As part of the ‘Anthology of Ukraine’s Big Business’ project by Forbes Ukraine, an interview was published with banker Oleksandr Derkach, who was a shareholder in Aval Bank and is now a co-owner of the ‘Dairy Alliance’ group of companies. Aval Bank worked with 600,000 businesses and was sold to the Austrian Raiffeisen Group for over $1 billion.
In 1992, with a $30 monthly salary, a non-working wife, a school-age son, and an unfinished two-room flat, Derkach had nothing to lose. Fedír Shpyh invited him to co-found Aval Bank. “I had never been inside a bank in my life,” he recalls. Of their first board, only one person had any prior banking experience.
The first business groups emerged through barter chains. Ukraine needed gas and oil but had nothing to pay with. Those who built the most efficient barter networks — trading manufactured goods for energy from Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Russia — quickly gained factual control over gas-consuming enterprises. They then moved to vertical integration. Business in those years followed clear stages: buy-sell, then structuring, then vertical integration. With inflation running at 3,000% a year, borrowing one million hryvnias and repaying 30,000 was simply how things worked.
On why oligarchs failed to preserve their businesses: ISD’s founders inherited plants requiring billions of dollars in reconstruction, financed by Russian bank loans. But when metal prices halved in 2008 and China became the world’s largest steel exporter, the entire business collapsed. “This is not a failure of people — it is a failure of circumstances,” Derkach says.
On PrivatBank: Kolomoisky realised too late that the core of his business was the bank. Aval and PrivatBank were comparable institutions. Aval sold for $1 billion; PrivatBank, sold two or three years earlier, could have fetched $3–4 billion. “For them, the bank was just a tool. Everyone knows how that ended.”
On competitive advantage: “Three things: interest, desire and energy. Connections — no. Knowledge — no.” Look at Farmak, MHP, mono — great management and great ideas, not connections.
After exiting banking, Derkach co-founded Molochnyi Alliance (Dairy Alliance) with Serhiy Vovchenko, plus Oberih Medical Clinic, River Mall and the Planet Kino cinema chain. “Why did I manage to preserve my money and assets when many from the 1990s didn’t? Probably because luck and chance in business are no less important than intelligence and energy.”
Source: Forbes Ukraine, No. 2 [41], April–May 2026
