Petro Poroshenko

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Petro Poroshenko (2017) Signature of Petro Poroshenko
Cyrillic ( Ukrainian )
Петро Олексійович Порошенко
Transl. : Petro Oleksijovyč Porošenko
Transcr. : Petro Oleksijowytsch Poroshenko
Cyrillic ( Russian )
Пётр Алексеевич Порошенко
Transl .: Pëtr Alekseevič Porošenko
Transcr .: Pyotr Alexeyevich Poroshenko

Petro Oleksijowytsch Poroshenko (born September 26, 1965 in Bolhrad , Odessa Oblast , Ukrainian SSR ) is a Ukrainian entrepreneur and politician and was President of Ukraine from June 7, 2014 to May 20, 2019 .

Poroshenko became a billionaire as the owner of the Ukrprominvest group of companies, which includes stakes in car and shipbuilding, chocolate and armaments, and television broadcasting. In 2013, the business magazine Forbes listed him as the seventh Ukrainian oligarch with an estimated fortune of 1.6 billion US dollars ; In 2005, the Polish news magazine Wprost had estimated his fortune at around 350 million US dollars. Because of his business in the field of chocolate production, he is also called the chocolate oligarch.

Poroshenko is a member of the Bloc Petro Poroshenko party named after him , which emerged in August 2014 from the Solidarnost party he founded in 2001 . From 2002 he was mainly involved in the bloc Our Ukraine , which was dissolved in 2012 . He held various government offices; From February to September 2005 he was chairman of the “ National Security and Defense Council ”, from February 2007 to March 2012 he was the central bank supervisory board and director of the National Bank of Ukraine and in 2009/10 foreign minister . In 2012 he was Minister of Economic Affairs for several months , but then developed into a critic of President Yanukovych .

On May 25, 2014, he won the 2014 presidential election in Ukraine in the first ballot. On April 21, 2019, he lost in the second round of the 2019 presidential election with the worst election result ever received by a candidate in the runoff election, against the political career changer Volodymyr Zelenskyj .

Origin and education

Poroshenko is the son of the mechanical engineer and later factory director Oleksij Poroshenko ( Олексій Іванович Порошенко ) from Odessa Oblast . He grew up in Bender ( Transnistria , then Moldavian SSR ) , among others . From 1982 to 1985 he studied at the Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev and from 1986 to 1989 at the Faculty of International Relations and International Law with a degree in international economics. From 1984 to 1986 he did his military service in the Soviet armed forces. He was sent to the army in Kazakhstan as punishment for a fight with four ensigns in the military commissariat.

After graduating, Poroshenko worked as an aspirant at the Chair of Economic Relations at the Institute for International Relations and International Law at the Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev. He published his doctoral thesis in 2002 at the Odessa National Legal Academy under the title "The legal regulation of the administration of state company rights in Ukraine" (in the original Правове регулювання управління державними корпорамам корпорам внима Унарам корнарвними Унарам корнарвними корпорам вними пирнвними пирам вними корпоративними .

Career as an entrepreneur

Roshen chocolate from Po roshen ko

Poroshenko laid the foundation for his economic rise in the upheaval of the 1990s. - According to his own statements, he traded cocoa beans , then he acquired several confectionery factories , which he merged in 1996 to form the Roshen concern (a word created from Po roshen ko's surname). In 2013 Roshen produced 450,000 tons of confectionery according to its own information and generated over 40 percent of its sales in Russia and the CIS countries . The confectionery manufacturer Roshen helped Poroshenko to get his nickname “Chocolate King” or “Sugar Baron”.

UA G-40 grenade launcher from Poroshenko's arms production Leninska Kuznya (Ukrprominvest)

He was deputy director in the Association of Small Entrepreneurs and Enterprises "Respublika" ; since 1991 general director of the stock corporation Börsenhaus "Ukraina" , before he - " together with his father and others " - founded the Kiev-based closed stock corporation Ukrprominvest (ukr. Група «Укрпромінвест» ), an investment company operating - meanwhile also out of Panama - and conglomerate , which includes the shipbuilding and armaments company Leninska Kuznya , beet, grain and seed trading company , over 100,000 hectares of land, automobile company, one of the largest taxi companies in Kiev, shares in an insurance company. Poroshenko was general director there until 1998. Poroshenko's father, Oleksij Poroshenko , is the managing director of Ukrprominvest and runs the family business. Through its shares in the holding company Ukrprominvest, Poroshenko also controls a media group with TV and radio stations, including the TV station Kanal 5 (5.ua) and the news magazines Bigmir.net and Korrespondent.net . The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatović , made the announcement that he wanted to keep his TV broadcaster Kanal 5 after the election as president : “This is not a good thing. As president, Poroshenko has to sell the TV channel “criticized.

Poroshenko announced in an interview with Bild newspaper at the beginning of April 2014 that if he won the presidential election in Ukraine in 2014 , he would sell the Roshen group . In fact, Nestlé appeared to be interested in a billion dollars worth $ 3 billion. The idea of ​​a “blind trust” was launched due to its difficult marketability, but in April 2016 the existence and independence of which was not ensured.

In the 2014 election campaign, Poroshenko promised the citizens that if he won the election he would sell his companies and only serve the good of the country. After that, however, Poroshenko did not keep the promise. Poroshenko gave reasons for this: the war had caused the economy to shrink significantly, no one had the money for large investments and foreign buyers feared the risk and he did not want to sell his companies below their value.

With the publication of the Panama Papers , it became known that on August 21, 2014, two months after his election, Poroshenko had acquired the mailbox company Prime Asset Partners Ltd. was founded in the British Virgin Islands as a "holding company for Cypriot and Ukrainian companies of the Roshen Group" with him as the sole shareholder. This founded CEE Confectionery Investments Ltd. , a mailbox company in Cyprus , which in turn founded Roshen Europe BV in the Netherlands . Poroshenko justified the company structure with the fact that he wanted to separate his business from political interests and defended the procedure with the fact that the offshore holding was used to transfer his assets to a trust. The tax authorities always knew about the assets parked in the companies. Poroshenko had launched the idea of ​​a " blind trust " for the confectionery group Roshen and on April 7th the "Treuhandgesellschaft Rothschild Trust" of the bank Rothschild & Co. confirmed that since January 2016 it has been running the confectionery group Roshen for Poroshenko in a "blind trust" - the term is linked to Poroshenko's presidential term of office. The investigative journalists from Hromadske TV concluded that Poroshenko created the sophisticated financial structures to avoid having to pay taxes to the Ukrainian state. The experts from the anti-corruption organization Transparency International pointed out that there was a violation of the law, because Poroshenko should have published certain information. The Ukrainian public prosecutor's office stated that no offense was yet seen.

The Panama Papers show that Poroshenko, in connection with the offshore company Intraco Management Ltd. , another company in the British Virgin Islands. The company was founded in 2002, and the Ukrainian media reported back in 2015 that MP Ihor Kononenko (deputy chairman of the party of the President , businessman and close confidante of Poroshenko) had connections with this company. Through the company, money flowed to Kononenko's daughter Daria Kononenko and Poroshenko's private jet was paid for. Intraco will also do business with the Russian gas company Gazprom . Who owned the Intraco was also in the dark in the Panama Papers.

Petro Poroshenko Foundation

Poroshenko is the head of the Petro Poroshenko Foundation , which he founded and is associated with the European Policy Center (EPC) think tank . This foundation is chaired by his wife.

Political career

Party offices

From October 1998 to February 2002 Poroshenko was a member of the Politburo of the " United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine ". From July to November 2000, Poroshenko was chairman of the Solidarnost parliamentary group (“Solidarity”), then vice-chairman of the Labor Solidarity Party of Ukraine . In 2000, Poroshenko founded the Solidarnost faction, which he merged with four other parties to a new party that same year - this was registered as the Party of Regions in March 2001 and Poroshenko was elected deputy chairman Mykola Azarov . Shortly afterwards, however, he resigned and founded Solidarnost as a new party.

After a long period of independent inactivity of the party, which he had originally founded primarily in order to be able to participate in the party alliance Block Our Ukraine , which was dissolved in 2012 , and the automatic dissolution of Solidarnost in December 2013, Poroshenko took over a small party as chairman in 2014. He converted this into the successor party, again called Solidarnost, whereby it was renamed the Petro Poroshenko (BPP) block after him in August 2014 as a result of the successful cooperation with Vitali Klitschko's UDAR . In August of the following year, the UDAR was absorbed into the BPP and Klitschko became the new chairman.

MP

Petro Poroshenko at the Munich Security Conference in 2010.

The regional stronghold of Poroshenko is the city of Vinnytsia in western central Ukraine. At the age of 32, he was first elected to parliament, the Verkhovna Rada , through his constituency in Vinnytsia Oblast in March 1998 . As an economics specialist, he worked on the committees for securities, fund and investment markets. He joined the faction of the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, which supported then-President Leonid Kuchma , and became a member of the political council of that party.

In the fourth electoral term of the Verkhovna Rada from 2002 to 2006, Poroshenko was again a member of parliament. He belonged to the Our Ukraine faction , which supported the future President Viktor Yushchenko . Poroshenko was temporarily chairman of the budget committee and a member of the National Bank Council . In addition to Yulia Tymoshenko , he was one of the candidates for the office of Prime Minister after Viktor Yushchenko's 2005 election victory .

Government offices

From his position as chairman of the National Security and Defense Council , which Poroshenko took over after Yushchenko took office as president, he resigned in September 2005 shortly before the dismissal of the Tymoshenko cabinet . Conflicts with the government and allegations of corruption were named as causes.

On October 9, 2009, Poroshenko was elected Ukraine's new foreign minister, a post he held until March 2010. From March to December 2012 he was a member of Mykola Azarov's cabinet as Minister of Economic Affairs under President Yanukovych . During this time, but also in his role as an entrepreneur, he pushed negotiations with the EU and strived for extensive liberalization of the economy.

Euromaidan protests

Munich Security Conference 2014 - Petro Poroshenko and the US Foreign Minister John Kerry shake hands, Vitali Klitschko on the left and Arsenij Yatsenjuk on the right .

In the parliamentary elections in 2012 , Poroshenko in Vinnytsia Oblast won a mandate for the Verkhovna Rada again as an independent candidate. Since 2013, his television station 5 Kanal has been reporting increasingly critical of the policies of the Yanukovych government and supported the demands of the Euromaidan .

On December 20, 2013, Poroshenko denied legitimacy to the Ukrainian government if it signed agreements that conflict with the interests of two-thirds of Ukrainians. Ukraine needs "the experience of the EU" and a "determined attitude of the political forces" to implement reforms. Some of these reforms, including economic reforms, would be unpopular. He also spoke out in favor of a joint opposition candidate against President Yanukovych in the upcoming presidential election. When asked if he saw himself as the future President of Ukraine, he said: "Poroshenko can do a lot." Poroshenko was a founding member of the Maidan Council , an association of several political parties, non-party people and public organizations of the Euromaidan protests the goal of "establishing a new Ukraine and a new Ukrainian government".

2014 presidential candidacy

After Yanukovych's flight to Russia and his removal as president by parliament in February 2014, Poroshenko was proposed by Vitali Klitschko as a candidate for the Ukrainian presidential elections on March 29, 2014 at a UDAR party conference . Shortly before, Poroshenko and Klitschko met in Vienna with the RosUkrEnergo gas distributor Dmytro Firtasch , who u. a. Via Inter Media Group Limited, Ukraines TV channel with the greatest reach, Inter , controlled and - according to observers - solicited support.

On March 31, Poroshenko said in a program on TV channel 1 + 1 that he stood for compromises with Russia on all issues, with the exception of the status of Crimea and the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine . Ukraine has chosen Europe and wants to become a full EU member . Membership could be achieved by 2025. He rejected a federal Ukraine.

According to the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , presidential rivals estimate his election campaign to be around 40 million euros from Poroshenko .

On May 25, 2014, Petro Poroshenko was elected in the first round of the presidential election with 54 percent of the votes cast. On May 26, he was officially declared the election winner and thus President-elect of Ukraine. His inauguration took place on June 7, 2014 in the Verkhovna Rada in the presence of the German President Joachim Gauck .

Presidency

Signing of the visa waiver with the European Union in 2017

During his presidency, the Yatsenyuk I cabinet ruled first , followed by the Yatsenyuk II cabinet , which was replaced by the Hroysman cabinet in April 2016 .

Poroshenko's first trip abroad as (still-designated) President took him to the Polish capital Warsaw on June 4, 2014 , where he met with the American President Barack Obama , among others . The following day there was a meeting with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin . On June 6th, he attended the commemoration ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of French Normandy, which was attended by 19 heads of state and government, where he held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others . From France he flew back to Kiev for the inauguration that followed the next day.

During Poroshenko's presidency, the health system was reformed and cities and regions were given more powers for the first time in the performance of their tasks. In 2017, Ukraine became visa-free with the EU.

Early elections on October 26, 2014

On August 25, 2014, he prematurely dissolved parliament by decree to allow early elections as part of his peace plan. The Bloc Petro Poroshenko party he founded , which goes back to Solidarity and was formally led by Yuriy Lutsenko due to Poroshenko's presidency , achieved the second-best result in the parliamentary election with 21.83 percent behind the Popular Front and was the strongest faction with it before the Popular Front coalition negotiations to form a government.

Presidential election campaign 2019

In the 2019 presidential election , Poroshenko appeared with the patriotic election slogan “Army! Language! Believe! ”, A triad aimed at the modernization of the armed forces, the privilege of the Ukrainian language in public spaces and the recognition of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He was defeated on March 31, the political career changers, but well-known TV actor Volodymyr Selenskyj in the first round and kicked it into a runoff on April 21, 2019 again.

Just a few minutes after the polling stations closed on April 21, 2019, Poroshenko admitted his defeat, congratulated his challenger and announced that he would remain in politics and fight for Ukraine.

Private

Poroshenko has been married to Maryna Poroshenko (* 1962), a cardiologist , since he was a student . The couple have four children together. The eldest son Olexij (* 1985) has been a member of the Verkhovna Rada since November 2014 . Viktor Yushchenko is the godfather of his twin daughters . Poroshenko, in turn, is the godfather of a son of Yushchenko. The youngest son was born in 2001.

Web links

Commons : Petro Poroshenko  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b Petro Poroshenko sworn in as the new president. In: Zeit Online , June 7, 2014.
  2. Full List: European Billionaires Of 2013. In: Forbes Magazine , March 7, 2013 (English).
  3. Poroshenko and Tymoshenko checkmate. In: Konrad Adenauer Foundation , September 13, 2005.
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  7. https://www.cvk.gov.ua/pls/vp2019/wp300pt001f01=720.html
  8. The "Schoko-König" sponsors the opposition, ksta.de from December 29, 2004 (accessed on March 31, 2014)
  9. Martin Leidenfrost: Where Petro Poroshenko comes from. In: Friday , July 23, 2014.
  10. ^ Entry by Petro Poroshenko , Munzinger Internationales Biographisches Archiv 28/2014 from July 8, 2014.
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  15. "Plan" Leninska Kuznya "(accessed on March 29, 2014)
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  26. The powerless Schokokönig Tages-Anzeiger , Switzerland of May 27, 2014 (accessed on June 3, 2014)
  27. a b c Ukraine’s leader set up secret offshore firm as battle raged with Russia , The Guardian, April 4, 2016
  28. The journalists were wrong: Roshen is in the Blind Trust , April 4, 2016
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  30. http://www.ft.com/fastft/2016/04/07/panama-papers-rothschild-defends-poroshenko
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  32. a b The deep fall of the bearer of hope Poroshenko , Die Welt, April 6, 2016
  33. Julia Smirnova: Mossack Fonseca: Mailbox company brings Petro Poroshenko to explain. In: welt.de . April 5, 2016, accessed October 7, 2018 .
  34. Ulrich Heyden: Poroshenko in the pliers , Telepolis, September 28, 2015
  35. Konrad Adenauer Foundation (accessed on May 18, 2014)
  36. EPC member list (accessed on May 18, 2014)
  37. Spinelli Group and Bertelsmann Foundation: useful tools of the Empire solidaritaet.com No. 21, May 21, 2014 (accessed on May 18, 2014)
  38. New Minister of Economic Affairs - Petro Poroshenko , Federal Agency for Civic Education, May 21, 2012.
  39. ^ Biography ( Memento of December 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), Correspondent , accessed on April 2, 2014.
  40. Порошенко Петр Алексеевич Poroshenko Petr Aleksiyovych , ЛІГА.net, accessed on April 2, 2014.
  41. Hryvnia exchange rate could strengthen, says NBU Council head , Interfax -Ukraine, March 16, 2011.
  42. NEWSru.ua : Порошенко стал министром иностранных дел. За назначение проголосовали БЮТ, НУ-НС, БЛ и по одному нардепу от ПР и КПУ ( Memento from October 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  43. Ukrprominvest Group - Oeconomicus access May 26, 2014
  44. a b Ukrainian billionaire: “We expect a clear gesture from the EU” , SPON from December 19, 2013.
  45. На Євромайдані створили народне об'єднання "Майдан" Euromaidan established national union "Maidan" Ukrayinska Pravda (December 22, 2013)
  46. Klitschko goes into the second row ( Memento from April 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Tagesschau on March 29, 2014.
  47. Tymoshenko: "The oligarchy must go once and for all" diepresse.com of April 12, 2014 (accessed on April 14, 2014)
  48. Klitschko & Poroschenko secret with Firtasch in Vienna oe24.at from April 1, 2014 (accessed on April 14, 2014)
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  50. Poroshenko officially winner of the presidential election on merkur-online.de ; last accessed on May 27, 2014
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  53. ↑ Relaxation exercises in Normandy on zeit.de , accessed on June 7, 2014
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  55. Ukraine wishes a fresh start , NZZ, April 23, 2019, front page
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  59. Comedian Selensky goes into a duel with incumbent Poroshenko , Die Welt, March 31, 2019
  60. Barbara Oertel: No more fun , taz.de from April 17, 2019
  61. The puller behind Poroshenko's challenger . world. de of April 20, 2019
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  64. kommersant.com from January 28, 2005 (accessed on March 31, 2014) ( Memento from March 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive )