Instead of Helping Ukraine’s Poor, Ferrexpo’s Charitable Donations Flowed to Companies Associated With Its Then-CEO

In 2017, the mining giant Ferrexpo announced it had donated more than two percent of its annual revenue to a charity based near the company’s vast iron ore mines in central Ukraine. 

This charitable spending significantly outstripped the average of its industry peers, the London Stock Exchange-listed firm highlighted in an annual report. 

Yet just one year later, questions set in. 

Auditors from Deloitte noted in Ferrexpo’s 2018 annual report that they had been unable to conclude whether the charity, named Blooming Land, had in fact spent $33.5 million of Ferrexpo’s donations on charitable ends.

Ferrexpo halted donations to the charity, which it said had been set up to “independently” coordinate the firm’s corporate social responsibility spending, and commissioned an investigation into the matter.

But the results were inconclusive: an investigating committee said only that the funds “could have been misappropriated,” and that it was unable to determine the fate of the firm’s donations.

Now, OCCRP has obtained a previously unpublished forensic report which concluded that an even higher sum — roughly $74 million out of the $110 million Ferrexpo donated to Blooming Land between 2013 and 2018 — was “not used for its intended purpose.”

The review was commissioned by the charity’s new management after it took charge in 2023, and was carried out by the Ukrainian branch of the global audit firm Crowe. 

Drawing on bank account data and internal charity documents, the report details how Blooming Land dispersed Ferrexpo’s donations to three sub-funds, which then sent the money onwards to two Ukrainian companies. Within a matter of hours or days, those firms transferred the money to dozens of other local companies operating in Ukraine’s industrial, finance, and wholesale trade sectors, the report says. 

None of these receiving companies was a registered charity. Yet many of them have something else in common, OCCRP found.   

Corporate records and public statements confirm Ferrexpo’s then-CEO Kostyantyn Zhevago has controlled or held shares in eight of the 43 firms that received the money. Two dozen of the other companies, meanwhile, have been alleged by a Ukrainian state banking agency to be under the businessman’s control. 

Zhevago, a 52-year-old Ukrainian businessman once crowned the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, is no longer Ferrexpo’s CEO but remains the firm’s largest shareholder. 

The Crowe report did not identify who was responsible for directing the funds at Blooming Land, and did not name Zhevago, who held no role at the charity. It also did not claim any responsibility on the part of Ferrexpo or trace the final destination of the money and how it was ultimately spent. 

But separate banking records obtained by OCCRP show that in 2015, six of the receiving companies flagged in the Crowe report subsequently transferred funds — often of similar or near-identical amounts — to Zhevago's Finance and Credit Bank, or to other companies that then made payments of a similar size to the bank. The Ukrainian bank, which was owned by the businessman, was facing a liquidity crisis at the time and was declared insolvent later that year.

The transfers to the bank were marked as loan repayments and investments in the bank’s share capital. The companies in these transaction chains had little to no other funds in these accounts at the time, suggesting the payments were likely made with the money that had originated with Blooming Land. 

In total, tens of millions of dollars of Ferrexpo’s charitable donations appear to have flowed into Zhevago’s Finance and Credit Bank in this manner throughout the first half of 2015, the data shows. 

When reached for comment, lawyers for Zhevago said that he “has no relation” to Blooming Land and that “assumptions” about the misuse of the funds “were not confirmed.”

The lawyers said that Zhevago had no control over Blooming Land, and pointed OCCRP to the conclusions of the Independent Review Committee (IRC) that was commissioned by Ferrexpo, and which concluded in 2019 that although there were signs some money “could have been misappropriated,” none of Ferrexpo's directors, management or employees had been involved. 

OCCRP’s findings — including about the connections between Zhevago and some of the companies that received Blooming Land’s funds — are “not true or correct and [are] not confirmed by the IRC's audit conclusions and the conclusions of the independent Ukrainian and British auditors and other independent parties who were involved in this review,” Zhevago’s lawyers said.

When asked what happened to the Blooming Land funds, lawyers for Zhevago said they were “spent on charitable purposes in connection with the beginning of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine in 2014.”

Ferrexpo also referred OCCRP to the Independent Review Committee’s public statement, and did not respond to questions about Zhevago’s connections to the Ukrainian companies through which the company’s charitable funds passed. 

Antonina Volkotrub, chief analyst at the Ukrainian advocacy group Anti-Corruption Action Center, said the transaction patterns suggest Blooming Land and its sub-funds were used as a “bank system” to provide cash to the receiving firms.

Blooming Land’s “financial activity resembles that of a financial institution rather than a charitable organization,” Volkotrub said.  

OCCRP found no evidence that Zhevago personally directed any payments involving Blooming Land. Yet the discovery that some of the companies that received Ferrexpo’s charitable funds were connected to the businessman — plus comments made to OCCRP by Blooming Land’s current and former leadership — reignite questions over whether he or representatives of his businesses exercised influence over the charity, which Ferrexpo had consistently denied.

“It is our opinion that Blooming Land was under the direct control of Zhevago from the year it was created until 2019,” the charity’s new director Oleksandr Kuznets told OCCRP in a written comment. 

A legal representative for Blooming Land’s former director Ihor Temchenko, who was in that role from 2015 until 2023, also told OCCRP that Zhevago had personally invited his client to become director of the charity. 

He said his client believed Blooming Land was “fully controlled” by Zhevago based on this interaction, personnel overlaps between the charity and Zhevago’s other Ukrainian businesses, and the fact that the billionaire owned some of the companies that were receiving Blooming Land’s funds. 

Under U.K. law and stock exchange rules, publicly listed companies like Ferrexpo must disclose what are known as “related parties” as part of a transparency mechanism designed to counter the risk that a personal connection could sway the terms of transactions. 

Deloitte raised the issue when it flagged concerns about Blooming Land in Ferrexpo’s 2018 annual report. The auditors noted a “significant number of potential associations and linkages adjacent” to Zhevago, and said they did not have enough evidence to conclude whether he had exercised control over the charity.  

The Independent Review Committee appointed by Ferrexpo to investigate the matter, however, concluded Blooming Land was “not a related party of the Group, Mr Zhevago… or its executive management.”

Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation told OCCRP that it was conducting a pretrial criminal investigation into possible misappropriation of funds at Blooming Land, but declined to provide further details. 

Zhevago is wanted as a suspect in a separate Ukrainian investigation into alleged embezzlement at his Finance and Credit bank, though he has not been formally charged. He denies the allegations. After sanctioning the businessman in February 2025, Ukraine’s government later seized Zhevago’s shares in one of Ferrexpo’s Ukrainian mines as part of an investigation into alleged losses at the bank. 

Zhevago’s lawyers told OCCRP that criminal proceedings involving him in Ukraine were of a “politically motivated nature,” unsupported by evidence, and that there were a number of procedural violations in the Ukrainian criminal investigations. 

How the Money Flowed  

After kicking off his career in newly independent Ukraine’s banking sector in the 1990s, Zhevago went on to amass the classic oligarch set — a private business empire, a seat in parliament, and a football club. Though he remains one of Ukraine’s richest men, he rejects the “oligarch” label, instead preferring to describe himself as a successful entrepreneur.  

In 2007, he made history when Ferrexpo, one of the world’s leading exporters of iron ore pellets and the crown jewel of his business portfolio, became the first company with Ukrainian roots to be listed on the London Stock Exchange. 

Zhevago declared the successful IPO “the best proof that the company is absolutely proven and transparent.”

A decade later, Ferrexpo was mired in controversy. The firm’s stock price tumbled and its credit rating flipped to negative after Deloitte issued its qualified opinion stating it could not determine whether the company’s donations had been used for charitable activities. 

In April 2019, Deloitte resigned from its role as Ferrexpo’s auditor, citing the company’s delay in carrying out an independent investigation into Blooming Land. 

Ferrexpo eventually launched its probe, but the review ran into difficulties. 

“With the exception of a little bit of correspondence early in the forensic stage [the charity] have clammed up,” Ferrexpo’s then-chairman Steve Lucas told the Financial Times in reference to the company’s efforts to seek clarification from Blooming Land. 

In response to questions from OCCRP, Ferrexpo confirmed that Blooming Land “repeatedly delayed or failed” to provide information requested by the review committee during the investigation.

In August 2019, the Independent Review Committee concluded its review and said it was “satisfied that none of Ferrexpo's directors, management or employees have had any involvement in any possible misappropriation of funds.” 

The new details on the broader scope of how much of Ferrexpo’s money went unaccounted for — and where it went — have come to light after Blooming Land’s director handed over control to a Kyiv-based lawyer and civic activists in 2023, who commissioned Crowe to investigate. 

Their report mapped how the money flowed out of Blooming Land and over to companies intertwined with Zhevago:  

Some of the transfers were large and instantaneous, including one payment worth approximately $986,000 that was moved out of Khimreaktyv within 45 minutes of the charitable funds hitting the company’s account in December 2016, the Crowe report shows. 

In other cases, money trickled out over a period of months. For instance, Khimreaktyv made eight transfers to a Ukrainian company called DRI LLC between July and November 2017 totaling around $480,000 worth of hryvnia, according to the Crowe report and a 2024 ruling by Kyiv’s Commercial Court relating to Khimreaktyv’s eventual bankruptcy. 

The contracts underpinning those payments, which were marked as fulfilling a loan assignment agreement, had no clear economic purpose, according to the court ruling. 

At the time of the transactions, DRI was majority owned by a U.K. company in which Zhevago owned shares in 2015, and which he told a U.K. High Court in 2021 he was the “owner or controller” of. Zhevago did not respond to OCCRP’s questions about whether he owned DRI at the time of the transactions. OCCRP contacted DRI via post, as well as its listed legal representative, but did not receive a response.

In total, OCCRP contacted more than two dozen other companies mentioned in the Crowe report seeking their response to allegations that they received charitable funds from Blooming Land, but did not receive a response. 

Khimreaktyv and Gas Turbine Technologies declared bankruptcy in 2020 and 2024, respectively, and are now under administration. Their largest creditors are Blooming Land’s sub-funds. 

The bankruptcy administrator for Khimreaktyv told OCCRP that the company received the majority of its income between 2013 and 2018 from Blooming Land, and that they had found no evidence that the funds were spent on implementing the company’s contracts with the charity.

“Khimreaktyv LLC did not conduct its own economic activity and did not have a real source of income,” the administrator noted. 

“Significant amounts of money were almost never retained in Khimreaktyv’s bank accounts,” the administrator added. “My analysis of the company's financial documents gives reasonable grounds to believe that it performed the function of a so-called ‘transit company’ - that is, one link in a chain of transactions.” 

The bankruptcy administrator for Gas Turbine Technologies confirmed the company received funds from Blooming Land and said that Ukrainian courts found it “did not take any actions aimed at the implementation of charitable programs and projects.”

Although OCCRP contacted multiple former employees of Blooming Land, apart from former director Temchenko only one other former manager at the charity, and a former director for one of the subfunds agreed to speak. 

Both rejected the findings that the charities had sent sizable funds to Gas Turbine Technologies and Khimreaktyv, while the former manager of Blooming Land from 2013-2014 said the organization “worked strictly within the framework of charitable activity” during her tenure. 

Banking Data Suggests Charity Funds Went to Troubled Bank

The National Bank of Ukraine classified Zhevago’s Finance and Credit Bank as “troubled” in January 2015 due to “risky operations,” including a significant increase in potentially non-performing loans. 

In response, Ukraine’s National Bank and Zhevago, who was the bank’s main shareholder but had no management role at the time, injected capital into the bank in an effort to save it. 

Around the same time, six of the companies which, based on the Crowe report, received Blooming Land’s funds, sent money — often of similar or near-identical amounts — to Finance and Credit Bank or to other firms that subsequently made transfers to the bank, banking data seen by OCCRP shows. 

These payments were marked mostly as investments in the bank’s share capital. The data shows that none of these companies had comparable funds in their accounts at the time, and that the transactions took place either the same day or shortly after they received the money that the Crowe report traced back to Blooming Land. 

In total, by mid-February 2015, the final companies in these transaction chains had spent the equivalent of some $22 million buying shares in Zhevago’s struggling bank in this manner.

Then on a single day in July 2015, around $26 million worth of hryvnia was transferred from the three Blooming Land sub-funds to Gas Turbine Technologies, Khimreaktyv, and another company in payments marked for charitable services. 

All three companies sent the funds to a financial services company, FK Faktoring LLC. 

Later that same day, FK Faktoring LLC transferred the equivalent of $19 million to Finance and Credit Bank, the data shows.

According to the payment reference, the money was not provided for any charitable initiative. Instead, it was designated as a repayment for a commercial loan that FK Faktoring LLC had drawn from the bank in November 2010.

At the time, FK Faktoring LLC was partially owned by a Ukrainian insurance company, Omega, which Ferrexpo noted was under “common control” by Zhevago in its annual report that year. 

When asked about the transaction, Zhevago’s lawyers said that OCCRP’s characterization of the events was “not correct” and “not confirmed” by Ferrexpo’s review into Blooming Land. 

The National Bank of Ukraine stated it couldn’t comment on the $19 million loan repayment or confirm the entire transaction chain showing the purchases of the bank’s shares in 2015. 

Neither FK Faktoring, which is now in bankruptcy, nor Omega responded to requests for comment from OCCRP. When reached by phone, the director of FK Faktoring at the time of the transactions said he had never heard of the charities and that his company had not received any funds from them. Neither he nor the bankruptcy administrator for FK Faktoring responded to a written request for comment.

Finance and Credit Bank ultimately failed, with the National Bank declaring it insolvent in September 2015, stating that Zhevago “did not fulfil his written obligations to support bank liquidity.”  

Zhevago’s lawyers told OCCRP that it was decisions by National Bank officials which caused the collapse of Finance and Credit. 

Blurred Lines

From its inception, Blooming Land employed personnel who had a history of working at businesses associated with Zhevago, OCCRP found. 

Blooming Land’s incorporation documents show the charity was first established in March 2013 by two people who had served as senior legal personnel for AvtoKrAZ, a manufacturer of heavy-duty vehicles owned by Zhevago until the Ukrainian state took control of the business in 2022. (One of those founders has since died, while the other told OCCRP she was “not interested” in discussing the matter.) 

Temchenko, the former Blooming Land director, had also been a long-term employee of other Ukrainian companies affiliated with Zhevago. And another director of one of Blooming Land’s sub-funds was in the same time frame listed as the director of a Ukrainian company partially owned by the billionaire. 

Zhevago’s lawyers said he had no information regarding the two founders’ involvement in Blooming Land and was therefore unable to comment. Similarly,  they said that he had no information regarding other former employees. 

After reviewing OCCRP’s findings, Rob Wilson, a U.K.-based forensic accountant and fraud investigator, said he believed Ferrexpo’s donations to the charity should have been reported as related-party transactions.

“Mr Zhevago may argue that at the time of the donation[s], he was not aware what the charity was going to do with the funds. However, as soon as one of his associated companies received funds from the charity, this would have triggered the related party disclosures” required by U.K. law and stock exchange rules, he said.

When asked whether Ferrexpo should have declared Blooming Land as a related party, Zhevago’s lawyers said that this had not been confirmed in the conclusions of the Independent Review Committee, nor in the conclusions of “independent Ukrainian and British auditors who were involved in conducting this review”.