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The owner of one of Ukraine’s largest agricultural companies has warned Kyiv against prolonging its dispute with the EU over food exports, saying it risks losing the bloc’s support in the war with Russia.
Andriy Verevskyi, the Switzerland-based founder of Kernel, the world’s biggest exporter of sunflower oil, said feuding with EU member states at such a critical time was unwise.
“I think Ukraine should not fight with Poland or other European countries over import duties and the protection of the European market,” he told the Financial Times in his first face-to-face interview with a media group.
“We have enough [other export] markets for Ukraine: I’m talking about India, Africa, Asia, China et cetera and I don’t think we should fight and escalate the relationship between Europe and Ukraine because of agricultural supply.”
He added: “If part of eastern Europe wants to protect their market from Ukrainian production, I would say let it go . . . let’s co-operate on more important things for Ukraine. Many people will disagree with me but that’s what I believe.”
The trade dispute started in April last year when Poland led a handful of EU countries to impose unilateral bans on imports of Ukrainian cereals in response to protests from their farmers about unfair competition.
This followed the EU lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s exports in 2022 to help its war-ravaged economy stay afloat. Poland, Slovakia and Hungary kept bans in place despite violating EU common trade policy.
The EU is levying new tariffs on foodstuffs ranging from poultry to maize if quantities exceed the annual average imported between July 2021 and December last year.
Ukraine has also introduced licences to avoid exports of sugar and other crops hitting levels that would trigger an EU “emergency brake” on imports.
Although Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has pledged full support for Ukraine’s war effort, he has promised to protect his farmers.
Verevskyi, 49, who controls Kernel through a Cyprus holding company Namsen, is entangled in a bitter courtroom fight with minority shareholders after he launched a tender offer to delist the group from the Warsaw Stock Exchange because of what he says was a lack of liquidity.
The businessman, who said he had 94 per cent of Kernel’s equity, is being sued by some investors for reclaiming ownership of the company without their consent. They accuse him of buying the group on the cheap after taking advantage of a sharp drop in its valuation following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Verevskyi had sold shares in a float on the Warsaw exchange in 2007, which after further transactions had reduced his holding to 37 per cent before the Russian invasion.
Last month a judge in Luxembourg, where Kernel is registered, opened court hearings into the shareholders’ complaints.
Verevskyi said he was sympathetic to investors who complained that the delisting was approved by Kernel’s board instead of a general assembly of shareholders. But he insisted it was compliant with Luxembourg’s laws.
“I’ve been made to look like a big, bad aggressive guy who is selfish and doesn’t care about anything. Perhaps partially it’s true, but it’s not that simple and there are many things that I’m doing for the company and for its people and for our position in Ukraine,” he said.
Verevskyi also stressed the plaintiffs were mostly small retail shareholders, with big institutions that still hold the stock including Vanguard, Artemis, Raiffeisen, Morgan Stanley and UBS staying on the sidelines in the court battle.
On President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the businessman said his government needed to strengthen the rule of law and reduce corruption in order to get foreign investors involved in the country’s postwar reconstruction. “I am a supporter of the president because I believe he has done a pretty good job and he was at the right place when the war started. But if you ask if Zelenskyy did economic and legal reforms in the country: No, he didn’t.”
Zelenskyy only had two years in office before Russia’s invasion, “so I don’t know if he had the chance to change anything dramatically, but I’m totally sure that more things could have been done”, he added.
Verevskyi was a member of Ukraine’s parliament from 2002 until 2013, when a court stripped him of his seat for simultaneously holding public office and running a commercial business.
Additional reporting by Andy Bounds in Brussels
