Former Odesa mayor Oleksiy Kostusyev, wanted by NABU, owns a hotel in Prague

Former Odesa mayor Oleksiy Kostusyev, wanted by NABU, owns a hotel in Prague

The former head of Odesa and former head of the AMCU, Oleksiy Kostusyev, together with his brother Heorhiy Kostusyev-Muromtsev, own a luxury hotel in the centre of Prague for €5.4 million.

The purchase took place in early 2014, several months after the former official resigned and left the country. Before leaving, Oleksiy Kostusyev filed a declaration, indicating that he had a little more than 100 thousand dollars in his bank accounts.

In June 2013, his brother bought the hotel through two companies - Baggy Group and Silenzia Prague. Both companies, as investigace.cz found out, have signs of being shell companies. Through these one-day firms, George paid the then owners of the Caruso, Italians Giuseppe Ampolini and Tarcisio Persegoni, 5.4 million euros. In January 2014, the two companies merged into one, Dušní, and six months later the Odesa brothers became the full owners of the hotel.

According to the declaration, as mayor of Odesa, Oleksiy Kostusyev earned $1,000 a month. The average salary of the head of the Antimonopoly Committee, where he worked before, was $2,500 per month. During his nine years of service at the Antimonopoly Committee and three years as mayor, Kostusyev could have earned about $300,000. A year before he bought the Caruso Hotel in Prague, the former official said he had just over $100,000 in his bank accounts. While still the mayor of Odesa, Oleksiy Kostusyev told a Ukrainian TV channel in an interview that he had become rich in Italy in the 1990s, doing maritime business there. However, the public register did not reveal any active or closed companies associated with ex-mayor Kostusyev.

The former Odesa mayor’s brother, Heorhiy Kostusyev-Muromtsev, a Russian citizen, was not a public figure but a businessman. He is currently considered the founder and director of two Odesa-based companies. Viola-Marine LLC, a marine crewing company, had no more than 10 employees between 2006 and 2017. And the authorised capital of another company, Telecom Service Plus LLC, whose main activity is the production of films and television programmes, is only UAH 500.