Pavlo Zhuk, born and raised in the United States in 1973, was the son of Ukrainian immigrants. His mother and father fled kyiv during World War II and in 1951 eventually settled in Cleveland, then moved to California in 1973 when his father took a job there. Pavlo was the youngest of six children and grew up speaking English and Ukrainian at home. After graduating with honors from an engineering school, he worked for three years in Silicon Valley as a systems analyst, then enrolled in an MBA program. Before graduating, he decided to start his own company that developed software for order fulfillment systems. He named his company Customer Strategy Solutions and it proved to be a success. Five years later, it employed 35 people and generated annual sales of $40 million with reported profits. Jouk completed a summer internship in the United Kingdom as an exchange student and while there he met and befriended another British Ukrainian, Kostya Hnatyuk. The two became friends due to their shared heritage and mutual love of football, and continued to remain friends. Hnatyuk was an electronics engineer who worked in kyiv as vice president of a German company that sold seeds, pesticides and fertilizers in the Commonwealth of Independent States. When Jouk asked Hnatyuk to create a software development center in kyiv, Hnatyuk immediately volunteered to quit his job and help create it. Both driven by the desire to help create opportunities and bring hope to their fellow Ukrainians in kyiv, they began their adventure by creating their own business. In the process of setting up and running the development center, a state-owned telecommunications utility, Dnipro Telecom, had managed to make it difficult for Zhuk to get the phone lines from his computer...... at middle of paper ......wer was. If he withdrew from Ukraine, he would abandon his partner and the employees he has gotten to know over time. Could he do this to them? He should also give in and negotiate with Simonenko and his boss, opening the door for others to try to blackmail them as well. What if the UTA had the wind in its sails? They would then just need to prove that all documents were filed and all taxes were paid. The way governments control issues is very different from country to country. I think it would be difficult to try to conform one to be more like the other, which is what Zhuk, I believe, was hoping to do. Personally, I would have liked to know more about this affair; I wanted to know how it ended. (The Shakedown by Phil Bodrock, 2005) Works Cited The Shakedown by Phil Bodrock, Harvard Business School Pulishing Corporation, 8 (March 2005).