United Energy Systems of Ukraine

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United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) was a Ukrainian natural gas trading company. It began in 1991 as the Ukrainian Petrol Company, founded by Yulia Tymoshenko, her husband Oleksandr Tymoshenko, and Alexander Gravets. In 1995 it reorganized into United Energy Systems of Ukraine. UESU became Ukraine’s largest natural gas importer in 1995–1996, buying gas from Russia’s Gazprom. Much of the money moved through an international network led by a Turkish company, United Energy International Limited, which helped route profits among a group of energy businessmen. In 1997 UESU formed a consortium to supply Russian gas to Ukraine.

At its peak in the mid-1990s, UESU controlled a large share of the country’s gas supply and had interests in several other sectors, including banks, metallurgy, machine building, airports, pipelines in Bulgaria and Turkey, and some media outlets. It was linked to Pavlo Lazarenko, Ukraine’s vice prime minister in 1995, who helped allocate gas quotas to private firms like UESU.

Tymoshenko resigned as UESU president in 1995, and Hennady Tymoshenko (her father-in-law) became president; Tymoshenko later held government roles, including minister of fuel and energy and prime minister. In September 1997 UESU was accused of dumping and was expelled from Ukraine’s natural gas market by the end of the year. The company faced criminal investigations and heavy taxation, and Lazarenko was arrested in 1999. From 2000 to 2004 Tymoshenko’s ties to Lazarenko were examined. UESU was dissolved in 2009.

There were numerous legal cases involving Tymoshenko and other executives. Yulia Tymoshenko was arrested briefly in 2001 over forgery and gas-smuggling charges, but many cases were dropped or closed in later years. In 2011 a Ukrainian security service probe looked into an embezzlement claim related to UESU’s 1997 operations, and in 2014 a court closed the case against Tymoshenko. UESU’s peak revenue was about $4 billion in 1996, and the company was headquartered in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.