Operation 'Midas:' participants consider protecting energy facilities as source of profit – NABU

Participants in the large-scale corruption scheme in the energy sector, dubbed "Midas," considered the issue of building protective structures at energy facilities as a regular source of profit, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) reported in a video on its YouTube channel on Monday.

"Members of the criminal organization viewed the protection of energy facilities merely as an ordinary source of profit," the NABU stated.

According to the bureau’s detectives, who referred to recordings of conversations between members of the criminal group, they discussed, among other things, raising the "kickback" rate from 10% to 15% in connection with the construction of protective structures at the Khmelnytsky Nuclear Power Plant.

The NABU recordings also indicate that the scheme’s participants discussed a contract worth UAH 4 billion for building protective structures for autotransformers and complained about receiving insufficient bribe proceeds from a previous contract. Given that their average "kickback" rate ranged between 10% and 15%, they allegedly decided to wait for a more profitable offer, which occurred a month later – in September 2025, during a period of mass Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the bureau’s detectives reported.

"And on October 10, 2025, at the very moment when the President of Ukraine was holding a meeting on the protection of energy facilities, members of the criminal organization were discussing how to raise their kickback rate from 10% to 15% during the construction of protective structures at the Khmelnytsky Nuclear Power Plant," the NABU report stated.

In addition to the issue of energy facility protection, NABU’s video report also cited an example illustrating how the corruption scheme operated: one company that supplied Energoatom with materials worth UAH 12 million in 2024, after coming under the control of the criminal organization, received contracts worth UAH 435 million in 2025.

NABU noted that Operation "Midas" had been under development since summer 2024 and has now entered its final stage.

As previously reported, among those identified by NABU as participants in the large-scale energy sector corruption scheme, codenamed "Midas," are Serhiy Pushkar, a member of the National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission (NEURC); businessman Tymur Mindich; former Executive Director for Physical Protection and Security at Energoatom, Dmytro Basov; and former adviser to the Minister of Energy, Ihor Myroniuk.