The Kyiv City Commercial Court has ruled to suspend the validity of special permit No. 5351 issued to Horizons LLC for the use of the subsoil of the Tyniv oil and gas field in the Lviv region. The ruling was adopted on August 16, 2024 and entered into force on the day of its adoption. This decision can be appealed within ten days.
Horizons LLC received this special permit at an online auction of the State Service of Geology and Subsoil of Ukraine in December 2021. The special permit granted the company the right to use the deposit in depth intervals from the surface to 400 meters and without depth restrictions. The court ruling suspends the company's activities until further consideration of the case.
The court's decision was made based on a lawsuit by another subsoil user, Naftogazrembud-1 LLC, which already has a special permit for the Tynivske field (No. 6562), issued in September 2021. Representatives of Naftogazrembud-1 claim that the new special permit for Horizons LLC overlaps the areas and depths allowed for development under their permit.
It should be noted that Horizons LLC is a partially owned company, 20% of whose shares belong to the father of the head of the Lviv Regional Military Administration (OVA). This raised questions about a potential conflict of interest. The main owner of Horizons LLC is Karel Komarek, who owns 80% of the company's shares.
Karel Komarek is known as a long-time partner of Russia's Gazprom. Despite the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Komarek did not stop cooperating with the main Russian gas company. Together with Gazprom, Komarek built a gas storage facility in the Czech Republic, which the Russians stopped using in full only after the 10th package of EU sanctions was implemented, which significantly reduced Gazprom's share in the joint project Moravia Gas Storage as from 50%+ to 3%. Komarek finally severed relations with Gazprom only in June 2024 under pressure from the British authorities.
Since 2011, Karel Komarek has also owned an oil and gas business in Russia, in particular, the Samara oil terminal. According to the SBU and the State Financial Monitoring Service, this terminal was involved in supplying oil products to the so-called “DPR” and “LPR” even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to a statement by Komarek’s company MND, the terminal was allegedly sold in the fall of 2022, but details of the deal have not yet been published.
