Police detain some officials guilty of Ukrayina bankruptcy
At his February 5 press conference, Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Bahanets briefed journalists on the investigation by his office of the Bank Ukrayina bankruptcy. Among other things, he mentioned that the prosecution has completed investigating 73 criminal cases involving the bank and submitted them to court. The team investigating wrongdoing by Ukrayina officials has come to a conclusion that part of the bank’s loan money was embezzled. Thus, it has been established that between 1995 and 2000 there were 151 cases of illegal loan extensions and nonpayment of the loans received. The prosecutors have allegedly succeeded in exposing some quite simple schemes used by the accused financial swindlers, with bogus deadbeats transferring loans into bank accounts of fake companies or submitting deliberately untrue information that Ukrayina loans could not be paid due to the failure of partners of such debtors to pay their debts to the firms involved. According to Mr. Bahanets, some of these deadbeats have been exposed by the prosecution, with their managers questioned and appropriate conclusions made. Part of the embezzled funds has been funneled abroad and the Prosecutor General’s Office has approached its foreign colleagues to render legal assistance, Interfax-Ukraine reports.
In a related move, PGO investigators have detained five persons suspected of being involved in the Ukrayina bankruptcy, Mr. Bahanets announced. Two of them were the bank’s former governor and security service head, and the three others were managers of commercial entities. The investigators have accused them of conspiracy and of walking away with over 11 million hryvnias. Another of the accused Ukrayina governors has been charged with gross bribery for extending illegal loans. As Mr. Bahanets stated, the prosecutors intended to detain two more Ukrayina bank officers, but according to the State Security Service (SBU) and Internal Affairs Ministry one of them left Ukraine citing a marriage trip abroad while the other could not be located. Law enforcement is now trying to track down and detain them, Mr. Bahanets confirmed.
Thus, the forecast of the skeptics that all the blame for the Ukrayina bankruptcy will go to the bank’s central management seems to be coming true. Of course, no one is there to justify the commercial bank management. However, there are some other questions to be asked, like why nothing has been said about the complicity in the bankruptcy of a number of Ukraine’s politicians. Is it the investigators’ big secret? Or could it be an attempt to keep the main perpetrators of Ukrayina’s downfall out of the limelight?
Recall that speaking to The Day last summer Deputy Governor of Ukrayina Oleksiy Poletukha stressed a number of factors that directly led to the bank’s bankruptcy. The major one, according to Head of NBU Overdue Loans Department Viktor Hordy, was the policy of the National Bank and the then “government of reformers.” It is common knowledge that since 1999 tough limitations have been imposed on most Ukrayina bank transactions, with the then NBU leaders turning a blind eye to cries of alarm coming from NBU’s Bank Oversight Department over Ukrayina extending deliberately bad loans. The Yushchenko government burdened Ukrayina with financing grandiose strategic programs while exerting pressure on it to extend loans to certain agricultural companies. Otherwise, deliberately bad loans totaling 533.5 million hryvnias would have never been extended, Mr. Hordy is convinced. Meanwhile, the absence of any direct guarantees of payment from the government made Ukrayina officers the whipping boys. Suffice it to mention the Khlib Ukrayiny Company’s 1.8 billion hryvnia debt hushed up by the government, now quite a millstone around Ukrayina’s neck. All this is just a drop in the sea of financial machinations concerning Ukrayina whose amount, incidentally, is way over the 11 million allegedly stolen by Ukrayina management.
On February 8, addressing a press conference, parliamentary investigators gave another example of the Bankruptcy Agency’s “professional” activities. Under the rental contract read out by Mr. Suslov, the liquidator leased a 3,954 square meter Ukrayina office in downtown Kyiv (Honchar Street) to the Khreshchatyk bank for UAH 11,217 a month plus VAT. Simple arithmetic brings us to the conclusion that Mr. Spilchenko, the liquidator’s representative, demanded that Dmytro Hrydzhuk, chairman of the Khreshchatyk Bank board of governors, pay “as much as” 2 hryvnias 80 kopecks rent per square meter in downtown Kyiv, placing at his disposal, as Mr. Suslov said, all the moveable property of the Ukrayina office. According to the parliamentary commission, it follows from Article 6.5 of the rental contract that the liquidator pledged, among other things, to pay all utility charges, including telephone calls, for Ukrayina-Khreshchatyk.
However, that same day The Day received a phone call from Mr. Hrydzhuk’s spokesperson who hastened to allay any fears. According to him, the information that Khreshchatyk rented a Ukrayina Bank office in downtown Kyiv at, to put it mildly, favorable conditions does not correspond to reality. The contract was signed by the Khreshchatyk Bank and the Ukrayina’s liquidator back when Kostiantyn Rusalin was the chief liquidator (i.e., there was a certain contract — Ed.). He explained that this contract has been terminated by now, with the Khreshchatyk Bank renting no Ukrayina offices.
