From the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, April 19:
The former chairwoman of Ukraine’s central bank dubbed it one of the biggest financial scandals of the 21st century.
Valeria Hontareva was describing the alleged theft of US$5.5 billion
from PrivatBank, once the country’s largest commercial lender. The
suspected masterminds are the bank’s two oligarch owners: Ihor
Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Boholiubov, who stand accused of absconding with
an amount roughly equal to 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic
product. According to court records, both men are said to have recently
been living in Switzerland, though Kolomoisky appears to be spending
time in Israel.
“Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank shareholders
and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,”
Hontareva said in March 2018. “This is 33 percent of the population’s
deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.”
Now, for the first time, OCCRP has traced the mechanism that appears
to have allowed Kolomoisky and Boholiubov to funnel such vast wealth out
of Ukraine: The money was moved through a PrivatBank subsidiary in
Cyprus.
The arrangement helped hide the fact that cash was disappearing
because the National Bank of Ukraine treated the Cyprus branch of
PrivatBank the same as it would domestic branches. This designation
meant officials never detected that cash transferred to Cyprus was
leaving Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Cypriot regulators either failed to detect that the
various bank transfers totalling $5.5 billion were backed by bogus
contracts, or didn’t take the necessary action to stop them.
The system allowed billions of dollars to be pumped through the
PrivatBank accounts, which were held in Cyprus by offshore companies.
This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based
corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report, which is
based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP,
also reveals that there was little distinction between Kolomoisky and
Boholiubov’s corporate and personal accounts.
Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank in December 2016, saddling taxpayers
with a $5.9 billion bailout. The nationalization was widely supported by
the international community, including the IMF, the European Union, and
the United States, which called it a “milestone in economic reform and
the fight against corruption.”
Kolomoisky has said he wants $2 billion in PrivatBank capital returned to him. And on April 19, a Kyiv court ruled PrivatBank’s nationalization unlawful, deciding in favor of the oligarch and setting the stage for a prolonged legal battle.
In a letter circulated to the media by Kolomoisky’s Swiss office, the
oligarch refuted allegations by the National Bank of Ukraine that
Privatbank had engaged in fraudulent lending practices.
“I categorically deny the allegations made by the National Bank of
Ukraine,” Kolomoisky said, adding that regulators had all the access
they needed to monitor his bank’s activities. He painted the
authorities’ nationalization of his lending business as an asset grab.
“Management of the [Ukrainian central bank] had as its main purpose
not the support of the country’s largest bank, but its nationalization
and the expropriation of the assets provided as security, together with
the persecution and pressuring of the former shareholders,” Kolomoisky
said.
Boholiubov declined to speak on the record.
The new revelations about how the scheme worked emerge just as
Kolomoisky stands to increase his already considerable influence in
Ukraine through the country’s presidential election. A candidate
favoured by the oligarch — Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a comedian who appears
on his television channel 1+1 — won the first round of the election,
which may determine whether the country continues its already shaky
course of anti-corruption reforms. Zelenskiy will now face off against
President Poroshenko in the final round.
An independent analysis funded by the Council of Europe and published
Feb. 18 shows that Kolomoisky’s 1+1 channel overwhelmingly favors
Zelenskiy in its news coverage. On March 30, the day before the first
round of the elections — which by law should be free of campaigning —
the channel was scheduled to broadcast 7.5 hours of Zelenskiy’s
programs.
The candidate has disputed that he owes Kolomoisky anything.
“He is my business partner, not my boss,” Zelenskiy said in an interview.
Accounting Tricks
Privatbank launched its Cyprus operation in the late 1990s. No other
Ukrainian lender is known ever to have received permission from the
National Bank of Ukraine to open an overseas branch.
The head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Yakiv Smolii, said
PrivatBank’s Cyprus office didn’t materially differ from the lender’s
branches in Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv or Lutsk, so cash being
funnelled there didn’t trigger any regulatory action. Ukrainian
officials did nothing to stop the money from leaving the country.
(Smolii spoke to OCCRP in his capacity as co-author of the book “Private
Story: The Rise and Fall of Ukraine’s Largest Private Bank.”)...
Much of the world seems to have forgotten about 'ol Ihor but there are a lot of secrets in Ukraine and he would be privy to some big ones,
Additionally, there is something very strange about his returning to Ukraine, getting arrested and being put on ice as the old-time mobsters used to say.
There is some talk that he will get Epsteined while in custody and some further talk that should that (appear to) happen there is a real chance he might show up in Israel in five years.
Statistically, your odds of resurrection are better in Jerusalem than just about anywhere else.
Here's the latest, from the Kyiv Independent, January 23:
Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky will remain in custody until March
2 with a bail set at Hr 2.65 billion ($71 million), Suspilne reported on Jan. 22, citing the Shevchenkivskyi district court’s decision.
Kolomoisky was charged
with fraud and laundering over Hr 500 million ($13.3 million) between
2013 and 2020, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported on Sept.
2, 2023.
A few days later, the oligarch and five other associates were accused of embezzling Hr 9.2 billion ($246 million) from PrivatBank, Ukraine's largest bank formerly owned by Kolomoisky.
Under
separate charges, Kolomoisky is also suspected of creating a criminal
group with PrivatBank's employees and illegally acquiring Hr 5.8 billion
($155 million) between 2013 and 2014....
That's another oddity, the so-called bail requirement. The guy was a multi-billionaire and even accounting for losses and dissipation of his assets due to the vicissitudes of war, he could probably scrape together $71 million with a phone call. If he wanted to.
We have quite a few posts on Kolomoisky, different pieces of the puzzle.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done an astoundingly thorough job of turning up facts and figures on one part of the story of a very, very bad person.... February 2022 Secrets: Ukraine's Zelensky Will Be Thrown Under the Bus As His Oligarch Patron Gets Squeezed (Deutsche Bank and dirty money) President Zelensky was not the optimal winner for the U.S. and Britain in the 2019 Ukraine election. The West was very happy with their guy, Petro Poroshenko, installed after the 2014 Maidan coup. Zelensky's sugar-daddy, Ihor Kolomoyskyi made a big bet on Zelensky and the result was a blow-out 73 - 25 victory for Zelensky. However....
And many more. We'll see if there is anything to our suspicions,
If interested see yesterday's comment on the author of this piece, John Helmer, and his possible biases. In the case of Burisma I don't think they matter except possibly as an impetus to figuring out where the billions went.
From Dances With Bears, February 19, 2015 (pictures omitted):
THE HUNT FOR BURISMA, PART II — WHAT ROLE FOR IGOR KOLOMOISKY, WHAT LONDON MISSED, WHAT WASHINGTON DOESN’T WANT TO SEE
By John Helmer, Moscow
The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the Central Criminal Court have
reported that Nikolai Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian businessman and twice the
minister of state for oil and gas licences, is the controlling
shareholder of the Ukrainian gas producer Burisma. So what are employees
of Igor Kolomoisky, warlord of Dniepropetrovsk and controller of the
Privatbank Group, doing as the shareholder representatives on the
Burisma board?
Kolomoisky isn’t the accommodating, retiring, passive sort, say
sources who work with him. Zlochevsky has the more bending character of
the two, the sources claim. So is Burisma their cooperative and joint
venture, or is Zlochevsky Kolomoisky’s front-man, just as others were
for Zlochevsky in the ten-year history of Burisma’s acquisition of
valuable oil and gas prospects.
Zlochevsky, now 48, headed the Ukrainian State Committee for
Resources between 2003 and 2005. He then served in the Verkhovna Rada
where he presided over legislation regulating resource licences. Between
2010 and 2012 he was the Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. He
then became Deputy Secretary of then President Victor Yanukovich’s
National Security Council.
During the years he was a state official, if he acquired business
assets, especially from licensing awards he was able to direct or
influence in his official capacity, Zlochevsky was obliged to act
indirectly. The transaction records
of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirm that in 2009
Zlochevsky (below, right) and a partner, Nikolai Lisin (left), were
the beneficial shareholders at the receiving end of a chain in which
Millington Solutions and Sunrise Energy Resources sold title to two
Ukrainian gasfields, Pari and Esko Pivnich.
Sunrise Energy Resources was a Delaware state company; Millington Solutions
was a short-lived UK front, registered at an address on Regent
Street, London, where the most active line of business was escort sex.
Signing for Sunrise was its purported chief executive, Konstantin
Tsiryulnikov; signing for Millington was Yevgeny Kozlov.
As their names suggest, these two are of Russian origin, with Soviet
backgrounds. In the history of Burisma and its Ukrainian gasfields, they
end up in Canada. Here is Tsiryulikov today and this appears to be Kozlov, an Ottawa lawyer.
For the start of the transaction chain in which Esko Pivnich (pictured
below in 2006-2007) ends up on Burisma’s balance-sheet, read this filing with the SEC in 2004.
In April of 2011 Lisin, whose business lines also included petroleum
products, was killed in a car crash, apparently self-induced but by accident.
In August 2012, a Ukrainian group calling itself the Anti-Corruption
Action Centre (AntAC), reporting its research into the ownership of
Ukrainian gasfields, claimed that Zlochevsky had sold out the year
before, apparently after Lisin’s death.
AntAC describes itself as “a Ukrainian civil society organization,
which unites experts from legal, media and civic-political sectors
fighting corruption as a root cause of the key state-building problems
in Ukraine.” Zlochevsky had let go of Burisma through a chain of
companies called Ukrnaftoburinnya (Ukraine), Deripon Commercial Ltd.
(Cyprus) and Burrard Financial Corporation (BVI). AntaAC’s reports cites
Oleh Kanivets, a former chief executive of Ukrnaftoburinnya, as saying
the chain ended up with Kolomoisky. “The Privat Group is the immediate
owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group.”
In March 2014, days after the ouster of Yanukovich in Kiev and the
installation of a new regime, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started
investigating Zlochevsky. According to the evidence it presented to
the Central Criminal Court between March and December of 2014, and
according to Justice Blake, who assessed the evidence, there is no
mention of Lisin, Deripon, Burrard or Kolomoisky. The judge’s report of
how Zlochevsky came by the Pari and Esko Pivnich licences refers only
to the fact that Zlochevsky was the state official in charge at the
licensing authority, the State Committee for Natural Resources at the
time.
The operative companies accepted by the UK investigators and the
judge to have been wholly or partly owned by Zlochevsky are identified
as Burisma Holdings (Cyprus), Brociti Investments (Cyprus), Chartlux
Resources Inc., its subsidiary TOV Kam, Cipriato Alliance Limited
(Belize), Seanon Limited, Kisaliano Holdings Limited (BVI), Infox,
Vestorgia Holdings Limited (Cyprus), Egeli Services (Cyprus) , and
Audrinura Trade LLP (UK). The transaction chains involving these names
were reported to the SFO and to the court by Zlochevsky’s lawyer, Andrei
Kicha, in order to explain how cash of up to $35 million ended up in
London bank accounts of Burisma. Most of the money and most of the names
were reported to have nothing to do with Burisma’s gas business but
came, allegedly, from real estate dealings by Zlochevsky.
Justice Blake concluded that SFO’s investigation had been barking up
the wrong tree. “The transactions appear to involve more corporate
vehicles than might seem necessary, but Mr Kicha explains that special
purpose vehicles are often the means of conducting large scale
transactions in Ukraine and explains why foreign companies and bank
accounts are preferred to domestic ones. There is nothing to suggest
that any other inference than criminality is implausible.” For Blake’s
judgement to lift the freeze order on the bank accounts, read this.
How could it be that the SFO testified, and the judge accepted, that
Kicha, the lawyer acting for Burisma and Zlochevsky, was moving
Zlochevsky’s cash, when AntAC and other Ukrainian evidence already
suggested that Zlochevsky had sold Burisma to the Privatbank group
sometime in 2011? Did SFO investigator, Richard Gould, fail to
substantiate this with Ukrainian authorities in Kiev? Did the succession
of Ukrainian prosecutors evade questions on the point because of
Kolomoisky’s countervailing influence? The SFO won’t get into detail.
According to spokesman Nilima Fox, “I am unable to share anything
further, however, due to the ongoing investigation.”
The Blake judgement of January 21 reveals that the court is open to
more evidence, but for the time being it isn’t too keen to understand
what is happening in Kiev to cover up for Burisma. The Ukrainian media
are reporting that Prosecutor-General Vitaly Yarema (right) was pushed
out of office on February 11 because he has reopened the Burisma
investigation, aiming not at Zlochevsky, but at Kolomoisky. His
dismissal, according to the uncorroborated reports, was Kolomoisky’s
doing.
Privat Bank won’t answer questions on the relationship to Burisma, and neither will Burisma.
One explanation for the gap in the Blake judgement is that the
evidence submitted to the court not only indicates that Zlochvesky kept
bank accounts at BNP Paribas in London with the Burisma name; but also
that he didn’t use them for Burisma’s gas business. That, the company
website suggests, was firmly under control of the two genuine directors
on the Burisma board
– Anzelika Pasenidou and Riginos Kharalambus. These are genuine in
the sense that the Americans on the board – David Apter, Devon Archer,
and Hunter Biden — are not, because Pasenidou and Kharalambus directly
represent the control shareholder.
An investigation of Pasenidou and Kharalambus (aka Charalambous)
uncovers a fresh chain of offshore entities in which they are also board
directors or executives. There is no overlap between this chain and the
Zlochevsky one pursued by the UK investigators. So where, and to whom,
does the Pasenidou-Kharalambus chain lead?....
Last Wednesday I dropped a little Easter Egg because I wasn't sure if I should do anything further: "Latvia wants foreigners to stop buying land" Meanwhile, as part of the IMF shenanigans in Ukraine a land reform
package was required which basically meant Ukraine had to sell land to
foreigners to get the latest multi-billion dollar loan....
That's it, one little sentence.
So we'll begin with some background. This is far from the whole story because quite a bit has been learned in the intervening years but it's a good place to start.
Two things to keep in mind:
1) Ukraine is the most corrupt place in Europe (outside Brussels)
2) Nothing is as it seems.
From Harpers:
Undelivered Goods
How $1.8 billion in aid to Ukraine was funneled to the outposts of the international finance galaxy
Update: As
Washington gets a crash course in Ukrainian politics, awkward facts
begin to surface, such as the ongoing, close relationship between comedian President Volodymyr Zelensky and oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky,
who sponsored Zelensky’s rise to the presidency. While President Trump
was soliciting a “favor” from Zelensky in the form of dirt on Biden,
the Ukrainian must have been hoping for a return favor on behalf of his
sponsoring oligarch, the subject of scathing reports that
he looted IMF aid to Ukraine via the bank he owned. Back in August,
2015, Washington Editor Andrew Cockburn was way ahead of the story.
Arriving home from a recent trip to
Ukraine, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle reported his joy at
witnessing “the Ukrainian people . . . coming together to rebuild their
country from scratch.” Ukrainians had, he wrote, moved him with their
dreams of joining the European Union, fighting corruption, and
rebuilding their shattered economy, inspiring Daschle, now a highly paid
lobbyist, to endorse the ominously strengthening Washington consensus
on escalating the fighting with “$3 billion in lethal and nonlethal
military assistance.”
Daschle’s trip was sponsored by the National Democratic Institute, an
affiliate of the congressionally funded National Endowment for
Democracy, headed by ur-neoconservative Carl Gershman, who some time ago
identified Ukraine as “the biggest prize” for Russia and deployed
considerable amounts of the taxpayer dollars at his disposal to securing
it for the West. However, it has been Assistant Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland who has played the most active role in pursuit of the
prize. Therefore, her interventions in Ukrainian politics and the
realities of politics and business in that country deserve closer
attention than they have so far received.
“Toria” Nuland, as I reported in the January 2015 issue of Harper’sMagazine,
has enjoyed a remarkable career, occupying a succession of powerful
positions through changing administrations, despite her close neocon
associations over the years both marital—her husband being leading
neocon ideologue Robert Kagan—and political, notably as a
national-security adviser to former vice president Dick Cheney. In the
buildup to the 2008 Russo-Georgia war, for example, Nuland, at the time
ambassador to NATO, urged George Bush to accept both Georgia and Ukraine
as NATO members. Since Georgia’s then president and neocon favorite,
Mikheil Saakashvili, had high hopes of drawing the United States in on
his side in the coming conflict, this was a dangerous initiative.
Fortunately, Bush, by that time leery of neocon advice, stood firm
against her pleas.
Despite her ongoing proximity to power, Nuland attracted little
public attention until the leak of an intercepted phone call gave the
rest of us a taste of how she operates. Incautiously chatting on her
cell on January 28, 2014, with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey
Pyatt, as the Kiev street protests against elected Ukrainian Viktor
Yanukovych gathered momentum, Nuland and the diplomat mulled over who
should now rule the country. Their candidate was “Yats,” the opposition
politician Aseniy Yatsenyuk, as opposed to another opposition candidate,
former world heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, favored by
various European powers. Nuland was determined to keep Klitschko out
and, as she infamously remarked on that call, “fuck the E.U.”
However, despite her enthusiasm for Yatsenyuk, Nuland was clearly
well aware of who was really pulling the strings in Ukrainian politics:
the oligarchs, who had assembled enormous fortunes out of the wreckage
of the Soviet economy. Chief among these were those connected to the
import of Russian natural gas, on which Ukraine was heavily dependent,
most especially Dmitry Firtash, a multimillionaire and key supporter of
the government Nuland hoped to displace. This may explain why, at the
end of 2013, Firtash found himself the subject of a U.S. international
“wanted” notice, charged with attempting to bribe local officials in
distant India. He happened to be in Vienna, and a request was
accordingly submitted to the Austrian government for his extradition
back to the United States to stand trial.
On the day the request was submitted, Victoria Nuland left Washington
on an urgent visit to Ukraine. President Yanukovych appeared to be
backtracking on a pledge to sign an association agreement with the
European Union— the specific “biggest prize” cited by Gershman in a Washington Post op-ed the month before. If Yanukovych were to be persuaded to change his mind, threatening to put his sponsor Dmitry Firtashbehind
bars was a potent lever to apply. Four days later, Yanukovych signaled
he was ready to sign, whereupon Washington lifted the request to shackle
his billionaire ally.
A month later, Yanukovych changed course again, accepting a $15
billion Russian aid package. Street protests in Kiev followed, eagerly
endorsed by Nuland, who subsequently distributed cookies in gratitude to
the demonstrators. Yanukovych fled Kiev on February 22, and four days
later the United States renewed the request to the Austrians to arrest
Firtash. They duly did. Briefly imprisoned, Firtash posted the
equivalent of $174 million bail and waited for a court to rule on his
appeal against extradition.
Nevertheless, Firtash was still politically powerful enough in
Ukraine to decide who should become president. The two leading
candidates for the post were Petro Poroshenko, a chocolate-industry
oligarch favored by Nuland, and Vitaly Klitschko, the boxer she had
schemed to exclude from the premiership. Klitschko was very much under
Firtash’s control. Both men flew to the Austrian capital for a meeting
with the oligarch, who negotiated a deal in which Klitschko stood down
and left the way open for Poroshenko, while Klitschko became mayor
of Kiev.
Ukraine meanwhile was in chaos. The
revolution that had brought anti-Russian nationalists to power in Kiev
was highly unwelcome in the Russian-speaking east, not to mention
Moscow. Vladimir Putin capitalized on this to engineer the return of
Crimea to Russian rule, and it appeared possible that he would similarly
absorb eastern Ukraine. By April 2014, Russian-backed separatists had
taken control of the Donbass, the steel and mining region, and were
advancing westward toward the next big industrial center,
Dnipropetrovsk, the domain of another oligarch, Igor Kolomoisky.
Kolomoisky had built his multibillion dollar financial base partly
thanks to his mastery of “raiding,” the local version of mergers and
acquisitions, involving methods that would make even the most hardened
Wall Street financier turn pale. According to Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars,
who has made a special study of the practice, “there are actual firms
in Ukraine . . . registered with offices and business cards, firms [that
specialize in] various dimensions of the corporate raiding process,
which includes armed guys to do stuff, forging documents, bribing
notaries, bribing judges.”
Rojansky describes Kolomoisky as “the most famous oligarch-raider,
accused of having conducted a massive raiding campaign over the roughly
ten years up to 2010,” building an empire based on banking, chemicals,
energy, media, and metals, and centered on PrivatBank, the country’s
largest bank, holding 26 percent of all Ukrainian bank deposits. At some
point, Kolomoisky’s business practices raised enough eyebrows in
Washington to get him on the visa ban list, precluding his entry into
the United States.
In April 2014, as the separatists advanced, Kolomoisky mobilized his
workforce into a 20,000-man private army in two battalions, Dnipro-1 and
Dnipro-2, and stemmed the tide. According to Wilson Center director
Rojansky, Kolomosiky is “perceived as the bulwark and the reason why the
whole Novorossiya project [Putin’s plan to absorb most of eastern
Ukraine] broke down at the border of the Donbass.”
Stopping Putin in his tracks would clearly have earned the master
raider merit in the eyes of policymakers in Washington and other Western
capitals, which may just explain how it was that while Firtash was
under the shadow of the U.S. indictment, no one made too much of a fuss
at the disappearance of an estimated $2 billion in IMF aid for Ukraine
that speedily exited the country via Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank.
The international financial agency had rushed the money to Ukraine in
April, in response to what IMF managing director Christine Lagarde
called a “major crisis.” She went on to hail the government’s
“unprecedented resolve” in developing a “bold economic program to secure
macroeconomic and financial stability.” Over the next five months the
international agency poured the equivalent of $4.51 billion ($2.97
billion in “Special Drawing Rights”—the IMF’s own currency) into the
National Bank of Ukraine— the country’s central bank. Much of this money
was urgently needed to prop up the local commercial banks. In theory,
the IMF appeared to require direct supervision of how the Ukrainian
banks used the aid. In fact, it appears the banks got to select their
own auditors.
As the largest bank, Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank stood to garner the
largest share of the international aid. Published estimates put this
share as high as 40 percent. Despite the torrent of cash, the banks’
situation did not improve; nine months into the program, the IMF
announced: “As of end January 2015 . . . the banking system’s capital
adequacy ratio stood at 13.8 percent, down from 15.9 percent at
end-June.” Where had the money gone?
Although we hear much about corruption
in countries such as Ukraine in general terms, a precise, detailed
accounting of the means by which an impoverished country has been
stripped of precious assets is not usually easy to come by. In this case
however, thanks to investigative work by the Ukrainian anticorruption
watchdog group Nashi Groshi (“Our Money”), we can actually watch the
process by which the gigantic sum of $1.8 billion was smoothly
maneuvered offshore, in the first instance to PrivatBank accounts in
Cyprus, and thence into accounts in Belize, the British Virgin Islands,
and other outposts of the international financial galaxy....
There are a lot of secrets in Ukraine and this guy knows quite a few of them, more on that next week.
In the meantime the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done more than any other news organization to investigate 'ol Ihor's property interests in the USofA. From the Post-Gazette, August 25:
Federal grand jury probes Ihor Kolomoisky -- now jailed in Ukraine -- in major U.S. money laundering case
Under the vaulted ceilings of Pittsburgh's Grand Concourse
restaurant, the partners of Ukraine oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky met to
embark on a venture that would lead to the reopening of one of the most
iconic steel mills in Ohio.
Warren Steel would become the cornerstone of the oligarch's ambitious plans to make his mark in the U.S. steel industry.
The business partners discussed the costs of firing up the furnace,
hiring workers, and blasting metal that could be used in everything from
cars and trucks to skyscrapers planned for some of the nation's largest
cities.
But in the ensuing years, the giant factory turned out more than just cast steel.
U.S. prosecutors are now bearing down on the oligarch in a criminal case
that could prompt a request for his extradition in the largest-ever
money laundering investigation of the U.S. steel industry.
In a rare court filing, prosecutors revealed that a federal grand
jury is now investigating Mr. Kolomoisky and others accused of concocting a scheme
to move millions in stolen money from their country into the United
States, where they purchased skyscrapers and steel factories.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which detailed the flow of dollars into the United States in a 2021 investigation, has previously reported the government's criminal case against the once powerful oligarch.
But the Justice Department's filing in July represents the first time
that prosecutors have disclosed the secret proceedings in a case that’s
been cited by fraud experts as one of the most egregious examples of money laundering in the country.
Though the 61-year-old billionaire is now in detention in his native
country for other financial crimes, he may be facing an even more
difficult future in the United States.
The Justice Department declined to comment, but prosecutors are
requesting the court to keep the findings of the grand jury under seal
as they track the hundreds of millions that poured into the United
States through shell companies controlled by Mr. Kolomoisky and fellow
oligarch Gennadiy Bogolyubov....
We may be hearing more about this master thief in the coming months.
From CoinDesk:
A supposedly shuttered U.S. steel plant owned by Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky is said to have been mining bitcoin.
Kolomoyskyy, one of the most influential people in Ukraine with net worth of $1.1 billion,
is the former owner of PrivatBank, a major privately owned bank in the
country. He was also governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region until 2015.
His
Calvert City, Ky.-based CC Metals & Alloys steel plant has been hit
by the coronavirus pandemic, and corruption allegations against
Kolomoisky were filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. The facility closed and let staff go this summer, but “every few months, it re-ignited the furnaces and urged the workers to return,” Radio Liberty reported Monday.
The only activity continuing at the plant is the production of bitcoin (BTC, +12.69%),
employees told the multimedia broadcaster. The sources said one of the
warehouses is filled with mining equipment, though it’s not clear how
many devices are on site and of what type or brand.
Kolomoisky and his partner Gennady Bogolyubov bought the plant plant in 2011 for $188 million as a part of a plan to build their metal business in the U.S., which grew to seven plants across five states.
The
holding firm, Optima Specialty Steel, filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and
ownership of the plant passed to another firm, Georgian American Alloys,
of which Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov are beneficiaries, according to a court document.
Further adding to their woes, the U.S. Department of Justice this year accused
Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov of buying real estate and businesses in the
U.S. for money misappropriated from PrivatBank from 2008 to 2016. The
DOJ alleges the partners had “obtained fraudulent loans and lines of
credit” from the bank before it was nationalized by the National Bank of
Ukraine in 2016....
As the Department of Justice works through the cases - and I hope to hell we get a special prosecutor, the magnitude of what was going on in Ukraine gets quite impressive.
The
reason for the original query was the mandate from the IMF that in
return for one of the tranches of multi-billion dollar loans related to
the whole PrivatBank theft, money laundering, Maidan, Victoria Nuland
web of lies and corruption that Ukraine allow foreigners to buy
farmland.
Some really good farmland, by all accounts.
Farmlandgrab keeps track of this stuff all over the world and a couple of their posts give a quick overview of what's what.
Here is one part of the puzzle, not the stuff that attracts the foreign money:....
President Zelensky was not the optimal winner for the U.S. and Britain in the 2019 Ukraine election. The West was very happy with their guy, Petro Poroshenko, installed after the 2014 Maidan coup. Zelensky's sugar-daddy, Ihor Kolomoyskyi made a big bet on Zelensky and the result was a blow-out 73 - 25 victory for Zelensky. However....
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has made something of a cottage industry digging into Kolomoyskyi's doings. Here's the latest, February 20, 2022:
PG INVESTIGATION | Shadowy money built steel empire — with bank's help
Deutsche was warned about highly suspicious money — but moved it anyway
Months
after Ukraine oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and his partners abandoned an
Ohio steel plant and left scores of workers without jobs, financial
crime experts at Deutsche Bank shot up a troubling alert.
Millions of dollars were flowing into its U.S. headquarters for a business owned by the oligarch, but something wasn’t right.
Detecting signs of suspicious money — large round numbers from
high-risk jurisdictions — the bank could have refused the transfers or
even dropped the client.
But it didn’t do either.
Despite warnings from its own workers, Deutsche allowed the money to
keep pouring into its coffers six years ago while the oligarch and his
partners secretly amassed a steel fortune in the United States.
The Justice Department has been investigating Mr. Kolomoisky and others in what prosecutors allege was a vast scheme to steal millions of dollars from Ukraine’s largest bank and move the money into the U.S. to buy steel mills and skyscrapers.
But recently unsealed federal court records show U.S. banks moved far
more money than what was reported by the U.S. government — billions of
dollars — for companies under the control of the power broker in
patterns that went unchecked for nearly a decade.
Between 2006 and 2015, more than $4.45 billion was transferred
without any apparent effort by the banks or the government to stem the
movement of dollars as the oligarch and his partners acquired an
enormous real estate portfolio....
We've been trying to figure out who Kolomoisky tainted and it appear to
include everyone from Victora Nuland who just became the highest ranking
careerist in the State Department to Donald Trump to the Biden's. But then a $5 billion cash honeypot is apt to draw....um, people.
The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done an astoundingly thorough job of
turning up facts and figures on one part of the story of a very, very
bad person.
We've been trying to figure out who Kolomoisky tainted and it appear to include everyone from Victora Nuland who just became the highest ranking careerist in the State Department to Donald Trump to the Biden's. But then a $5 billion cash honeypot is apt to draw....um, people.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done an astoundingly thorough job of turning up facts and figures on one part of the story of a very, very bad person.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 16:
Dirty Dollars Accused money launderers left a path of bankrupt factories, unpaid taxes, shuttered buildings and hundreds of steelworkers out of jobs
By Michael Sallah
A Post-Gazette Investigation
Years after back-to-back explosions at an aging steel
factory in northern Ohio tossed workers into guardrails with bloodied
faces and deep burns, the leaders of the facility met in Pittsburgh to
decide the future of the company.
They summoned a new plant manager to a private aviation center at
Pittsburgh International Airport in 2013 to look for ways to improve the
troubled facility and increase output.
But it wasn’t the sale of steel that would keep the money flowing into the mill.
Hundreds of millions of dollars had been stolen from a Ukraine bank —
the losses large enough to cripple the country’s economy — and secretly
moved into the United States, where the money was used to pump up the
cash reserves of Warren Steel in a money laundering scheme carried out
across the country, the U.S. Justice Department alleges.
Prosecutors say Ukraine oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, a powerful figure in his country who was banned
last month by the State Department from entering the United States,
secretly purchased a dozen other steel mills in small towns from Ohio to
Texas.
In all, he and his associates acquired nearly two dozen
properties, including four office towers in downtown Cleveland and a
484-room hotel with waterfront views in what became the foundation of
his real estate empire.
While federal agents tracked millions to the properties, the money
that poured into the Ohio steel facility would become key evidence in
one of the first money laundering investigations involving the U.S.
steel industry, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation found.
Bank records, emails and other critical documents were turned over to
a federal grand jury examining the finances of the Ohio mill that
prosecutors say became a conduit for tens of millions of dollars
siphoned from PrivatBank in Ukraine, according to two sources familiar
with the probe.
The explosions and breakdowns in safety underscore the dangerous
impact that financial crimes like money laundering can have on everyday
people — cost-cutting, neglect and a lack of investment — when buildings
and workplaces are used to clean cash.
It also reveals how a foreign operator — a target of a corruption
probe in his own country — could stake a claim in the U.S. steel
industry at a time it’s considered vital to the national security of the
United States.
With prosecutors now trying to seize some of the
properties, former steelworkers in the city of Warren say they’re still
angry over what they described as decrepit and unsafe conditions that
led to devastating injuries.
“They destroyed the lives of a lot of people,” said Brian Shaffer,
53, a millwright who suffered severe injuries in one of the blasts. “I
don’t know how they got away with what they got away with.”
Federal safety inspectors turned up serious violations in the
facility while state environmental agents found rampant hazardous waste
problems that remained for years.
Mr. Shaffer, who is disabled and walks with a cane, said he arrived
at the Ohio plant after one of the explosions and placed a co-worker on a
medical helicopter as his skin was peeling from his forearm and blood
was oozing from his eye. “It’s the most god-awful thing I’ve ever seen,”
he said.
The Post-Gazette obtained hundreds of previously sealed court
documents and sworn statements, reviewed federal workplace safety
reports and environmental inspections, and conducted interviews with
nearly a dozen former employees who worked at facilities owned by Mr.
Kolomoisky and his partners to gain a greater understanding of a global
money laundering case that went deep into the U.S. heartland.
So far, the allegations against the oligarch and others have been raised in civil forfeiture lawsuits,
but recently prosecutors asked a federal judge to temporarily halt the
proceedings so they could press forward with the criminal case.
Mr. Kolomoisky, 58, a mercurial figure in Ukraine who once funded his own militia to fend off pro-Russian insurgents, did not respond to repeated interview requests.
Known for his tough tactics, he built a fortune in the free-for-all
economy that followed the demise of the Soviet Union, launching
companies in metals, energy and aviation before embarking on his
spending spree in the United States from 2006 to 2016.
His criminal defense lawyer in the United States, Michael J.
Sullivan, did not return messages, but in prior interviews with
reporters, he denied all the allegations....
As the Department of Justice works through the cases - and I hope to hell we get a special prosecutor, the magnitude of what was going on in Ukraine gets quite impressive.
Last Wednesday I dropped a little Easter Egg because I wasn't sure if I should do anything further: "Latvia wants foreigners to stop buying land" Meanwhile, as part of the IMF shenanigans in Ukraine a land reform
package was required which basically meant Ukraine had to sell land to
foreigners to get the latest multi-billion dollar loan....
That's it, one little sentence.
So we'll begin with some background. This is far from the whole story
because quite a bit has been learned in the intervening years but it's a
good place to start.
Two things to keep in mind:
1) Ukraine is the most corrupt place in Europe (outside Brussels)
2) Nothing is as it seems.
The
reason for the original query was the mandate from the IMF that in
return for one of the tranches of multi-billion dollar loans related to
the whole PrivatBank theft, money laundering, Maidan, Victoria Nuland
web of lies and corruption that Ukraine allow foreigners to buy
farmland.
Some really good farmland, by all accounts.
Farmlandgrab keeps track of this stuff all over the world and a couple of their posts give a quick overview of what's what.
Here is one part of the puzzle, not the stuff that attracts the foreign money:....
About 9,600 purchase-and-sale transactions for a total of 22,000
hectares of agricultural lands were concluded in Ukraine in February
2024.
About 9,600 purchase-and-sale transactions for a total of 22,000
hectares of agricultural lands were concluded in Ukraine in February
2024, which is 50% more than in January 2024, Ukrainian media reported
citing an analytical survey of the Ukrainian land market carried out by
the Kiev School of Economics Center for Food and Land Use Research along
with the U.S. Agency for International Development Program for Agrarian
and Rural Development.
This previous peak in sales of farmlands since the start of the crisis
was observed in December 2023, when 8,200 deals involving 19,800
hectares of farmland were concluded. The market leaders since the
beginning of 2024 have been the Poltava (3,700 hectares), Dnepropetrovsk
(2,700 hectares), and Kirovograd (2,000 hectares) regions.
Since the land market was opened for legal entities, 266 companies have
exercised the right to purchase agricultural land, including 223
companies that purchased at least one plot of land in February 2024....
....This is a subject we have been posting on for years and many of our links can be found in March 2023's "Big Money: "Who Really Benefits from the Creation of a Land Market in Ukraine?"
including Pyatt and Nuland and the Maidan coup, the disappearing IMF
loot and the IMF's subsequent demand that Ukraine open their land market
to foreigners for any more multi-billion largess, President Z and his
patron Kolomoisky, the Templeton sovereign bond fund shenanigans with
the Ukraine debt, the shock therapy applied to Russia in the '90's as
the role model for Ukraine, some of the immediately pre-war players in
Uke farmland, the positioning of BlackRock as advisor and gatekeeper for
the reconstruction to come and much more. For events and posts we
didn't stuff into that post the 'search blog' box upper left comes in
handy.
“In general, as of today, a total of 153,659 land agreements, covering
344,061 hectares, have been signed since the land market was launched,”
the report states.
In terms of the total area of lands in relation to which the agreements
were signed, the following regions took the lead: Kharkiv (40.8 thousand
hectares), Dnipropetrovsk (31.5 thousand hectares), Poltava (28.5
thousand hectares), Kirovohrad (28.3 thousand hectares) and Khmelnytskyi
(21.5 thousand hectares).
The average price of land per hectare is UAH 39,000 in Ukraine. This
indicator was calculated based on 125,397 land agreements, covering
284,483 hectares....
One of the reasons for the Maidan Revolution was to open the sale of
Ukrainian land to foreigners—it's much too good for the Ukes to keep to
themselves—but that step, required by the IMF as a condition of any
further loans to replace the loans that were stolen and laundered (just
what was Templeton up to with the Ukrainian sovereign debt bets?), that
step needs a referendum and enabling legislation.
But this phase, also required by the IMF, is the starting point.
....What
I do know is that there is going to be something on the order of $100
billion worth of Ukrainian farmland changing hands over the next decade
which is getting to be serious money. Except maybe for Musk and Bezos.
And the CIA. And the State Department. and...
A law to privatise farmland, ultimately for the benefit of global
finance and agribusiness, was pushed through Parliament under pressure
from the IMF in the context of the coronavirus crisis.
Of particular interest is Ihor Kolomoisky, backer of both the current President Zelensky and the Azov Battalion.
We've been trying to figure out who Kolomoisky tainted and it appear to
include everyone from Victora Nuland who just became the highest
ranking careerist in the State Department to Donald Trump to the
Biden's. But then a $5 billion cash honeypot is apt to draw....um, people.
The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done an astoundingly thorough job of
turning up facts and figures on one part of the story of a very, very
bad person....
President
Zelensky was not the optimal winner for the U.S. and Britain in the
2019 Ukraine election. The West was very happy with their guy, Petro
Poroshenko, installed after the 2014 Maidan coup. Zelensky's
sugar-daddy, Ihor Kolomoyskyi made a big bet on Zelensky and the result
was a blow-out 73 - 25 victory for Zelensky. However....
The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has made something of a cottage industry digging
into Kolomoyskyi's doings. Here's the latest, February 20, 2022....
As
the Department of Justice works through the cases - and I hope to hell
we get a special prosecutor, the magnitude of what was going on in
Ukraine gets quite impressive.
"Latvia wants foreigners to stop buying land" Meanwhile, as part of the IMF shenanigans in Ukraine a land reform
package was required which basically meant Ukraine had to sell land to
foreigners to get the latest multi-billion dollar loan....
That's it, one little sentence.
So we'll begin with some background. This is far from the whole story
because quite a bit has been learned in the intervening years but it's a
good place to start.
Two things to keep in mind:
1) Ukraine is the most corrupt place in Europe (outside Brussels)
2) Nothing is as it seems.
The
reason for the original query was the mandate from the IMF that in
return for one of the tranches of multi-billion dollar loans related to
the whole PrivatBank theft, money laundering, Maidan, Victoria Nuland
web of lies and corruption that Ukraine allow foreigners to buy
farmland.
Some really good farmland, by all accounts.
Farmlandgrab keeps track of this stuff all over the world and a couple of their posts give a quick overview of what's what.
Here is one part of the puzzle, not the stuff that attracts the foreign money:....
I have to be careful when linking to John Helmer at Dances with Wolves Bears.
He's
been reporting from Russia for a very long time, which raises the red
flag question, why are the Rooskis putting up with him.
And the
answer, of course, is that he serves some purpose for the regime and
since he's in media it's probably because he's somewhere on the spectrum with CNN's Eason Jordan:
CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan yesterday sent a memo to his staff
defending his decision to withhold information about how Saddam
Hussein's regime had intimidated, tortured and killed Iraqis who had
helped the cable news network over the years....
His approach became known as "Taking the Eason Way Out...". Catchy, someone should write a song.
Somewhere on there with the New York Times' Pulitzer prize winner, Walter Duranty who was an actual mouthpiece for Stalin.
And while I don't think Mr. Helmer is anywhere near as ethically corrupt and morally bankrupt as CNN and Eason Jordan, it is something that the reader should be aware of.
From John Helmer's Dances With Bears, February 19, 2015:
THE HUNT FOR BURISMA – WHEN THE PACK OF HOUNDS IS MISSING ITS MASTER, THE FOX ESCAPES
Burisma, an influential Ukrainian oil and gas company with disputed
ownership involving Nikolai Zlochevsky and Igor Kolomoisky, is under
criminal investigation in the UK. But you wouldn’t know it from a
release issued by the company on January 22. According to Burisma,
“Britain closed criminal proceedings against the assets of Nikolay
Zlochevskyi [sic]. The case was closed after the Court analyzed the
period from 2002 to December 2014 for alleged illegality of the source
of funds of companies the ultimate beneficiary of which was Nikolay
Zlochevskyi [sic] and ‘found no grounds for further consideration of the
case’, said the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales decision.”
A statement issued yesterday by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in
London, which initiated the criminal proceedings against Zlochevsky in
April of 2014, said its investigation of Zlochevsky and Burisma is
“ongoing”. The SFO regrets, it added, that unexplained changes of
position by the state prosecutor in Kiev led to last month’s court
judgement. “We are disappointed,” said the SFO spokesman, “we were not
provided with the evidence by authorities in the Ukraine necessary to
keep this restraint order in place. Our criminal investigation
continues.”
No trace of Burisma’s “no grounds” quotation from the court judgement can be found.
Instead, Justice Blake ruled that until or unless the SFO and the
Ukrainian authorities produce fresh evidence of wrongdoing by
Zlochevsky, a freeze order over Burisma’s bank accounts in London should
be lifted. Blake also ruled: “it is not known why the [Ukrainian]
authorities subsequently changed their minds 27 days later, or whether
fresh evidence has arisen… In the event that this information suggests
that a Ukrainian request for mutual assistance is about to be made on
fresh evidence not considered in this application, that is a matter that
can be addressed by a timetable for setting aside the existing order
and to which the parties can give consideration following the handing
down of this judgment.”
Burisma Holdings Ltd. was incorporated in Cyprus in 2006; there is no
trace of its registration, asset history, or financial accounts on the
company website. Its
registered office appears to be on St. James Square in London. The chief
executive, Leonid Petukhov, and his deputy, Alexander Gorbunenko,
pick up the telephone at Asterius Fund, a small hedge fund registered in
the Cayman Islands since 2011. Petukhov used to work at Victor
Pinchuk’s EastOne holding.
Burisma reports that its auditor is KPMG, but it doesn’t release
audited statements of its financial condition. Instead, the company
issues press statements
of production plans and operating intentions. “By the end of this year,
Burisma Holdings is planning to produce more than 700 million cubic
meters of natural gas. At year-end 2014, the Company invested around UAH
2 billion. Based on a previously approved strategy, Burisma Holdings
intends to put into operation another 28 wells and invest around UAH 3
billion in case of subsoil use tax reduction. In 2015, the Company is
aiming to produce more than 1 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
Openness and operational transparency are key factors in the activities
of the largest independent gas producer in Ukraine.” For the last
report on Burisma, read this.
Until the release of Justice Blake’s judgement, Burisma and
Zlochevsky refused to confirm their shareholding relationship. The SFO
evidence discussed in Blake’s ruling omits the name of Igor Kolomoisky;
he has been identified in Ukrainian investigations and media reports as
a stakeholder in Burisma. Kolomoisky runs the Privat Bank group and he
is governor of Dniepropetrovsk region.
The attempt by the Ukrainian government to protect Zlochevsky and
Burisma from UK charges of money laundering, and the British
Government’s decision to continue the investigation of Burisma’s
shareholders and their sources of cash, have not deterred the US
Government from financing a role for Burisma in what the US Agency for International Development (USAID) calls its Ukrainian Municipal Energy Reform Project (MERP). According to a Burisma press release, the company and USAID have combined to “promot[e] energy security of our country.” USAID
is spending $13.5 million on MERP; the locations selected for the
programme in April of 2014 are all outside the areas of Lugansk and
Donetsk where the civil war is most intense.
Lobbying for US Government support of Burisma are two Americans who
were appointed to the Burisma board in 2014, just after the change of
government in Kiev. Hunter Biden (below left) is one of the sons of Vice
President Joe Biden. Devon Archer (centre) is a campaign advisor and
family friend of Secretary of State John Kerry. Biden and Archer work
together in a group of investment vehicles known as Rosemont Capital
Partners, Rosemont Seneca Advisors, Rosemont Realty, Rosemont
Opportunities Fund, and Rosemont Solebury Capital Management. US
Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) filings indicate that
together they are “pooled investment vehicles” linked to Christopher Heinz, managing director of the group (right), and the Heinz family fortune.
Heinz is Kerry’s stepson. His mother Teresa, who was married to Senator
John Heinz until he was killed in a 1991 aircrash, controls several
Heinz family wealth trusts, as does Kerry his own family trusts. The two
also share their investment wealth.
According to the SEC dossier, the Rosemont group appears to be funded
by money from the Heinz and Kerry trusts; Biden and Archer are fund
managers for the Secretary of State’s pocket, as well as crew for
Isabel, the Heinz-Kerry family yacht.
The UK investigation of Burisma began just before Biden and Archer
officially joined the Burisma board of directors. Initially, when the
SFO issued this release on April 28, 2014,
there was no identification of Zlochevsky or Burisma. The SFO said
it had “opened a criminal investigation into possible money laundering
arising from suspicions of corruption in Ukraine. The SFO has obtained a
restraint order freezing approximately $23m of assets in the UK in
connection with this case. For reasons of confidentiality we cannot say
more at this time.”
The SFO was confirming a London court order issued on April 16 in
favour of SFO’s request to freeze the cash and other assets of Burisma
and two related parties, Brociti Investments Ltd. of Cyprus, and Andrey
Kicha. Intended to pre-empt the disappearance of the money abroad,
before SFO could complete its investigation and frame indictments, the
procedure was made without notice to the defendants. Kicha is identified
in court as a “Ukrainian commercial lawyer, the chief legal officer of
Burisma and other companies owned by the defendant [Zlochevsky]. He was
the sole authorised signatory on the BNP accounts that are the subject
to the restraint order.”
Burisma identifies Kicha as having worked
for the company since 2007. He can be found signing asset transaction
documents on behalf of Burisma recorded by the US Securities &
Exchange Commission (SEC) in June 2009.
The SEC records treat Kicha as Zlochevsky’s employee. The British
court found that as soon as Zlochevsky and Kicha got wind that the
British had started an investigation of money-laundering, Kicha tried
to empty the London bank accounts. He wasn’t quick enough....
The Post-Gazette has done some excellent, excellent investigative work on Ukrainian sleazeball oligarch and benefactor of both the Azov battalion and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ihor Kolomoisky.*
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project along with the ICIJ is justifiably famous for the Panama Papers, the Pandora Papers and many others.
There have been rumors since the Panama Papers story broke in April 2016 that the OCCRP does some investigative stuff for its funders, the Open Society Foundations, the Omidyar Network and the Skoll Foundation (along with USAID and the State Department). Personally, I don't have a clue, we've linked to both sources.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the OCCRP, August 26:
For a time, Anna de Rothschild
boasted of her family roots to the European banking dynasty, donning
designer clothes, a Rolex watch, and driving a $170,000 black
Mercedes-Benz SUV.
She talked about developing a sprawling luxury housing project on
Emerald Bay in the Bahamas, a high-rise hotel in Monaco, and a Formula
One race track in Miami, say people who knew her.
A pivotal moment for the woman who was fluent in several languages
took place last year when she was invited to Mar-a-Lago, where she
mingled with former President Donald Trump’s supporters and showed up
the next day for a golf outing with Mr. Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham
among other political luminaries.
But the 33-year-old woman was not a member of the famous banking
family, and is now a subject of a widening FBI investigation that has
delved into her past financial activities and the events that led her to
the former president’s home.
“It was the near-perfect ruse and she played the part,” said John
LeFevre, a former investment banker who met her with other guests around
a club pool.
In addition to the FBI, law enforcement agents in Canada have
confirmed that she has been the subject of a major crimes unit
investigation in Quebec since February.
A year before the FBI’s spectacular raid of the former president’s
seaside home, the woman whose real name is Inna Yashchyshyn, a
Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine, made several trips into the
estate posing as a member of the famous family while making inroads with
some of the former president’s key supporters.
The ability of Ms. Yashchyshyn — the daughter of an Illinois truck
driver — to bypass the security at Mr. Trump’s club demonstrates the
ease with which someone with a fake identity and shadowy background can
get into a facility that’s one of America’s power centers and the
epicenter of Republican Party politics.
Those issues have become even more critical after FBI agents seized
boxes of classified and top-secret materials two weeks ago from
Mar-a-Lago after executing a search warrant on Mr. Trump’s home.
Her entry — multiple trips in and out of the club grounds — lays
bare the vulnerabilities of a facility that serves as both the former
president's residence and a private club, and highlights the gaps in
security that can take place.
“That’s his residence,” said Ed Martin, a former U.S. Treasury
special agent who spent more than two decades in criminal intelligence.
“She shouldn’t have been in there.”
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project learned
that numerous records have been turned over to the FBI as part of the
inquiry, including copies of two fake passports from the U.S. and Canada
— bearing her photo and the name Anna de Rothschild — and a Florida
driver’s license with the same name that shows the address of an opulent
$13 million mansion in Miami Beach where she has never lived.
In
2015, Ms. Yashchyshyn became president of United Hearts of Mercy
charity, which was dropped by two payment processors because they
detected fraud.
Ms. Yashchyshyn said in sworn statements in a legal dispute that
she has never used another name and has not broken any laws. In an
interview with the Post-Gazette, she said she didn’t know Anna de
Rothschild.
“I think there is some misunderstanding,” she said.
She said that she was meeting with FBI agents on Aug. 19 and that
passports or driver’s licenses generated with the Rothschild name and
her photo were fabricated by her former business partner to harm her.
“That’s all fake, and nothing happened,” she said.
Mr. LeFevre and three other guests interviewed for this story said
Ms. Yashchyshyn repeatedly told people after entering the palatial
Mar-a-Lago grounds that she was a Rothschild “and everyone was eating it
up,” he said.
The probe into her activities comes three years after two
different women from China — one of them toting two passports and a
thumb drive with malicious software — were arrested in separate
instances after they entered the club grounds while Mr. Trump was
president.
Both were sentenced to less than a year in jail and have since
been released with at least one being deported to China last year.
The Secret Service said it could not comment on whether the agency
is investigating Ms. Yashchyshyn’s visits to the former president’s
home in May 2021, or any other subsequent trips.
“To maintain the operational integrity of our work, we are unable
to comment specifically concerning the means, methods or resources used
to conduct our protective operations,” said Steven Kopek, a special
agent and spokesman, in a statement.
The Secret Service more than likely didn’t run background checks
to determine Ms. Yashchyshyn’s identity when she visited the former
president’s home, partly because the level of protection drops
significantly when a president leaves office, said four former agents
interviewed for this story.
In most cases, “they are going to do a level of screening — a hand
check” for weapons, said Jonathan Wackrow, a former agent who served on
President Barack Obama’s detail. “He still has a full detail.”
But experts say her ability to mingle with members of Mr. Trump’s
entourage raises concerns about ongoing security at the private club
that continues to host some of the most powerful elected leaders in the
country and serves as a storage site for some of the country’s closely
guarded secrets.
“The question is was it a fraud or an intelligence threat,” said
Charles Marino, a former Secret Service supervisor. “The fact that we
are asking this question is a problem.”....
We've been trying to figure out who Kolomoisky tainted and it appear to include everyone from Victora Nuland who just became the highest ranking careerist in the State Department to Donald Trump to the Biden's. But then a $5 billion cash honeypot is apt to draw....um, people.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done an astoundingly thorough job of turning up facts and figures on one part of the story of a very, very bad person....
President Zelensky was not the optimal winner for the U.S. and Britain in the 2019 Ukraine election. The West was very happy with their guy, Petro Poroshenko, installed after the 2014 Maidan coup. Zelensky's sugar-daddy, Ihor Kolomoyskyi made a big bet on Zelensky and the result was a blow-out 73 - 25 victory for Zelensky. However....
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has made something of a cottage industry digging into Kolomoyskyi's doings. Here's the latest, February 20, 2022....
I've said the reason Pyatt and Nuland and the rest of the American gang facilitated the Maidan coup was to get at the farmland. That's a bit of an exaggeration but not by much.
Along with pushing against Russia, getting a piece of the oligarch's loot and, dream of dreams, turning Crimea into the headquarters of the U.S. Black Sea Fleat, it is just a piece of the picture, which is now coming into focus: the economic shock therapy that was applied to the Russian part of the Soviet Union will now strip Ukraine of its assets. And then perhaps move on to Poland and definitely liberate the assets of Germany.
If you follow these things, one of the interesting tidbits of the Nord Stream 2 sabotage is the fact that Jeffrey Sachs, one of the Harvard Boys who wreaked Havoc on the Russian economy in the 1990's is at the forefront of those calling for an honest investigation of who blew-up the pipeline. Go figure.
But I'm getting ahead of the story. Right now it is the land that matters, matters so much that the International Monetary Fund has made selling land to foreigners one of the conditions for the multi-billion-dollar loans that Ukraine has been receiving since the Maidan coup.
First up, from The Oakland Institute, the headline story, August 6, 2021:
Although Ukraine has large swaths of the most fertile farmland in the
world, the wealth of its agriculture sector has long remained largely
out of reach of the country’s farmers. In the country known as the
“breadbasket of Europe,” agriculture has been dominated by oligarchs and
multinational corporations since the privatization of state-owned land
following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For the past thirty
years, no government has been able to meaningfully challenge that status
quo.
Will this change, now that a controversial law to create a land market entered into effect on July 1, 2021?
The law, “On Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine on the Conditions
of Turnover of Agricultural Land” (Law 552-IX), is a crucial plank of
the liberalizing agenda championed by President Volodymyr Zelensky and
the Western international institutions that support his government. It
was passed by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s unicameral legislature, in
March 2020 as a condition for the financially imperiled government to receive a US$5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The Troubled History of Land Ownership in Ukraine When Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, all land was the property of the state, with farmers working on state and collective farms. In the 1990s, guided and supported by the IMF and other international institutions, the government privatized(link is external) much of Ukraine’s farmland, and distributed certificates that individual workers could use to obtain ownership of a discrete plot of land. However, amid a nationwide economic collapse, many resold(link is external) their certificates, beginning a process that resulted(link is external) in the growing concentration of land in the hands of a new oligarchic class.
In order to stop this process, the government instituted(link is external)
a moratorium in 2001, which halted further privatizations of
state-owned land, and prevented almost all transfers of private land,
with a few exceptions, such as inheritance. Although the moratorium was
meant to be temporary, it was extended multiple times due to the failure
of the Verkhovna Rada and multiple presidential administrations to pass
and implement legal reforms that would allow for the creation of a more
equitable land tenure system.
While the moratorium prevented further purchases of land, farmland could still be leased(link is external), and many small landowners leased their land to both domestic and foreign corporations. The state also auctioned(link is external) off leases for extensive amounts of the land it owns. President Zelensky’s government has claimed(link is external)
that at least five million of over ten million hectares of state-owned
land was illegally privatized under previous administrations.
While reliable data on who is leasing Ukrainian farmland is hard to
find (many leases are not registered), the Land Matrix database lists
large-scale land deals totaling 3.4 million hectares by both Ukrainian
and foreign companies; other(link is external)estimates(link is external) place the amount of land leased by the largest corporations operating in Ukraine at over six million hectares. The largest(link is external)
farmland holder is Kernel, owned by a Ukrainian citizen but registered
in Luxembourg, with about 570,500 hectares; followed by UkrLandFarming
(570,000 hectares), US private equity firm NCH Capital (430,000
hectares), MHP (370,000 hectares), and Astarta (250,000 hectares). Other major players include Saudi conglomerate Continental Farmers Group(link is external) with 195,000 hectares (a majority shareholder(link is external)
is the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company, owned by
the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia), and French agricultural
company AgroGeneration(link is external) with 120,000 hectares.
Opening of the Land Market Law 552-IX(link is external) ended the moratorium and allowed individuals to purchase up to 100 hectares of land starting July 1, 2021. Both individuals and legal entities (i.e. companies) will be allowed to purchase up to 10,000 hectares starting January 1, 2024. Banks will be able to seize land for nonpayment of a loan, but will have to auction off the land for agricultural use within two years. Individuals or entities that currently lease a piece of land are supposed to receive priority (“pre-emption rights”) when the land is up for purchase. A longstanding prohibition on foreign individuals and companies buying land in Ukraine will continue, although they retain the ability to lease land.....
“In general, as of today, a total of 153,659 land agreements, covering
344,061 hectares, have been signed since the land market was launched,”
the report states.
In terms of the total area of lands in relation to which the agreements
were signed, the following regions took the lead: Kharkiv (40.8 thousand
hectares), Dnipropetrovsk (31.5 thousand hectares), Poltava (28.5
thousand hectares), Kirovohrad (28.3 thousand hectares) and Khmelnytskyi
(21.5 thousand hectares).
The average price of land per hectare is UAH 39,000 in Ukraine. This
indicator was calculated based on 125,397 land agreements, covering
284,483 hectares....
One of the reasons for the Maidan Revolution was to open the sale of
Ukrainian land to foreigners—it's much too good for the Ukes to keep to
themselves—but that step, required by the IMF as a condition of any
further loans to replace the loans that were stolen and laundered (just
what was Templeton up to with the Ukrainian sovereign debt bets?), that
step needs a referendum and enabling legislation.
But this phase, also required by the IMF, is the starting point.
....What
I do know is that there is going to be something on the order of $100
billion worth of Ukrainian farmland changing hands over the next decade
which is getting to be serious money. Except maybe for Musk and Bezos.
And the CIA. And the State Department. and...
A law to privatise farmland, ultimately for the benefit of global
finance and agribusiness, was pushed through Parliament under pressure
from the IMF in the context of the coronavirus crisis.
Of particular interest is Ihor Kolomoisky, backer of both the current President Zelensky and the Azov Battalion.
We've been trying to figure out who Kolomoisky tainted and it appear to
include everyone from Victora Nuland who just became the highest
ranking careerist in the State Department to Donald Trump to the
Biden's. But then a $5 billion cash honeypot is apt to draw....um, people.
The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done an astoundingly thorough job of
turning up facts and figures on one part of the story of a very, very
bad person....
President
Zelensky was not the optimal winner for the U.S. and Britain in the
2019 Ukraine election. The West was very happy with their guy, Petro
Poroshenko, installed after the 2014 Maidan coup. Zelensky's
sugar-daddy, Ihor Kolomoyskyi made a big bet on Zelensky and the result
was a blow-out 73 - 25 victory for Zelensky. However....
The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has made something of a cottage industry digging
into Kolomoyskyi's doings. Here's the latest, February 20, 2022....
As
the Department of Justice works through the cases - and I hope to hell
we get a special prosecutor, the magnitude of what was going on in
Ukraine gets quite impressive.
"Latvia wants foreigners to stop buying land" Meanwhile, as part of the IMF shenanigans in Ukraine a land reform
package was required which basically meant Ukraine had to sell land to
foreigners to get the latest multi-billion dollar loan....
That's it, one little sentence.
So we'll begin with some background. This is far from the whole story
because quite a bit has been learned in the intervening years but it's a
good place to start.
Two things to keep in mind:
1) Ukraine is the most corrupt place in Europe (outside Brussels)
2) Nothing is as it seems.
The
reason for the original query was the mandate from the IMF that in
return for one of the tranches of multi-billion dollar loans related to
the whole PrivatBank theft, money laundering, Maidan, Victoria Nuland
web of lies and corruption that Ukraine allow foreigners to buy
farmland.
Some really good farmland, by all accounts.
Farmlandgrab keeps track of this stuff all over the world and a couple of their posts give a quick overview of what's what.
Here is one part of the puzzle, not the stuff that attracts the foreign money:....
