Scandalous details of the purchase of the online taxi service Uklon by the mobile operator Kyivstar have become known. To lower the price of Uklon on the market, Kyivstar commissioned a dirty media company, which was sold by Mykhailo Fedorov and David Arakhamia through the pro-government TG channel Joker.
According to our sources, negotiations on Kyivstar's purchase of the Uklon taxi service began in early 2024. The owners of Uklon set a sale price of $300 million, but Kyivstar was only willing to pay $200 million.
Information about the negotiations between Kyivstar and Uklon became known on the market, and later the Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov contacted Kyivstar and offered his services to "bend" Uklon on price.
It is worth noting that Kyivstar has been cooperating with Mykhailo Fedorov for a long time. In particular, the IT company Kyivstar.Tech has been a resident of Diya.City since 2022, and in 2023, Kyivstar, within the framework of the Memorandum with the Ministry of Digital Affairs, transferred 300 million hryvnias for the development of digital infrastructure.
At the same time, Mykhailo Fedorov is in personal contact with both the co-founder and CEO of VEON, Kaan Terzioglu, and the CEO of Kyivstar, Oleksandr Komarov.
PHOTO: Kyivstar has been cooperating with Mykhailo Fedorov for a long time
According to sources, the conditions were as follows: Mykhailo Fedorov asked Kyivstar for "help" in reducing the price of Uklon, $5 million for the project in total, plus 10% of each million of the price below $200. Fedorov involved the head of the Servants of the People faction in the Verkhovna Rada, David Arakhamia, the Joker TV channel, and a number of media resources controlled by the Ministry of Digital Economy in the project.
A dirty media campaign was launched against the Uklon taxi service on the instructions of Mikhail Fedorov , most of which was carried out through the Joker TV channel. The service was accused of various fabricated violations: from driving during curfew to not paying taxes and working with Russians.
During this period, on the Joker TG channel alone, the Uklon service was mentioned in a negative context more than three hundred times.
As a result of a dirty media attack on the Uklon service, the company's owners reduced the sale price of 97% of corporate rights to $155.2 million, and Mykhailo Fedorov and David Arakhamia received $9 million from Kyivstar.
