The Kyiv Post has repeatedly hammered the Ukrainian justice system for allowing bank fraud impunity.
This week, we finally saw progress with the arrest of PrivatBank’s former first deputy CEO Volodymyr Yatsenko. In a rare move, anti-corruption chief Artem Sytnyk personally ordered Ukraine’s air traffic controllers to ground the plane with the fleeing Yatsenko on board.
Now that he’s out on bail, Yatsenko can still try to leverage his millions of dollars in cash and his real estate in Vienna to escape justice.
Charges filed against PrivatBank’s ex-CEO Oleksandr Dubilet and head of the financial department Olena Bychikhina shed light on the secret chamber inside PrivatBank that oversaw billions of dollars in fraud and money laundering to benefit the former bank’s owners.
NABU said it was ready to charge other suspects. Will former owners of PrivatBank Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov be next? After all, they were the ones to orchestrate the scheme to steal $5.5 billion from the bank. This is something that only Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova knows.
The fact that she approved charges against the trio of the bank’s former top managers is a pleasant surprise.
What’s going on? Maybe Ukrainian officials are emboldened that “the West will help.” The U. S., which has its own bone to pick with Ihor Kolomoisky, seems to be watching carefully to see what will come of PrivatBank — and what that says about the country.
Or maybe Ukraine’s leaders can’t bear how discredited they’ll be if another country becomes the first to bring criminal charges over Ukraine’s most publicized financial crime. Maybe by going after the lesser suspects, Venediktova gives time for Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov to escape.
Either way, it’s a start. But a start is all it is for now. Ukraine’s courts and law enforcement bodies are infamously corrupt and ineffective. The only hope is the High Anti-Corruption Court, a relatively new institution launched in 2019.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), Ukraine’s most effective fraud-fighting force, has been thwarted left and right when it tried to investigate powerfully connected officials. Even now, the government wants to fire NABU head Artem Sytnyk because his agency started an investigation into the government’s procurement of COVID-19 vaccine. Many have wanted him gone for a while.
If Sytnyk is forced out, the PrivatBank investigation may not survive.
