'Florida Man' Lawsuit
NY Ukrainian Sports Club fights hostile takeover
“Florida Man” introduced Bandera Lobby Blog readers to Steve Gbur, or “Stevie Limo,” and a conflict in the New York Ukrainian Sports Club that is connected to a Banderite feud centered in Manhattan’s “Ukrainian East Village.” The Ukrainian Sports Club (YCK) sold its building in that neighborhood for millions of dollars in cash, and is relocating to Brooklyn. Earlier this month, for the second time in the past year, Gbur and a dissident group in YCK (“oosk”) held a dubious “special meeting” to declare a new board of directors of the Ukrainian American Soccer Association (UASA), which is more or less the YCK parent organization.
Gbur and co. met in the Banderite “Home of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front” in Manhattan. They’ve now been sued by the UASA board of directors that was elected in 2021, and they are being defended in court by Walter Drobenko, another character introduced in “Florida Man.” Drobenko is also now representing the “facade structure” that technically owns the Banderite building—the Organization for Defense of the Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU), and more specifically, the group that ignited the “local Banderite feud” by seizing control of the ODFFU in a 2019 “coup.” Drobenko’s sister married (and divorced) Gbur, and his son is married to the daughter of the ODFFU treasurer, who is the U.S. director of the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front.”
At the 2021 annual meeting of the Ukrainian American Soccer Association, the YCK soccer coach nominated a new president, Stephen Atamanchuk, but the incumbent won another term of three years. Nobody challenged the legitimacy of the results, but a year later, Atamanchuk joined forces with Steve Gbur, who returned from Florida to fundraise for the “Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation” and the “Free Ukraine Resistance Movement.”
The UASA held its first quarterly meeting of 2022 in January, and scheduled the next one for April 8. That was also the day that Atamanchuk, Gbur, and others convened their first coup attempt, or “special meeting.” Atamanchuk notified the UASA secretary and attorney on March 28. “In place of a special meeting, can you please put any questions or concerns into the agenda for the quarterly meeting?” asked the lawyer. “NO!!!” responded Atamanchuk on March 31. “We haven’t gotten any notices about a quarterly meeting so our special meeting will proceed.” Thirty minutes later, he followed that up with: “Sorry our notices has been sent out…” According to the UASA lawsuit,
Article 1 Section 5 of the [UASA] By-Laws requires that notice of a special meeting shall be given “not less than ten nor more than fifty days” in advance, and that the notice “shall indicate the purpose for which [it] is called.” As shown below, respondents’ special meeting notice violated both of these provisions. Atamanchuk sent notice of the special meeting to the membership by email on March 31, 2022, for a Zoom meeting to be held at 7 p.m. on April 8, 2022. This notice violated the By-laws because it was sent only 8 days before the meeting, rather than the required 10 days. The second By-Laws violation is that the 7-point agenda that was sent along with the invitation to the special meeting did not include anything concerning the removal and replacement of UASA board members and officers. Nonetheless, this is exactly what respondents purported to have accomplished at that meeting… Furthermore, Article III, Section 6 of the By-Laws provide that the directors can only be removed “for cause by a vote of Directors then in office at a regular meeting or special meeting of the Board called for that purpose.” Respondents satisfied none of these requirement.
Stephen Atamanchuk sent a letter on UASA letterhead to the board of directors saying that they had been removed from office. Members of the “new board,” all of whom attended the 2021 annual meeting (except for Steve Gbur in Florida), then delivered a copy of this letter to the Ukrainian American credit unions that UASA banks with, “which constituted an illegal demand to take control of UASA’s accounts.” The Ukrainian Selfreliance Federal Credit Union decided to freeze the accounts until the conflict is “resolved by mutual agreement or court order.” The “old board” organized a special meeting in June 2022 “to investigate and resolve an unusual event that has occurred in the UASA organization.”
A group of our members decided to form a new board of directors without following the procedures laid out in By-Laws in an attempt to take over the organization… What this basically means is that we cannot do business and pay our bills, such as building construction, electrical, taxes, etc. This can cause irreparable disruption to the day-to-day operations of the UASA. This is an attempted hostile takeover of the UASA in circumvention of the organization’s By-Laws. It was orchestrated behind the backs of the members and current board and without our knowledge or authorization. Furthermore, these members knew about scheduled quarterly meeting on April 8, 2022 and instead of attending the same, held a shadow special meeting on the same day and time to create a conflict.
It seems obvious to me that this “attempted hostile takeover” was at least inspired by the ODFFU “coup” launched in 2019. “There’s NO Real Board of Directors,” Steve Gbur complained to the YCK membership later that year. Gbur allegedly tried sponsoring Askold Lozynskyj, a notorious Banderite and lead architect of the ODFFU takeover, for membership in YCK. At the June 2022 special meeting, the dwindling UASA membership voted to sanction the dissident group for six months, rather than expel them. In December, the UASA attorney sent a cease and desist letter to the “new board” that explained the illegitimacy of their April 2022 special meeting.
Later that month, “in an attempt to correct their prior mistakes,” the sanctioned Atamanchuk-Gbur group called for another special meeting. In January 2023, the UASA leadership “permanently and immediately” suspended them, but a couple weeks ago, they went and declared a new leadership of the UASA again. They met in the US headquarters building of the internationally active OUN-B, or clandestine Banderite faction of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Gbur, a hot-headed Banderite who embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from a former employer, was named chairman of the audit committee.