The Hostage Zelensky
Zelensky as Hostage, His Corruption and the Corruption of His Inner Circle, How He Was Snookered By the West, Tucker Interviews His Former Press Secretary, His Tighter Noose
I am not as harsh on Vladimir1 Zelensky as many others have been over the years. I do not view him as holding a significant amount of responsibility for the war in Ukraine when compared to others, as I am of the opinion that he is a hired gun, one who was cornered and forced to play-act the role of a “Ukrainian Churchill” by the country’s western backers. This has been my opinion since the Russians (re)crossed the border in February 2022, and I have no reason to change it.
Why do I say this?
It’s quite simple: In October of 2021, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) released a published report accusing Zelensky of benefiting from a network of offshore companies first established in 2012 and spanning the countries and territories of the British Virgin Islands, Belize and Cyprus:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.
Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.
Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.
Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore.
The London properties bought via offshore shells linked to his associates: roughly £1.58M + £2.2M + £1.5M (totaling around $8 million USD at the time). That may not seem like much, but then there’s also the charge stemming from an unproven 2019 campaign allegation by a political opponent (Volodymyr Ariev), who claimed the offshore network received $41 million from Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank. The Pandora Papers partially corroborate the structure of the companies (10 matched the chart) but do not confirm the $41 million transfers or prove any wrongdoing.
Zelensky campaigned on a peace and and anti-corruption platform, but at the same time he was the protégé of the notorious Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky from Dnipro (aka Dnepropetrovsk). In the ever-shifting alliances of the Ukrainian Oligarchy, one that would not be out of place in Game of Thrones, Kolomoisky was the ultimate maverick as he refused to side with either Russia or the USA, preferring to extract as much as he could while the getting was good. In 2019, OCCRP accused him of stealing $5.5 Billion USD from Ukraine’s PrivatBank:
The former chairwoman of Ukraine’s central bank dubbed it one of the biggest financial scandals of the 21st century.
Valeria Hontareva was describing the alleged theft of US$5.5 billion from PrivatBank, once the country’s largest commercial lender. The suspected masterminds are the bank’s two oligarch owners: Ihor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Boholiubov, who stand accused of absconding with an amount roughly equal to 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. According to court records, both men are said to have recently been living in Switzerland, though Kolomoisky appears to be spending time in Israel.
“Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank shareholders and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,” Hontareva said in March 2018. “This is 33 percent of the population’s deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.”
Now, for the first time, OCCRP has traced the mechanism that appears to have allowed Kolomoisky and Boholiubov to funnel such vast wealth out of Ukraine: The money was moved through a PrivatBank subsidiary in Cyprus.
The arrangement helped hide the fact that cash was disappearing because the National Bank of Ukraine treated the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank the same as it would domestic branches. This designation meant officials never detected that cash transferred to Cyprus was leaving Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Cypriot regulators either failed to detect that the various bank transfers totalling $5.5 billion were backed by bogus contracts, or didn’t take the necessary action to stop them.
The system allowed billions of dollars to be pumped through the PrivatBank accounts, which were held in Cyprus by offshore companies.
This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report, which is based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP, also reveals that there was little distinction between Kolomoisky and Boholiubov’s corporate and personal accounts.