In March 2015, Igor Kolomoisky, a well-known Ukrainian oligarch, compared his country’s privatization of industry process as a criminal conspiracy to rob billions of dollars from the State. Quoted in the Financial Times, Kolomoisky said Ukraine should not receive money from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) “until all “illegally” privatised property had been restored to state ownership”.
It appears it was an undercover play to beneficiate directly from a large part of the IMF $17 billion IMF granted Ukraine in April 2014. The Deutshe Wirtschafts Nachrichten, an online German media, revealed in August that $1.8 billion has been discovered in a Cyprus bank controlled by Kolomoisky.
The oligarch, former governor of Dnipropetrovsk, is one of Ukraine’s richest businessmen, with a business empire that includes holdings in the energy, media, aviation, chemical and metalwork industries. At the center of Kolomoyskyi’s wealth is PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest financial institution, which claimed the bulk – 40 percent – of the bailout money which had been earmarked for stabilizing the banking system.
It looks like the fraudoulus operation conducted by PrivatBank was undercovered by the Ukrainian anti-corruption initiative «Nashi Groshi», meaning “our money”. According to their investigations, the bank has more than 40 connections with Ukrainian companies, owned by another 54 offshore structures based primary in the USA, the Caribbean and Cyprus. These companies borrowed money from PrivatBank totalling $1.8 billion.
These Ukrainian companies were looking for investments products from six suppliers both based in European countries or the Caribbean and transferred later money to a branch of PrivatBank in Cyprus to pay for them. But products requested by overseas suppliers were never delivered and the 42 companies took legal action in Dnipropetrovsk.
It is particularly ironic that when an Ukrainian national steals money from IMF, no one makes a move, but when Greece needs more time to recover from its huge economical crisis, the pressure form the same institution is enormous.