Valeria Gontareva, former head of the National Bank of Ukraine, said on Sept. 17 that her house just outside the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv was burned down following an apparent arson attack.
“A bottle of fuel mixture has just been thrown into our house near Kyiv… the house is on fire,” she told the Kyiv Post, adding that the whole building was consumed by flames.
“The house is completely burned out… I no longer have the strength to deal with this all,” said the Ukrainian economist, who now lives in London and fears returning to Ukraine.
Videos posted online by locals in the early hours of Sept. 17 and shared by some Ukrainian media show flames consuming a property in the village of Gorenichi, a community of 2,500 people 15 kilometers west of Kyiv.
In one video, local firefighters are seen trying to bring the blaze under control. Gontareva said that nobody was present in the house at the time of the fire, but a guard on the property had witnessed the attack and called the police and fire service.
Пожежа в будинку колишньої глави НБУ Гонтаревої. pic.twitter.com/VEU5NHygpQ
— theБабель (@theBabelUA) September 17, 2019
The apparent arson attack on Gontareva’s home is the latest incident in what appears to be a developing campaign of reprisals and harassment against the former NBU governor and her family.
Gontareva is still recovering from an Aug. 26 accident when she was hit by a car on a pedestrian crossing in London which left her hospitalized with multiple injuries, including bone fractures. She is awaiting a number of operations because of her injuries and U.K. police are still investigating the incident.
On Sept. 5, a family car belonging to her son and daughter-in-law was torched in Kyiv in another apparent arson attack outside their family home in the capital. The vehicle is registered to the wife of Gontareva’s son, who is also named Valeria Gontareva.
On Sept. 12, masked men armed with assault rifles raided her unoccupied apartment in Kyiv.
While some Ukrainian media reported that the men were law enforcement agents with the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI), Gontareva did not confirm this: “Ten unknown people with masks and machine guns intruded in my Kyiv apartment and did not even call me or my lawyers,” she said at the time.
Gontareva blames the controversial oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and his allies for the hostile acts against her and her family.
Kolomoisky has effectively denied any involvement in the campaign against Gontareva, despite his past threats against her.
Calls to the private number of Kolomoisky on the morning of Sept. 17 went unanswered and other recent requests for comment from the Kyiv Post have also been ignored by the oligarch.
Gontareva, who was seen as a reformist force during her tenure as governor of the NBU between 2014 and 2017, made a number of adversaries because of her reforms, but Kolomoisky has positioned himself as a nemesis to the economist.
PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank that previously belonged to Kolomoisky, was nationalized in 2016 by the NBU and Gontareva played a pivotal part in this. Investigators discovered the bank had a $5.5-billion hole in its ledger and faced collapse after years of insider lending and fraud, alleged schemes in which Kolomoisky and others are implicated.
Kolomoisky denies the allegations and has sought the return of PrivatBank, mainly through Ukrainian courts, while the bank itself is currently suing its former owners in the U.K. and U.S. for billions in alleged losses.
PrivatBank is also finding itself under renewed pressure and says it is being unfairly targeted and harassed by law enforcement. On Sept. 11, police in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro raided the PrivatBank headquarters there on dubious grounds relating to how the bank hires foreign consultants. The bank says police wanted information relating to PrivatBank’s legal cases against its former owners.
Kolomoisky is from Dnipro — he formerly served as governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and still has significant influence throughout the city of 1 million people located 480 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
