Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court dismissed the PrivatBank labor union’s complaint against the bank in an Oct. 20 decision.
In its September court filing, the union took issue with the bank’s development strategy. The union said that this strategy entails an unjustified staff reduction that violates the labor rights of the bank’s employees.
The court said that the complaint is “in fact an illegal form of interference by the labor union in the internal economic activities of the bank.”
The union’s objection cannot be subject to consideration in court, according to the Pechersk court’s decision.
In its strategy through the year 2024, the bank wants to maintain its leading position in Ukraine, grow its presence in the market for small and medium enterprises and prepare itself for eventual privatization.
The labor union that filed the lawsuit was created in 2019. According to a PrivatBank spokesman, this union has done nothing but try to hinder the bank’s every move, including the selection of a new CEO in the spring of this year.
The state-owned PrivatBank is Ukraine’s largest bank. It was nationalized in 2016 after the government and forensic investigators found a $5.5 billion hole in its balance sheet, allegedly caused by insider lending and money laundering by the previous owners, the oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov.
Kolomoisky has filed hundreds of lawsuits against the bank, trying to reclaim it. Meanwhile, PrivatBank is trying to get Kolomoisky to cough up the money that went missing when he was its owner.
