Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Sat 08/02/2025 View Fri 08/01/2025 View Thu 07/31/2025 View Wed 07/30/2025 View Tue 07/29/2025 View Mon 07/28/2025 View Sun 07/27/2025
2025-08-02 Government Corruption
The End of the Oligarch: Former Chief Zelensky's Business Empire to Be Torn Apart
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Denis Davydov

[REGNUM] “When we finished our investigation, the client couldn’t believe his eyes: Kolomoisky turned out to be much bigger than his country,” the head of a forensic company that studied the “business” of the main Ukrainian oligarch once shared his impressions.

Now his fairy tale has come to an end: on July 30, the now state-owned Privatbank announced that it had won a court case in London against its former owners, Igor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov. Nationalized in December 2016, the bank filed a lawsuit against them in the High Court of London, accusing them of siphoning off about $2 billion into the accounts of their companies.

London appeared here for the simple reason that the money was being withdrawn through six companies affiliated with Kolomoisky and his partner, which are also defendants in this case. Three of them are registered in Britain, the rest are from the British Virgin Islands.

By the summer of 2023, the amount of claims had grown to almost $4.5 billion, including interest — about half a million dollars a day. And Igor Valerievich himself, once full of confidence in his immunity and living in Switzerland for months, watched all this from the SBU pretrial detention center.

He has been here since September of the same 2023, when the court sent him to jail for only 60 days with the option to post bail of 509 million and some change. A couple of weeks later, the bail was increased to 3.8 billion hryvnia, then reduced, but, one way or another, the greedy "Benya" refused to pay on principle.

"Because I believe that this is racketeering at the state level using all the security structures, including the judiciary. I was taken hostage, put in prison and they are demanding money," Kolomoisky said in court and may now regret his decision.

It would have been much cheaper.

Because the case itself ended in November 2023, and since then the announcement of the decision has been constantly postponed, and it itself has "grown" to five hundred pages. It is easy to guess that the growth of interest was the main purpose of the wait - the final amount of 4.2 billion dollars means the actual confiscation of all property, which the Ukrainians, the British, and the US, whose Justice Department once started the whole story by bringing charges of robbing Privatbank and buying real estate in the States with laundered money, will be happy to do.

And there, Kolomoisky, who pleads not guilty, owns $70 million in commercial real estate in Dallas and Louisville, Kentucky. He also owns the Warren Steel Holdings steel mill in Ohio and a dozen more such plants, four office towers in Cleveland, and a 484-room hotel overlooking the waterfront there.

In London, the Privat group (this is its unofficial name) also owns excellent real estate - as well as in a number of European countries. Therefore, now the process will flow into a search for all the property, proof of its belonging to Ukrainian oligarchs and seizure through the court.

Although there is no need to look for anything special - the aforementioned forensic company also worked for a reason. As noted in the documents that are at the disposal of the Regnum news agency, the ubiquitous Dnepropetrovsk Jews built a separate "mycelium" even in Australia, where, in particular, they owned the Fortescue company, the fourth largest iron ore producer in the world.

And in African Ghana, Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov's firms from the Virgin Islands controlled 90% of the shares of Nsuta Gold Mining Ltd., which produces gold and has a rich manganese mine in the western region of the country.

In Ukraine, where the core of the empire is concentrated, there are still plenty of tasty morsels left even after the oligarch was stripped of 40% of the shares of the mining company Ukrnafta, a block of shares in the Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant, and a grain terminal in the Odessa region in 2022.

He remained a co-owner of the Zaporizhia Ferroalloy Plant and the Krivoy Rog Iron Ore Plant, and owns the Marganets and Pokrovsky Mining and Processing Plants, which mine manganese ore. Benya also remains a beneficiary of the 1+1 Media media holding, which includes the 1+1, 2+2, TET, Plusplus and Ukraine Today TV channels.

Considering that Ukrainian courts have already satisfied Privatbank's claims against former shareholders, all of this will most likely be "nationalized", that is, will change its owner, who would be happy to become, for example, the oligarch's ungrateful protégé, Vladimir Zelensky.

The basis for the lawsuit, which was heard in London, was a scheme to withdraw funds through 270 loans by 46 borrowers associated with the former owners. The scheme was covered by so-called "loan recycling", that is, previous loans were repaid from subsequent loans, and along the way some of the money was lost among numerous transactions.

But this is only one of many cunning machinations that were investigated by the SBU and the ubiquitous NABU, each in its own line. The latter, on July 23, completed its work on the “organized criminal group” headed by the bank’s owner, which in January–March 2015 developed a plan to seize the bank’s money in order to then finance an offshore company under its control and increase its own share in the authorized capital of Privatbank.

Real estate in the States was purchased using a scheme in which the group's ferroalloy plants received credit lines, withdrew money from the bank and split the amounts: some was laundered, some was redistributed among other companies in the Privat group, and some was returned to the bank. And the loans were brazenly "paid off" through the courts by recognizing their payment.

Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov (who successfully fled to Austria) behaved just as brazenly in the London court, which had never seen the defendant but highly praised his behavior. It is noted that both of them, until the very end, groundlessly held a public position on "political persecution" and "violation of human rights" on all issues: from the nationalization of the bank to legal disputes.

And they refused to testify in court without any acceptable explanation.

Instead, they tried in every way to drag out the process: the claim was regularly proposed to include "belated amendments", the plaintiff received the requested documents late, the court was asked to give time to find evidence, and then to turn a blind eye to its absence. The British judge, who described his emotions in the decision, considered that this was "an unjustified and potentially harmful delaying tactic".

The oligarch's request to soften the arrest conditions, since several planes (Kolomoisky owned the company "International Airlines of Ukraine"), which were idle in Kyiv and Odessa, finished him off. Moreover, the court received the request a day before the end date of the potential sale under the contract.

And Gennady Bogolyubov, despite the arrest, in 2023 liquidated three dozen companies from the British Virgin Islands that owned his assets.

So the harsh decision is fully justified by the circumstances. And then the chances of the "main beneficiary" to get out of this interesting story unscathed are very small. The admission of fraud in a civil suit is a reason for British law enforcement to start criminal proceedings. The sum of 400 million pounds, which is the value of Bogolyubov's personal property alone, is an excellent motivator for work.

For example, the pearl of London real estate, according to Regnum news agency, is the Grand Buildings on Trafalgar Square, built in the 1870s, which Bogolyubov bought in 2010 for 173 million pounds. The next number on the list is houses No. 27-31 in the elite Knightsbridge area, bought for 55 million pounds.

Secondly, the FBI investigation into the Privat schemes is ongoing in the US, and we have already explained everything about their motivation. And just in case, in June the Delaware court determined the application of the preclusive (i.e. mandatory) effect of the decisions of Ukrainian courts to the Privatbank lawsuit in the US. And in principle, the conditions are quite consistent with the decision of the London court - it is only necessary to expand the scope of the mandatory effect.

Accordingly, claims that may be made by an American court based on the FBI investigation materials will hardly be ignored in Ukraine. So who will become the new owner of the ferroalloy plants is still a matter of two minds. And Bogolyubov, who has agreed to cooperate with NABU, will definitely not be as greedy as his senior partner – it is already obvious to everyone that Kolomoisky has played himself into oblivion.

Although he is still trying to play politics from his comfortable pretrial detention center to knock Zelensky out, his card is already beaten. The once powerful arbiter of fates, who held political parties in his pocket and set up his president, will be plucked and thrown into the trash.

And the main thing is that no one will even say a kind word about him at the end.

Posted by badanov 2025-08-02 00:00|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| ||Comments [35 views ]  Top

19:51 trailing wife
18:22 Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435
18:10 Besoeker
16:58 Super Hose
16:02 Clem+Elmish4239
15:48 European Conservative
15:45 European Conservative
15:39 Elmerert Hupens2660
15:35 Procopius2k
15:31 Procopius2k
14:46 Marilyn Hatrack6456
14:37 Whiskey Mike
14:30 NoMoreBS
14:10 Skidmark
14:05 Abu Uluque
14:05 Abu Uluque
13:59 Abu Uluque
13:52 Skidmark
13:50 Abu Uluque
13:45 Super Hose
13:45 magpie
13:44 Super Hose
13:44 Abu Uluque
13:43 Super Hose
Merry-Go-Blog










Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com