Serhii Stefurak has been an adviser to Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal on public events since March 2020. In the media, his person is associated with the return of the scandalous EDAPS (Unified State Automated Passport System) and accused of organizing corruption schemes that cost the warring country's budget billions of hryvnias.
Stefurak is from Rohatyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region. He got into the head of government's team thanks to family ties: his mother, Maria Savka, worked as the first deputy head of the Ivano-Frankivsk State Administration at the time when it was headed by Denys Shmyhal.
Before joining Shmyhal's team , Stefurak worked in Oleg Bakhmatyuk's agricultural holding "Ukrlandfarming", in particular, in the "Favorite" retail chain and on the supervisory boards of other related companies. Under Stefurak's management, the agro-tycoon's companies tried to circumvent tender rules for the supply of food products, for which they were fined by the Antimonopoly Committee.
Also, Serhii Stefurak, being the director of one of Bakhmatyuk's companies, sued the bankrupt bank of Bakhmatyuk himself, in order to obtain compensation for losses from the Deposit Guarantee Fund, which is clearly a fraud. Therefore, it is not surprising that our interlocutors in the Cabinet of Ministers call Stefurak "Oleg Bakhmatyuk's lobbyist" in the government of Denys Shmyhal.
In the context of Serhiy Stefurak's career in Denys Shmyhal's team, it is also worth mentioning Stefurak's connections with the now deceased Andrii Ivanchuk. Ivanchuk is known for representing the interests of the Russian Lukoil after the formal sale of its asset in the Ivano-Frankivsk region - the Karpatnaftokhim plant.
Andrii Ivanchuk was also related to the chain of Duty Free stores, which he owned together with his partner Artur Granets , owner of the Forbes publication. Granz is often credited with ties to Russians through the gambling business and an attempt to sell Forbes Ukraine to Russian Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev . We will remind that Serhii Stefurak, as an adviser to Denys Shmyhal on economic issues, has influence, including on fiscal and customs policy related to Duty Free activities.
It is also interesting that in the spring of last year Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and his closest advisor Serhiy Stefurak blocked the work of the Gambling and Lottery Regulation Commission (KRAIL) by deliberately not appointing the fourth member of the commission, which automatically led to the absence of a quorum and the impossibility of adopting solutions As a result, KRAIL could not revoke the licenses of companies that were related to the Russian Federation and were included in the sanctions list. As market participants note, this situation was beneficial to one of the beneficiaries of Vbet, Artur Granz.
In August 2023, a scandal broke out in the media due to Serhiy Stefurak's alleged lobbying for the return of corruption schemes of the mid-2000s related to the YEDAPS concern.
EDAPS is a monopolistic consortium of Yanukovych's time, through which all possible documents of the country were printed, starting with citizens' passports and ending with excise stamps. He naturally had a huge corruption component, actively working to replenish the black coffers of the "family" of the ex-president.
Today, EDAPS is called "Industrial Innovation Group", and its branch in Ukraine is "Polly-Service". "Industrial Innovation Group" presents itself as a new player on the market. But is it really?
The notorious co-owner of EDAPS Yuriy Sydorenko , who repeatedly hid from law enforcement officers of various countries and had a business in Moscow, officially left the company's structure in 2017. Instead, the owners became two old managers of EDAPS, a number of offshore companies and a citizen of the Arab Emirates, where the consortium "revived".
But already in 2018, one of the companies of this empire, patenting its next invention in the EU, named Sydorenko personally among the inventors. It should be noted that this information is currently deleted.
In addition, in 2021, in one of the customs declarations of the "Industrial Innovation Group" for the goods sent to Geneva, a person named "M Sidorenko" was indicated as the recipient. It could be the businessman's daughter Maria .
The company "Polly-Service", which supplies materials for all monopolized spheres, is presented to the public as a Ukrainian manufacturer.
That business empire, which includes this supposedly domestic producer of documents of critical importance for Ukraine, did not shy away from doing business with Russia after the invasion of Crimea and Donbas, shortly before the full-scale war. The latest agreements with companies from the Russian Federation, which have been preserved in the international import-export database ImportGenius , are dated December 2021.
According to journalists, pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk . And during Yanukovych's time, the consortium built a temple of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Emirates.
Starting from 2021 to 2023, with the participation of Serhiy Stefurak, Shmyhal's government made a number of decisions that allowed EDAPS to return to the market. In particular, the requirements for passports, driver's licenses, technical passports of Ukrainians have changed, a monopoly on the production of notary forms has been introduced, and the hologram on the excise stamp has been returned.
Materials for all these productions are currently supplied only by the above-mentioned company "Polly-Service", connected to the Russians and the former EDAPS. We will remind that only for 2021-2023, EDAPS received state contracts worth at least 2.3 billion hryvnias.
But Serhii Stefurak and Denys Shmyhal's return of Yanukovych-era corruption schemes for printing state documents, in the conditions of a full-scale invasion, in addition to significant corruption risks, also carries risks for Ukrainian statehood.
Law enforcement officers began to massively discover fake documents that are practically indistinguishable from the original ones. It is not difficult to guess that documents of this kind, in addition to criminality, are also interesting to the Russian special services. Therefore, the question of the return of EDAPS is not only about corruption, but also about state security.
