The story
In 1989, Yulia Tymoshenko founded a family cooperative in Dnipropetrovsk. In 1991, Tymoshenko, her husband, Oleksandr, and Olexandr Gravetsas created the Ukrainian Petrol Company, a vendor of gasoline to farmers in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. In 1995, the company was reorganized into the United Energy Systems of Ukraine.
UESU bought gas from RAO Gazprom (Russia). However, UESU was largely held by a Turkish company, United Energy International Limited (UEIL) and the perhaps inflated payments of Ukraine gas customers was filtered through a number of international locations (allowing a distribution of profits – hundreds of millions of dollars – amongst the energy oligarchs involved), before Russia was paid.
From Wikipedia’s article on United Energy Systems of Ukraine, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3