The Prosecutor General’s Office on Feb. 23 charged Oleksandr Dubilet, former CEO of PrivatBank, with embezzling Hr 136 million and forgery.
PrivatBank, Ukraine’s biggest bank, was nationalized in 2016 when it was found to have an over $5.5 billion hole in its ledger, allegedly moved out by its former owners and oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov via fraudulent schemes. Ukrainian taxpayers paid for the bailout of the bank. Kolomoisky denies the accusations of wrongdoing.
Besides Dubilet, prosecutors charged former head of the bank’s financial management department.
The former executives are accused of embezzling PrivatBank money in 2016 when they found out the bank would be nationalized. They unlawfully paid money to an affiliated company under deposit contracts and backdated the payment documents, according to the prosecutors.
On the day before, the Prosecutor General’s Office also detained Volodymyr Yatsenko, a former deputy CEO of PrivatBank, and charged him with embezzlement.
Immediately after the charges were signed, Yatsenko boarded a private jet to fly from Dnipro to Vienna. However, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine asked the State Aviation Service to land the plane at Boryspil Airport and arrested him.
Charges against the three former top executives of PrivatBank are the first criminal charges in the long-running investigation of the biggest bank fraud in Ukraine’s history.
Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova cryptically hinted that some people who are witnesses in the case can be charged, too.
“I recommend to those who are (so far) witnesses to the case, to be prepared,” she wrote on Facebook. “Law enforcement agencies used to close their eyes on your activities. We will open them.”
Dubilet, Yatsenko, and other top executives of PrivatBank are disputing the bank’s nationalization in court. So do its former owners Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov.
Dubilet is reportedly not in Ukraine, so he wasn’t arrested.
After PrivatBank was nationalized, Dubilet, along with other former top managers, founded Fintech Band. As a contractor, the company developed two online banking applications – Monobank in Ukraine and Koto in London.
Fintech Band’s co-founder Mykhailo Rogalsky told Kyiv Post that charges against Dubilet and Yatsenko won’t impact the work of the company.
Meanwhile, Kolomoisky has been under investigation in the U.S. in a money laundering case. He denies the accusations.
While Kolomoisky and his associates haven’t been officially charged in the U.S. yet, in 2020 the U.S. Justice Department filed two civil forfeiture complaints that could allow it to seize $70 million worth of real estate. In the complaints, the U.S. says Kolomoisky, Bogolyubov and their American associates Mordechai Korf and Uriel Laber engaged in fraud and money laundering.
The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv on Feb. 23 praised the charges against Yatsenko and Dubilet.
“Congratulations to NABU, the OPG, and Ukraine for bold actions against former PrivatBank officials, charged with costing Ukrainian taxpayers millions,” the embassy tweeted. “Courageous actions like these are an important step in the fight against corruption.”
In a separate civil case, the nationalized PrivatBank filed a $1.9 billion lawsuit against Kolomoisky in the U.K. in 2017. The High Court ruled that the case has no British jurisdiction in 2018 but the Court of Appeals overturned that decision in 2019.
The U.K. Supreme Court on Feb. 1 ordered Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov to pay PrivatBank’s legal fees to the tune of 1 million pounds.
PrivatBank is also clashing against Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov in Switzerland, Cyprus and Israel.
