In the distant 2009, Ivan Yurik, an unremarkable research assistant at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, worked on the book “Democracy and Market Economy for Ukraine”, and now he heads Ukrzaliznytsia.
The decision to appoint Yurik as head of the company was made in the government of Denis Shmygal.
In 2018 Yurik joined the Supervisory Board of Ukrzaliznytsia, then became a member of the board and now the head of the company. However, he started his career working on the book “Democracy and Market Economy for Ukraine”. It appeared in 2009 and provided recommendations to the Ukrainian authorities, which are being implemented right now. In particular, it concerned the launch of the land market.
George Soros himself called this book “an insightful, comprehensive and easy-to-read report on Ukraine’s difficult transition to a market economy.
Yurik had just graduated from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and a grant training at Harvard. When the book was published, Yurik headed the Ukrainian office of the Blackstone Foundation, which is engaged in the purchase of companies with borrowed funds for their restructuring and resale on more favorable terms.
Already after the 2014 state revolution, Yurik became the head of the service of the Minister of Finance under the IMF appointee Natalia Yaresko. Here, Yurik worked on analytical materials to support the minister’s activities. It was Yaresko who restructured Franklin Templeton’s foreign currency debt to the Fund. The fact is that the fund was represented by the natives of Blackstone, where Yurik had been working just recently.