The Lithuanian company Pontem recently won a tender from Ukrzaliznytsia to lease restaurant cars on Intercity trains. Over the past few years, it has aggressively expanded into Ukraine’s school and kindergarten catering market, securing one multimillion-dollar tender after another. It seems the state is actively supporting the Lithuanian company, clearing the way by reducing competition from Ukrainian companies. At the same time, Pontem.UA consistently faces complaints from parents about the quality of the meals they provide. The company has been accused of violating labor laws and delaying employee salaries. Despite these issues, the company is now aiming to supply food for the military. Who is protecting the questionable business practices of Irmantas Norkus, the Lithuanian businessman?
As of June 1, the catering services on Ukraine’s Intercity high-speed trains have been taken over by a new player — LLC Pontem.UA. Replacing WOG, which had served the railway for the past eight years, Pontem.UA won the Ukrzaliznytsia tender, securing the rights to lease restaurant cars and provide catering services on 16 high-speed trains for the next five years.
Lawyer for Dmytro Firtash and Yurii Ivaniushchenko, Valerii Hudenko, Takes on Feeding Ukrainian Schoolchildren
LLC “Pontem.UA,” specializing in providing ready-made meals, entered the Ukrainian market in July 2016. The company was established as a subsidiary of the Lithuanian firm Baltijos Paslaugu Grupe, whose ultimate beneficiary is Lithuanian citizen Irmantas Norkus. Initially, the Ukrainian branch was headed by another Lithuanian, Audrius Januškaitis. Today, the company is managed by 55-year-old Ukrainian Valeriy Hudenko, while Volodymyr Tsyba has served as the official signatory since January 2022.
Valeriy Hudenko previously worked as a lawyer for companies linked to former allies of Viktor Yanukovych, including Ukragro NPK, owned by oligarch Dmytro Firtash, and Zakhidinkombank, connected to Yuriy Ivanyushchenko—an ex-MP from the Party of Regions, better known as “Yura Yenakiyevskiy,” who has been avoiding authorities since 2014. In the GetContact app, some users saved Hudenko’s number under tags like “Valeriy Ukragro,” “Hudenko Valeriy Zakhidinkombank,” and “Valeriy Firtash.”
Volodymyr Tsyba, also a lawyer, was one of the founders of the legal firm Spero Lo Group. Until 2017, he worked as chief legal counsel for Stroy Center LLC, where he specialized in preparing tender documentation. This company deals in grain, raw tobacco, seeds, animal feed, wholesale chemical products, and fuel retail. It also imports petroleum products from the Lithuanian firm Oilead.
According to tags in GetContact, Valeriy Hudenko also worked at Stroy Center. This might explain how Tsyba and Hudenko became acquainted with Irmantas Norkus, the Lithuanian businessman. Seeking to expand his operations from the Baltic states to Ukraine, Norkus entrusted the management of Pontem.UA to lawyers with years of experience handling business disputes for prominent players during the Yanukovych era. It seems Norkus had a clear strategy: he needed people who could help him secure tenders while managing complaints tied to the company’s questionable activities.

The History of Pontem: How Family Connections Secured Government Contracts
Pontem’s operations in Lithuania date back to 1968 when it began as a small grocery store, Smulkaus urmo, in Vilnius. The store was established to supply food to institutions such as kindergartens, hospitals, and pioneer camps. In 1990, following the collapse of the USSR, Smulkus urmas became a state-owned enterprise, and by 1992, it was restructured into a private entity under the name Closed Joint-Stock Company Smulkus urmas.
In the 2000s, the company expanded into school catering and introduced the “Myls” brand to the market. Later, it became part of the “ZIA Valda” group, owned by Lithuanian businessman Gediminas Žiemelis. Žiemelis has been closely associated with key figures linked to russian president vladimir putin, including Yevgeny Prigozhin, Arkady Rotenberg, Ilgam Ragimov (a friend and former classmate of putin), and Artur Taymazov, a member of the russian state duma representing the party “Yedinaya Rossiya”.
The father of ZIA Valda’s main shareholder, Vidmantas Žiemelis, served as a member of Lithuania’s parliament. This position opened doors for Smulkus urmas, which, in May 2009, won the contract to manage and operate the cafeteria, restaurant, buffet, and store in the Lithuanian Seimas (parliament). From there, success snowballed: within months, Smulkus urmas secured a catering contract for the workers of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, followed by a series of tenders to provide meals for kindergartens, schools, hospitals, airlines, and major industrial facilities across Lithuania.
It seems that Smulkus urmas realized early on that the key to market entry was through political offices rather than starting from the bottom. With the help of his father’s influence, Gediminas Žiemelis quickly positioned himself as a dominant player in Lithuania’s catering industry, establishing a foothold in just two years.
By 2013, the company was involved in a tax evasion scandal. Perhaps to distance itself from the controversy, it rebranded as Closed Joint-Stock Company Pontem in January 2013. According to Lithuanian media, the company owed much of its success in securing multimillion-euro contracts to the support of influential politician Juozas Bernatonis. In the fall of 2015, Irmantas Norkus acquired Pontem. Before this, Norkus had been a competitor in state catering contracts with his own company, Kretingos maistas. By merging these two major players under one umbrella, a true business giant emerged, capturing over 40% of Lithuania’s public sector catering market.

Monopolies often come hand in hand with violations. Irmantas Norkus’s company, Kretingos maitas, faced allegations of fraud, large-scale asset misappropriation, and falsified accounting practices between 2014 and 2016. These activities reportedly caused losses exceeding €100,000 to the Lithuanian tax authorities. As a result, Norkus rebranded the company as Bruneros. However, this rebranding failed to stop Lithuanian regulators from uncovering additional violations.
The Lithuanian State Food and Veterinary Service classified more than half of Bruneros’s kitchens and nearly a third of Pontem’s kitchens as high-risk. Despite these concerns, both companies continued to secure significant state contracts. From 2015 to 2018 alone, Pontem and Bruneros signed deals with the Lithuanian government worth over €125 million.
How Lithuanian Minister Keruskaskas and Ukrainian President Poroshenko Became Advocates for a Controversial Business Venture
This all took place in an EU country with strict antimonopoly regulations and robust anti-corruption policies. Now, think about how much simpler it is to work the public tender system in Ukraine — if you know the right people and strategies. That’s where lawyers Valeriy Hudenko and Volodymyr Tsyba come in to help Irmantas Norkus.
Their tactic is simple but effective: if Pontem.UA doesn’t win a tender or their application is rejected, the company’s lawyers file numerous complaints with Ukraine’s Antimonopoly Committee, forcing the tender to be canceled. This gives Pontem.UA another chance to join the new tender — this time with insider knowledge of competitors’ prices and requirements. Initially, the Antimonopoly Committee dismissed Pontem.UA’s complaints. But things changed when Lithuania’s Minister Plenipotentiary to Ukraine, Gvidas Keruškauskas, got involved. Alongside Irmantas Norkus, Keruškauskas held meetings with government officials and city mayors, promoting Pontem’s “innovative” approaches to school and hospital catering. It’s likely they also met with Antimonopoly Committee leadership, as shortly after Keruškauskas’s visit, the committee began canceling tender decisions and allowing Pontem.UA back into the process.
This strategy helped the company secure numerous education department contracts in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
In September 2016, just two months after it was registered, LLC Pontem.UA landed its first contract worth 5.1 million UAH from the Education Department of Kyiv’s Darnytskyi District. This opened the door for the company to quickly expand to other regions, including Mykolaiv, Kherson, Chernihiv, Myrhorod, Poltava, and Kremenchuk. In many cases, Pontem secured these contracts with the help of Ukraine’s Antimonopoly Committee (AMCU).
For example, in Chernihiv, Pontem.UA was initially excluded from the competition due to errors in its documents. However, AMCU stepped in and forced the committee to let the company participate. A similar situation happened in Poltava, where Pontem’s bid was rejected because it didn’t include important documents, such as a sample school menu approved by the State Food and Consumer Service or proof of equipment ownership. Pontem filed a complaint, and AMCU ruled in its favor, canceling the entire process because other bidders also had mistakes in their applications. These disputes often left schools without meals. In Poltava and Kyiv, for instance, AMCU’s decisions to cancel tenders led to delays in providing food to students. Pontem’s method of using AMCU to get contracts caused more problems than solutions.

Wherever LLC Pontem.UA faced resistance in tenders, complaints to the Antimonopoly Committee were used to clear the path for the Lithuanian company to secure contracts. In 2020, as reported by “Nashi Hroshi,” Pontem.UA removed its competitor, KP Promin of Sviatoshyn District Administration, in a tender worth 57.5 million UAH for school catering in Kyiv’s Darnytsia district. The AMCU forced the tender committee to reject Promin’s bid due to the absence of a document confirming ownership or lease of facilities—a requirement often cited to reject Pontem.UA’s bids. In the end, Pontem.UA won the contract, barely surpassing its sole remaining competitor, Dnipro-based LLC Food-Cook, by a margin of just 8,000 UAH.
By the way, an analysis of contracts awarded to Pontem.UA across Ukraine reveals a curious pattern: the company often wins tenders by offering a bid just a bit lower than its competitors — sometimes just a few hundred or even a single hryvnia. In Mykolaiv Oblast, Pontem beat its competitor, the Odesa-based company Olympia Service, with a bid that was exactly 1 UAH lower. Olympia Service alleged that local authorities in Mykolaiv were openly lobbying in favor of Pontem.UA.
In December 2018, then-President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, for reasons best known to him, publicly supported LLC Pontem.UA during the Ukraine-Lithuania Business Forum. He praised the company for supposedly “establishing a high-quality school catering system in Ukraine over the past two years.” By that time, Pontem.UA had already secured 57 contracts worth a total of 190 million UAH — a dream scenario for a newcomer in the market. After receiving this presidential recognition, the company’s path to landing more state contracts became even smoother and faster. After all, if the president himself backs a company, how could tender committees possibly object?
Remember the strategy of entering markets from the top down, rather than building from the bottom up? It seems that after succeeding with this approach in Lithuania, Pontem has managed to replicate it in Ukraine — and perhaps beyond.
How a Meeting with Moldova’s Prime Minister Secured Pontem a 150 Million Leu Contract
In late 2018, the Lithuanian company JSC Pontem expanded into Moldova, establishing its subsidiary, Pontem. X SRL. The company quickly began bidding for contracts to provide meals in schools and kindergartens in Chișinău. However, it was disqualified for not providing documents to show it could handle the job. As expected, the Moldovan branch of Pontem filed a complaint with the National Agency for Dispute Resolution but lost.
After this challenge, Pontem turned to the highest level of government. Irmantas Norkus managed to secure a meeting with Moldova’s Prime Minister, Pavel Filip, during which he discussed the challenges of providing quality meals in Moldovan schools and proposed solutions to address these issues.

A few months after the meeting, Pontem. X SRL effortlessly secured a 150 million lei contract to provide meals for 6,800 children across 66 educational institutions in Moldova’s largest region, Strășeni. Following this, Prime Minister Filip visited a kindergarten in Strășeni and stated, “There’s almost always resistance when introducing something new. But we’ll overcome it through quality. I’m confident this project will succeed and expand nationwide.”
What promises Irmantas Norkus made to the Ukrainian president and Moldovan prime minister in exchange for their high-level lobbying of his business remains unclear. However, while Poroshenko and Filip praised the exceptional quality of Pontem’s catering to their citizens, Norkus’s enterprise was blacklisted in Lithuania for supplying schools with substandard milk.
In Ukraine, the scenario is completely different: no blacklists for violations, no accountability. This is despite numerous complaints from parents and even officials about Pontem.UA’s operations over the years—enough to fill several “blacklists”.
Pontem.UA Systematically Violates Labor Laws: Former Employees Speak Out
Many former employees of Pontem.UA report frequent delays in salary payments or even complete non-payment, as well as unofficial employment practices. This, unfortunately, comes as no surprise. All the talk about a foreign company entering Ukraine to improve processes and significantly raise the quality of school and hospital catering is, in reality, a fiction.
When Pontem.UA entered the Ukrainian market, it didn’t hire its own staff of new cooks, invest in its own equipment, or establish its own network of suppliers. Its primary goal was to win tenders — a task that former lawyers of Firtash have been very good at to this day. Once the tender is secured, Pontem changes nothing in the kitchens of schools or kindergartens. Instead, the existing cooks who worked under a different company simply “switch over” to work for Norkus’s firm.
Pontem.UA reportedly hires only part of the necessary staff, and even then, not all of them are officially employed, likely to avoid paying taxes. Unofficial employees are often left without pay entirely, as many former workers claim. One review says:
“They don’t officially hire staff, they trick employees, delay promised wages, or don’t pay them at all. They force you to work overtime and on weekends without any compensation. In the end, you work 17-hour days without breaks, and then you don’t even get paid”.
With such practices, any claims about improving quality are hard to believe. In fact, these conditions likely make things worse.
Another review from September 2021 states: “This company is shit. They immediately cut staff wherever they operate! Of course, they’d rather line their pockets by working with fewer people — just one cook preparing meals for 200 kids”.

Pontem.UA Feeds Ukrainian Children Poor-Quality Meals: Complaints Keep Coming
Almost immediately after Pontem.UA began winning education department tenders in Kyiv districts, complaints from parents and officials started coming in. The first issues were reported in the Solomianskyi district. After the company won a tender with the lowest bid of just 7 UAH per school breakfast, it became clear that Pontem lacked the resources to provide meals for schools. As a result, children were left without food, prompting the Solomianskyi District Administration to escalate the matter to the prosecutor’s office.
A year later, the State Consumer Service conducted inspections of meal quality in Kyiv schools and kindergartens. Not surprisingly, the highest number of violations were found in districts where Pontem.UA operated.
“Just in the past month, Pontem.UA was found breaking numerous rules and regulations in providing children’s meals. Some of the issues recorded include violations in technological processes, improper storage of raw vegetables, meat, and fish, inadequate washing procedures, and more,” stated Oleg Ruban, Head of the State Consumer Service in Kyiv. He added that laboratory tests confirmed these violations.
However, neither appeals to the prosecutor’s office nor promises to terminate contracts made a difference. Pontem continued to win tenders, and complaints kept coming in. Parents of kids at the Kyivska Rus gymnasium in Osokorky, after hearing constant complaints from their children about school meals, decided to inspect the cafeteria and kitchen themselves.
“We saw some strange pickled products, inedible zucchini spread, black buckwheat that no one could swallow, and unidentified butter,” a parent involved in the inspection told the Left Bank publication. They also discovered a lack of staff in the kitchen, with those present working without health permits and serving underweight portions.
“To say the food was awful is an understatement! Rotten products, rock-hard bread rolls, it was horrifying! And this was being fed to kids, some of whom can barely chew properly,” wrote a user on a company review site in January 2023.

In October 2019, Kyiv resident Maryna Rassolova shared photos in the “Parents SOS” Facebook group showing the meals served to students at School No. 332 in Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district, where her child studies. She wrote:
“Another shocking incident with Pontem.UA’s kitchen staff at School 332. This is worse than yesterday’s cabbage leftovers in the borscht. According to today’s menu, it was supposed to be home-style potatoes and fresh vegetables, but since no vegetables were delivered, someone decided to serve plums instead. After the first lunch shift, leftover potatoes were thrown into a trash bin by someone on the kitchen team. Then, children from the second shift came to eat and found plum pits in their mouths! These were the pits from the plums eaten by earlier kids.
This wasn’t just one child — five kids complained to the teacher at the same time. It turned out the kitchen team hadn’t prepared enough potatoes and decided to pull leftovers out of the trash! And as if that weren’t enough, by the third lunch shift, there was no food left for the children. They were given rapidly cooked pasta instead — tiny portions of pasta that were terribly stuck together,” Rassolova wrote.

Marina’s post received over a thousand likes and several hundred comments, most of them negative. “I’m in shock. It’s terrifying to think about the bacteria that could have ended up on children’s plates from a trash bin. This is beyond unacceptable — serving leftovers,” wrote Hanna Donets.

Was there any response? Was Pontem.UA blacklisted, as the authorities did in Lithuania? Were they removed from schools? No, the company continued to win catering contracts for schools and kindergartens in Kyiv and other cities year after year, right up to the present day.
Over four years, “Pontem.UA” increased its earnings from government tenders by more than tenfold
Even a criminal case opened in June 2021 (№12021100040001743) against Pontem.UA for misusing public funds didn’t lead to any results. The company was accused of falsifying documents about food supplies, exaggerating quantities, and providing low-quality products under contracts with Kyiv’s Dnipro District Education Department. While investigators even searched Pontem’s offices, it’s no surprise that the case went nowhere and quietly disappeared.
Over eight years in Ukraine, Irmantas Norkus’s company has won 181 contracts to provide meals for schoolchildren and hospital patients.

The amounts Pontem.UA receives from the state budget keep growing rapidly. In 2022, the company earned 32 million UAH from tenders, which increased to 125 million UAH in 2023. By mid-2024, the total had already reached half a billion UAH. It seems Pontem’s success formula in Ukraine is simple: the more scandals, the more contracts; the worse the quality, the higher the profits.
But it’s not just schoolchildren on their radar. Valeriy Hudenko, director of Pontem.UA, apparently decided that poor-quality food could also be served to soldiers. In summer 2023, the company aimed for a nearly billion-UAH tender from the Ministry of Defense to supply food to Ukrainian Armed Forces units. However, Hudenko made a big mistake during the bidding process, submitting a final price of 10 million UAH instead of 950 million UAH in the second round, leading to Pontem.UA’s disqualification. Even without the mistake, they had little chance of winning — competitors had already offered prices 200 million UAH lower. Regardless, it’s clear that if not today, then soon enough, “rock-hard buns” and scraps from the trash might end up on the plates of Ukraine’s defenders.
And don’t forget passengers of Ukrzaliznytsia’s Intercity trains. Guess who managed to push out WOG from providing food services there? That’s right — Pontem.UA, once again helped by the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine. Referring to concerns over economic competition, the committee pushed Ukrzaliznytsia to conduct a new supplier selection process, and, unsurprisingly, the Lithuanian company led by Irmantas Norkus came out on top.