From naked capitalism, November 3:
Yves here. Gambling in Casablanca? Boatloads of money going astray in Ukraine? Quelle surprise!
Actually, the only surprise is how openly remiss the IMF has been in keeping tabs on the dough it has been funneling into Ukraine. Recall that the original loans to Ukraine were already in violation of IMF rules, since states in conflict are supposed to be no-go zones, and it was awfully hard to deny that Ukraine was in a civil war, with 14,000 dead and 1.5 million refugees fleeing to Russia and Belarus.
One also has to wonder if some of these IMF funds did wind up getting to intended targets, like mercenaries. Former Swiss intelligence officer and NATO small weapons program inspector Jacques Baud said the Ukraine armed forces needed to be beefed up quickly after the war in the Donbass started and came to be composed 40% of mercenaries. So the leakage could be partly by design, to hide key recipients.
But even if true, the best case scenario is an awful lot of official grift to get money to black ops types. Hard to believe we don’t have less greedy cutouts in the mix.
By John Helmer who has been the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to have directed his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. Originally published at Dances with Bears
A new report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals that the Ukraine has become a thieves’ paradise in which corporate loan defaults are written off; embezzlement from banks is not traced; the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) no longer audits the country’s bank liabilities and reserves; and the IMF admits it cannot tell how much of the $35 billion in foreign cash grants and loans promised to Kiev has been disbursed, or to whom.
“Disbursements of all committed funds over the remaining months of the year is urgently needed and will make a difference,” declares Kristalina Georgieva (lead image), the IMF Managing director since 2019, “especially in light of the recent horrific damage to energy infrastructure.” Georgieva was speaking in Berlin on October 25.
“In a best-case scenario,” she added, “we estimate that Ukraine’s financing needs would be about $3 billion per month. When we incorporate some additional financing for higher gas imports and some repair of critical infrastructure, we quickly reach $4 billion per month. The recent missile attacks, which have clearly caused much more damage, not only confirms the validity of these estimates but leads us to consider $5 billion upper range.”
However, in a 32-page IMF staff report on the state of Ukrainian budget finance and the risk of system-wide financial collapse, the Fund experts have concluded that “large-scale forbearance with a delayed recognition of NPLs [commercial bank non-performing loans] and the suspension of NBU enforcement actions and audits of financial statements make a comprehensive assessment of the impact of the war difficult and uncertain.” The report has been released at this link on the IMF website.
“Uncertainty” is IMF officialspeak for black hole. “The balance of probabilities,” according to the staff paper dated October 3, “would suggest that Ukraine has an unsustainable level of debt.” According to the Fund rules, this should suspend or stop IMF and all other foreign government cashflows....
....MUCH MORE
I am always a bit suspicious when reading Helmer. The fact that he has been able to remain in Moscow all these years means he obviously knows what lines he cannot cross regarding Russia coverage. It's the same situation that CNN got itself into in Iraq where, to maintain access they eventually became nothing more than Baghdad's mouthpiece. (WaPo 2003)
On the other hand re: Helmer, he's reporting on the IMF, who put out the docs in question.
Regarding the tens of billions of dollars of equipment the U.S. now has boots on the ground in Ukraine attempting to locate the largess and make some sort of accounting.
As they said about Vietnam in '62: "but the administration stresses that these forces are not in combat."
