Masked men again attack Akhmetov’s Zaporizhstal steel plant

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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – October 20, 2014) Over 100 masked men wearing nationalist insignia laid siege to Zaporizhstal, one of Ukraine’s largest steel plants, and owned by Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov, newswires report. “The northern and southern entrances to the Zaporizhstal metallurgy plant are blocked by about 10 passenger vans carrying unidentified people of athletic appearance wearing balaclavas,” Interfax reported on October 18.

Zaporizhstal said in a press statement that the raiders made no demands and were repelled by plant security. The plant said that the raiders wore the insignia of Ukraine’s controversial far right group Right Sector.

The attack repeated an incident of October 15, when similarly large numbers of masked young men wearing Right Sector insignia attacked the plant.

Right Sector denied any connection to the incident. Masked youths also wearing nationalist insignia attacked Ukraine’s parliament and police defending it on October 14. Right Sector and nationalist party Svoboda denied any links to the attack, but police said subsequently that one of the arrested attackers was the son of a leading Svoboda party member.

Akhmetov and his Metinvest group are on the rocks after Russian-backed rebels seized control of the Donbass region of East Ukraine where most of the concern’s mines and smelters are based. Bloomberg threw Akhmetov out of its ranking of world’s top 100 billionaires in October, putting his net wealth at only just over $10bn, down from around $17bn before the conflict in East Ukraine.

Zaporizhstal is located in East-Central Ukraine in territory controlled by Ukraine, thus still under effective control of Metinvest, making the repeated attacks on the premises alarming for the survival of the concern.

 

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