An English judge ordered more than $2.5 billion in assets belonging to oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov frozen on Dec. 19, PrivatBank said in a statement.
The order freezes the two oligarchs’ assets around the world, as well as six companies that they own or control, the bank said.
The purported move came days after the state-owned PrivatBank sued its former owners Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov in the High Court in London for $2.5 billion over massive misappropriation of funds from the bank.
Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers nationalized PrivatBank on Dec. 19, 2016, amid pressure from the International Monetary Fund and internal instability at Ukraine’s largest bank. Upon nationalization, the government was forced to fill a hole in the lender’s capital.
Stabilizing PrivatBank has amounted to nearly $5 billion in recapitalization payments, Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk said in a statement.
“This Hr 140 billion is the money of every citizen, every taxpayer, and they must necessarily be returned to the state budget,” Danylyuk said, reacting to the London court ruling.
Government officials, including former National Bank Chief Valeriya Gontareva, allege that Kolomoisky ran an elaborate insider lending scheme to siphon the cash out of the bank over the course of many years.
The Dnipro-born Kolomoisky, whose holdings include 1+1 TV channel, as well as multiple industrial plants around the world, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
In a late Dec. 20 press release, the state-owned PrivatBank said that the “freezing order was granted on the basis of detailed evidence put to the court that Messrs Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov extracted almost $2 billion from the bank through a particular series of dishonest transactions, which had the effect of transferring the funds to companies that they secretly owned or controlled.”
Law firm Hogan Lovells is representing Ukraine in the London court battle. The same firm represented Kazakh BTA Bank in a bank fraud case against Mukhtar Ablyazov, the lender’s former chairman.
This is not the firm’s first time squaring off against Kolomoisky. Hogan Lovells represented rival Dnipro oligarch Viktor Pinchuk in another London court battle in 2015, which settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. The settlement included Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov giving Pinchuk a landmark building on Trafalgar Square.
Ukraine’s National Bank hired forensic auditing firms AlixPartners and Kroll to conduct a forensic audit of insider lending at the bank.
But those investigations have been in danger in recent days after a Kyiv court ruled on Dec. 15 that the government’s hiring of AlixPartners and Kroll was illegal in a lawsuit filed by Kolomoisky. Ukraine’s National Bank said it would appeal the decision.
Weeks before, on Nov. 25, Kolomoisky was spotted having coffee in Amsterdam with current Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, apparently at random by a visiting Ukrainian student.
“PrivatBank is confident that the English court will determine its claims fairly and objectively and that it will succeed in recovering funds that have been misappropriated from it,” the bank wrote in a statement.
A copy of the decision was not immediately available.
