022 was only 20,700 hryvnia, which is not enough even for the clasp of such a bag.

The social networks of the deputy’s wife reveal another interesting detail. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Oleksandr Kizlyar has traveled abroad at least once. The Kizlyar family celebrated New Year 2023 in Dubai. Photos of the deputy’s wife on Instagram indicate that they were in the UAE from November 2022 to the end of January 2023.

The deputy’s Instagram also contains photographs from the United Arab Emirates, dated May 2023. On what grounds Oleksandr Kizlyar, a deputy of military age, was able to leave Ukraine remains a mystery.

In March of this year, Oleksandr Kizlyar published a photo in which he is driving a Porshe car, which, however, is not in his declaration.

A few weeks ago, his wife posed with another Hermes handbag, by this time blue.

All these purchases cost more than tens of thousands of dollars. Whether they will appear in the new financial statements of the Khmelnytskyi deputy, one can only guess.

In 2016, MP Serhiy Melnychuk declared a trillion hryvnia. Then he explained this by saying that he wanted to show the imperfection of the declaration system, which allows one to draw any amount for the future legalization of income. 8 years have passed and it seems that a similar situation is repeating itself. It’s just that now there is a fashion for declaring a non-existent cryptocurrency, which will help justify a luxurious life. Whether Khmelnytskyi MP Oleksandr Kizlyar did exactly this will only be known after an inspection by the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption.

Author: Olena Dobrodiy