By DENYS BIGUS

Four months after he walked into Ukraine’s TVi newsroom as a financial savior and “second breath” for the financially struggling channel, Alexandr Altman is crying foul.

“I do not accept that I am the controlling mind or the director (statutory, de facto or otherwise) of Balmore or any of the five Invest companies,” Altman now says of the interlocking maze of companies that last April took over a channel once praised for its independence and hard-hitting investigations.

In documents filed at the High Court of Justice in London on July 28, Altman claims his name was used in a series of filings with regulatory agencies in London “entirely without my knowledge or consent, and therefore fraudulently… I have no knowledge of how these companies were incorporated, who incorporated them, how they are run, or what they have done since they were incorporated.”

This latest upheaval at TVi had shed light on how offshore shell corporations are being used to gain control of a profitable or powerful media entity, while also obscuring the identities of those seeking that control.

Altman was front and center on April 23 when a mysterious group of new owners barred TVi’s former management from entering the building and announced they were taking control from Russian businessman Konstantin Kagalovsky, TVi’s co-founder.  Altman, an American businessman of Ukrainian descent, was presented as bringing with him “a flow of investments” to sustain the money-losing channel.

The channel has now been “resold” twice, following the assets’ freeze by High Court in London.

But Altman’s claim to ownership was anything but clear.  It was based on a power of attorney allegedly issued by Wilcox Ventures, a British Virgin Islands-registered company owned by Kagalovsky. Kagalovsky and Wilcox’s director, Orthodoxia Nikia, denied issuing any such letter to Altman.

Multiple layers of companies appear to control the station. Through Altman’s UK-based company Balmore Invest Ltd., Altman claimed to control 95 percent of Media Info, the Ukraine-based company that owned Teleradiosvit which is the Ukrainian company that holds TVi’s license.

The majority of those companies seem to be classic “shell” corporations run by proxy directors. Balmore’s Australian nominee director and shareholder, Rachel Amy Erickson, is listed in the UK company registry as running 124 active companies. When contacted by OCCRP, Erickson denied that the signature on Balmore’s incorporation documents was hers.

The companies’ paper trail, tracked by OCCRP, shows frantic and sometimes puzzling activity

On May 21, Balmore’s filings with the UK registrar of companies showed that Erickson was replaced as Balmore’s director by Altman. Likewise, ownership of Balmore was transferred to five UK companies, all of which were registered on April 23--the same day Altman showed up to “save” TVi.

Also effective April 23 was the transfer of Balmore’s shares from Erickson to the five UK companies in equal shares: Invest Info One, Invest Rating Two, Invest Media Three, Invest Creative Four and Invest Active Five. In four of the companies the proxy shareholders and directors resigned on the same day – May 21 – and Altman took over.

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