Start here. Therefore, there was no one to give direct testimony about who ordered the crime, so all the versions in this matter were based on indirect evidence and were widely used as an element of a political struggle to discredit certain politicians and businessmen. Among the main versions, three can be distinguished. Version 1. Client - Pavel Lazarenko, the murders of Shcherban, Bryagin and Momot were carried out in order to establish and strengthen the monopoly position of the Dnepropetrovsk UESU Corporation in the gas market. The version is the most common, as it fits into the framework of the struggle between the Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk clans - one of the central plots of the economic and political life of Ukraine in the mid-1990s. The outline is something like this. In 1995, a number of entrepreneurs, with the help of the authorities, began to launch a plan to take over the largest industrial plants in the country through the supply of gas. The essence of the plan is that traders supplied factories with gas that had risen sharply in price; The factories had no money to pay for it, so they paid in barter with their products, whose sole sellers were gas traders (including those who used to pay Gazprom for the gas), and gradually transferred all the goods and financial flows of the factories under their control. One of the most interesting exchange networks for traders was the gas-strip-pipeline scheme. The strip was produced in Azovstal, then the pipes of the Kharchisk Pipe Plant (at that time the main supplier of large-diameter pipes to Gazprom) were made from it, and then the pipes were used to pay for gas. In order to take over this network and other similar networks in the region, in 1995, the great entrepreneurs of Donetsk of that time, Ahat Bragin and Yevgeny Shcharban, founded the gas trading corporation "Industrial Union of Donbass". The main ideologist of the project was the famous Donetsk businessman Alexander Momot.