The Fire Point co-founder said he last visited Mindich’s apartment at 9-A Hrushevskoho Street in late August 2025.
Shtilerman said he met with Mindich because the businessman wanted to buy a stake in Fire Point.
“They were related to the fact that Mindich was trying to buy a stake in our company,” Shtilerman said, referring to the meetings at the apartment.
“We communicated because we had agreements — Mindich could buy 50% of Fire Point at market valuation minus 20%. That is the maximum discount allowed by our Tax Code and considered market-based.”
However, investors from the UAE appeared in the summer of 2025 and valued Fire Point at $2.45 billion, so the deal with Mindich never happened, Shtilerman said.
“He probably realized that it would cost him a little less than a billion. I understood he did not have that kind of money. He said he would gather some pool of investors,” Shtilerman said.
Negotiations over the possible purchase of a stake in Fire Point lasted about a year in total, he added.
“At first, he tried to buy it for $100 million, but we refused,” Shtilerman said.
Shtilerman said at a previous commission hearing on May 13 that Mindich had offered to buy 50% of the company for $1 billion.
Mindich was refused the purchase because “a sovereign fund of one country offered $758 million for 30% of Fire Point,” the Fire Point co-founder said at the time.
A year and a half earlier, Mindich had offered $100 million for a stake in the company, Shtilerman said. By then, however, the business had grown so much that Mindich’s offer increased tenfold.
Ukrainska Pravda published new results of alleged recordings involving Mindich on April 29, in which he and National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov discuss financing Fire Point.
According to the recordings, Mindich, speaking with Umerov about allocating budget funds to purchase Fire Point products, allegedly asked the then-defense minister whether he had summoned Andriy Pyshnyi. Umerov replied that the National Bank governor was not in the country.
Mindich then allegedly asked him to “summon the state-owned Sense Bank, because the decision can be made by a Cabinet resolution.”
After the recordings were published, the Defense Ministry’s Anti-Corruption Council called for the creation of a working group with representatives of the General Staff, branches and services using Fire Point products, as well as anti-corruption and investigative agencies, to audit the company’s contracts and pricing.
Fire Point chief designer Denys Shtilerman categorically denied the information published in the Ukrainska Pravda investigation on April 30.
“It is currently not known for certain why and in whose interests these dirty manipulations are being spread, but it is quite obvious that this is a targeted information attack and an attempt to destroy the reputation of one of the best and most effective weapons manufacturers in Ukraine,” he said.
“We do not rule out that competitors are behind these actions, seeking to deprive us of funding, stop contracts and shut down our enterprise.”
Fire Point also called for an end to “information terror” against the company and the broader defense sector.
National Bank of Ukraine Governor Andriy Pyshnyi denied the same day that Mindich and Umerov, while Umerov was defense minister, had approached him for help financing Fire Point.