A prosecutor with the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) has sent to court an indictment against the former ultimate beneficial owner of PrivatBank and five former employees of the financial institution.
As SAPO’s press service reported, NABU detectives allege the bank suffered losses totaling more than 9.2 billion hryvnyas.
According to the investigation, in January–March 2015 one of the bank’s owners devised a scheme to finance a controlled offshore company and increase his stake in the institution’s charter capital. He involved the bank’s top managers and department heads in the scheme, including the former chairman of the management board and the treasury director.
The participants forged documents and artificially created an obligation for the bank to pay a controlled company more than 9.2 billion hryvnyas for the purported buyback of its own bonds at an inflated price.
Subsequently, the perpetrators laundered more than 446 million hryvnyas from this amount through a series of financial transactions and transferred it to the ultimate beneficial owner’s personal account. He contributed the funds to the bank’s charter capital to meet the requirements of a financial recovery program, while the remaining money was disposed of by the suspects at their own discretion.
The suspects are accused of misappropriation of property, money laundering, and official forgery.
- Last year, NABU and SAPO disclosed the case materials in the investigation into the former ultimate beneficial owner of PJSC CB PrivatBank and five members of a group he allegedly organised, suspected of embezzling more than UAH 9.2 billion from the bank.
- The investigation found that in January–March 2015 the bank’s ultimate beneficial owner—at the time the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration—developed a plan to seize PrivatBank funds to finance a controlled offshore company and increase his own stake in the bank’s charter capital.
- This concerns Ihor Kolomoyskyy.