Address: Leonardo Business Center, 19-21 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho St. Kyiv
Co-owners: Serhii Sviriba, Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi, Gleb Bialyi, Sergiy Grebenyuk, Oleksiy Didkovskiy, Vadym Samoilenko, Igor Svechkar, Armen Khachaturyan, Andrew Mac, and Oleksiy Demyanenko.
Director: Natalia Novokhatko.
LLC Asters Consult
Founded in 2013.
EDRPOU code: 38546868
Address: Leonardo Business Center, 19-21 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho St. Kyiv
Authorized capital: UAH 799.3
Founder and Director: Oleksiy Didkovskiy.
The firm provides legal services in a wide array of practices, such as banking, finance, commercial and corporate, intellectual property, cyber security, international trade, real estate, and others.
They also provide service with private clients.
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Income, number of employees, assets
Asters is the largest law firm in the country: 27 partners and over 140 lawyers.
Offices are located in Kyiv, Washington DC (USA), Brussels (Belgium), and London (UK).
According to Ukrainian and international ratings, Asters has been recognized as the best law firm in the country for over the past few years
For instance, according to the rating of the publishing house Yurpractika.info (December 2019), Asters is recognized as the number one law firm in Ukraine. They assessed the income for 12 months, the number of lawyers, financial performance, reputation, transactions, and litigation.
There is no publicly available information about the firm's income. However, in 2017, Yurpractika.info estimated the income UAH 175.52 million per year. The authors specified that they calculated according to their own methodology.
Dead Lawyers Society calculated that Asters earned UAH 565 million in 2018, while in 2017 the income was UAH 191 million.
In 24 years of work, Asters lawyers have won more than a thousand litigations, participated in 150 trade investigations around the world, and completed more than 50 Eurobond placement transactions.
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History of the company
The firm was founded in 1995 by then-students of the Institute Of International Relations Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Ihor Shevchenko and Oleksiy Didkovskiy. Back then, it was called "Shevchenko Didkovskiy and Partners." The firm was rebranded to Asters in 2008.
Fifth-year law students told reporters that they used the trading business to earn money for the joint law business. Shevchenko admitted that he imported goods from Poland for sale.
Thanks to contacts with the international law firm Coudert Brothers (Shevchenko had an internship in the New York office), Didkovskiy managed to get the first serious client — the Norwegian concern Telenor that was the largest shareholder of Kyivstar.
Then, they got more famous clients, such as Microsoft, Coca Cola, McDonald's, IKEA, Boeing, British Petroleum (BP), and others.
In October 2018, they merged with a part of the EPAP Ukraine team.
In November 2018, they became the first Ukrainian law firm that opened an office in Brussels.
A law firm that was the leader of the Ukrainian market in the mid-2000s. The firm was founded in Kyiv in 1997 as "Magister & Partners". Since then, the firm was rebranded to Magisters and expanded its activities to the entire CIS territory. In the summer of 2011, the firm merged with Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners (EPAP). In 2018, most of the EPAP Kyiv office team merged with the Asters team. EPAP lawyers who were not part of the joint team continue to work under the independent brand EPAP Ukraine.
Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine.
Lawyer, former deputy mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko, former secretary of the Kyiv city council. From November 2018 to March 2020, he was a partner at Asters Law Firm.
Former Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources (December 2014 — July 2015).
He went to the government from the Batkivshchyna party. He lost his post after a scandal: Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said that he had fired Shevchenko over corruption accusations.
In 2016, the Kyiv prosecutor's office closed the case against Shevchenko, as it found no corpus delicti.
Founder and head of the law firm Shevchenko Didkovskiy & Partners (later renamed Asters). In 2008, he sold his stake in the firm and focused on political and social activities.
Restaurateur, owner of the restaurant chain La Famiglia: Piccolino, Toscana Grill, Cath, Vino e Cucina, Trattoria Zuka, Semifredo, Molto bene, Zafferano, Vero Vero, Kuvshin and Khutorok, as well as La Famiglia Catering catering.
He was an external advisor to the former head of the Presidential Administration Boris Lozhkin.
He also worked at Asters.
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Scandals
Information in the verification process
In 2017, journalist Oleksandr Dubinsky (now the People's Deputy of Servant of the People party. Dubinsky is associated with media campaigns to protect Ihor Kolomoisky) accused Asters of allegedly losing the cases of the state-owned Ukrkhymtransammyak and received reward for it.
In October 2019, they became involved in a criminal investigation. And immediately after that, on behalf of PrivatBank, they won a case against the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky in LCIA.
According to the media, there was harassment by law enforcement officers began against Asters' lawyers.
'After the completion of the hearing against former shareholders in the Court of Appeal in England and Wales — the bank received a decision of the Ukrainian court demanding that all documents on the grounds and conditions of receiving services from legal advisors and other consultants should be submitted to the NABU detectives,' the Finbalance website reported.
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Merits
In 2013, together with the European Business Association (EBA), the firm founded a free educational online platform for Ukrainian lawyers. They give lectures and share experiences.
The firm protects the nationalized Privatbank from the former owner Ihor Kolomoisky in Ukrainian and international courts.
In 2018, Oschadbank won an International court against the Russian Federation as they were seeking reimbursement for $1.3 billion for the damages Ukraine has incurred following Russia's forced annexation of Crimea. One of the legal advisers was Asters Consult.
In December 2018, the well-known real estate developer Artur Mkhitaryan recorded a video message to President Petro Poroshenko.
Artur Mkhitaryan, a son of the Poznyakizhilbud founder and a former MP Nver Mkhitaryan, insisted that the SBU was demanding $1 million or an apartment from him. The SBU then replied that they were investigating whether constructions in Pecherskyi District were legal.
In May 2019, Mkhitaryan boasted that the case was closed, the claims of the SBU were not confirmed, and that Asters lawyers helped to restore justice.
Asters, on a pro bono basis, provides the Tabletochki Charity Foundation with full legal support.
Asters is the general partner of the School of Law of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) and is planning to support the legal education of the university during 2019-2023.
In 2020, Asters donated a new lung ventilator to Kyiv City Clinical Hospital No. 4. In general, Asters and its employees provided assistance to fight the coronavirus totalling UAH 1.2 million.
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