Individuals and companies associated with the son of fugitive ex-President Viktor Yanukovych withdrew almost Hr 2 billion ($72 million) from his bank in 2016-2017 through the bank of President Petro Poroshenko, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Schemes investigative television show reported on Nov. 8.
By Schemes’ estimates, Poroshenko’s bank made Hr 20 million ($716,159) from the transactions.
Poroshenko’s bank refused to comment on the transactions to Schemes, referring to its bank secrecy policy, but said it did nothing illegal.
“The International Investment Bank was not and is not a party to any ‘schemes’ to legalize (the laundering) of proceeds obtained by criminal means,” the bank said in a statement.
The journalists of Schemes claim to have obtained information about bank transfers that show several employees of the Ukrainian Development Bank (Vseukrainsky Bank Rozvytku, or VBR), which belonged to Oleksandr Yanukovych, each withdrew up to Hr 80 million in cash from International Investment Bank, owned by President Poroshenko.
Poroshenko holds a 9.9 percent stake in the bank personally, and 50.1 percent through his asset-management company Prime Assets Capital.
Oleksandr Yanukovych’s Ukrainian Development Bank (VBR) has been undergoing liquidation by the National Bank of Ukraine since Yanukovych’s family was put under international sanctions after the EuroMaidan Revolution. The bank’s depositors are being refunded from Ukraine’s Deposit Guarantee Fund.
About Hr 2.5 billion on the bank’s accounts were arrested as part of an investigation by the Interior Ministry into fictitious deposit accounts registered to front parties and used to give credits to launder Yanukovych’s money.
However, Pechersk District Court of Kyiv lifted the arrests on these accounts in 2016 because the investigators of the Interior Ministry and Prosecutor General’s Office failed to prove that this money was acquired illegally by these parties, according to the court’s decisions.
Ukrainian Development Bank employees then started to withdraw from Hr 23 million to Hr 80 million each from their deposit accounts, Schemes claim. Most were employees of Yanukovych’s VBR bank: such as an office manager, a designer and the head of the securities department.
According to Schemes, most of these people withdrew tens of millions in currency via Poroshenko’s International Investment Bank. Some of them did so through authorized representatives, such as lawyer Oleksandr Salazskyi.
In an interview to Schemes, Salazskyi confirmed that he represented the interests of several individuals from VBR bank, and said they had borrowed these hundreds of millions of hryvnias from Yashar Khojayev.
Khojayev was a close friend and business partner of Oleksandr Yanukovych, according to Tetiana Shevchuk, a lawyer with the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv.
The claim that Khojayev lent hundreds of millions of hryvnias to parties associated with Oleksandr Yanukovych satisfied Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court, which lifted the arrests on their accounts.
In a comment to Schemes, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said prosecutors had done everything in their power to retain the arrests, and responsibility for the money’s withdrawal lay with the court.
According to Schemes, bank transaction data they have obtained show that about Hr 2 billion were transferred from Yanukovych’s bank to Poroshenko’s bank, and almost immediately part of it was withdrawn. Poroshenko’s bank made an estimated Hr 20 million on the transactions – a 1 percent cash withdrawal fee.
