18 April 2019: Kyiv's District Administrative Court decides behind closed doors that the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank had insufficient legal grounds to declare PrivatBank insolvent… a declaration which led to the bank being taken over by the government in December 2016. PrivatBank was the equivalent of Ukraine's FDIC. “The PrivatBank Affair,” which is what it should be known as, revolves around the alleged laundering of some $470 BILLION dollars (including through Joe Biden's home state of Delaware) and has been described as “the biggest case of money laundering in history.” Multiple intelligence agencies are very clearly implicated and some might even suggest that it's one of several causal factors behind the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Wikipedia provides relevant some background on PrivatBank's founder:
❝ Ihor Valeriyovych Kolomoyskyi (Ukrainian: Ігор Валерійович Коломойський, romanized: Ihor Valereriyovych Kolomoyskyi; Hebrew: איגור קולומויסקי; born 13 February 1963) is an Israeli-Cypriot billionaire businessman, once considered a leading oligarch in his native Ukraine. In 2020, he was indicted in the United States, on charges related to large-scale bank fraud, and in 2022 was deprived of Ukrainian citizenship by President Zelenskyy. Many of Kolomoyski's [[alleged]] assets, particularly ones that were strategic to the Ukrainian state in light of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, including his ownership of Ukraine's largest gasoline companies, were nationalized by the Ukrainian government in November 2022. […]
Kolomoyskyi was born into a Jewish family in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. Both parents had graduated in engineering. His mother worked at the university and father in a metallurgical plant. Already in his childhood he was considered to be very determined, diligent and serious, was enthusiastic about sports, and liked to play chess [[chess was/is a conduit for intelligence asset cultivation/recruitment]]. Professionally, he followed the example of his parents. After graduating from the Gymnasium 21 in Dnipro with the Komsomol badge “For outstanding school performance,” in 1980 [[thus making him a likely target for intelligence asset cultivation]] he took up graduate studies in engineering at the Leonid Brezhnev Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute (now the National Metallurgical Academy of Ukraine), graduating in 1985. […]
In 1990, with two other graduates from Dnipropetrovsk universities, Gennadiy Bogolyubov and Oleksiy Martynov, Kolomoyskyi created a joint enterprise marketing office equipment bought in Moscow. After the collapse of the USSR, the partners, joined by the son of a major Soviet entrepreneur, Leonid Miloslavsky, began to import foreign goods — from sneakers and sportswear to telephones. To pay for the imports, Kolomoyskyi arranged the export of steel products. Soon they realized the greater profits to be made in internationally trading the locally sourced ores and metal. Among other operations, their Privat group supplied fuel to the mining company Pokrovsky (Ordzhonikidzevsky) GOK, receiving in return manganese ore for export. [[Analyst: this sounds like the beginning of a securitization/forward-financing ponzi scheme… likely the first of many major crimes.]] […]
In March 1992, the four companies of the Privat Group established Privatbank CJSC. Unlike state-owned banks, Privat willingly served private entrepreneurs and in 1995 participated aggressively in the voucher scheme for the privatization of state assets. With the blessing of Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma (also from Dnipro, and whose successful presidential campaign in 1994 Kolomoyskyi and his partners later funded), PrivatBank was also the only Ukrainian lender to receive permission from the National Bank of Ukraine to open overseas branches. One branch in Latvia, established in 1992, was later implicated in the 2014 Moldovan bank fraud scandal. The operations of a second, opened in the late 1990s in Cyprus, helped precipitate the nationalization of PrivatBank in 2016. [[One should also note that Kolomoyskyi's fellow Lubavitcher, Victor Pinchuk, is Leonid Kuchma's son-in-law.]]❞
Swedish economist Anders Åsland (generally a good source), writing for the (state- and corporate-funded and therefore sometimes unreliable) Atlantic Council, explains a bit more how the situation has developed:
❝ On 21 May 2019, the nationalized Ukrainian PrivatBank filed a remarkable civil case against its prior owners Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov in the state court of Delaware. [[Deleware. Interesting.]] The three co-defendants are US citizens in Miami and nineteen anonymous companies.
The defendants are accused “for hundreds of millions of dollars of damages arising in connection with claims for… unjust enrichment, for fraudulent transfer under state laws (including Delaware and Ohio), for violations of Ohio’s [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] statute, and for civil conspiracy” (p. 2).
The most striking statement is “From 2006 through December 2016, the total movement of funds (credits) into the [ultimate beneficiary owners’] laundering at PrivatBank Cyprus was $470 billion, which amounts to approximately double the Gross Domestic Product of Cyprus during the same period” (p. 77). If this is true, this is the biggest case of money laundering in history, and it has been perpetrated by one single group. ❞
Per Kreller Consulting:
❝ The complaint, which arose after the bank’s 2016 nationalization, in the wake of its fraud-induced near collapse, offers a unique window into the 4-step process by which a financial institution’s funds can be stolen by its principals, obscured through a labyrinthine laundering process, funneled into offshore commercial assets, and the whole process hidden through a system of loan recycling. […] In step three the laundered money originally acquired through “general corporate financing” loans, was channeled to a group of related Delaware LLCs and used to purchase commercial assets in the United States […] contravening the stated purpose of the loans.❞ (Analyst: Kreller's entire breakdown of the 4-step process should be read.)
Analyst's note: one doesn't simply launder billions of dollars through Delaware shell companies without paying “10% for the big guy.” Racketeering — serving as the point man for what's essentially a money-laundering protection racket being run by people who have abused their privileged positions in the intelligence community and in elected office — isn't possible if you let some people pay and let some people skate. Of course, compensation has to be far removed from the illicit activity. The way you do that is by arranging for a board seat or another perk for your patron or one of their family members.
Even though Ukrainian Zelensky has recently turned against Kolomoyskyi, depriving him in 2022 of Ukrainian citizenship (a small penalty), he's long been considered Kolomoyskyi's man. A Politico piece from 2019, explains the situation well:
❝ Ukrainians hope that Zelenskiy will fight for the common man instead. It’s a powerful narrative that has catapulted this political unknown within spitting distance of the presidency. There’s just one major problem with it: the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, whose television station 1+1 hosts Zelenskiy’s hit show. Kolomoisky’s media outlet also provides security and logistical backup for the comedian’s campaign, and it has recently emerged that Zelenskiy’s legal counsel, Andrii Bohdan, was the oligarch’s personal lawyer. Investigative journalists have also reported that Zelenskiy traveled 14 times in the past two years to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoisky is based in exile. Neither man could be reached for comment. ❞
It gets more interesting. On 18 May 2019, (perhaps not realizing that he was referring to a person who might be described as “a load-bearing oligarch”) Rudy Giuliani sent out a tweet asking if Zelensky would have Ihor Kolomoisky arrested. Three days later, on 21 May 2019, Giuliani was photographed with Kolomoiskyi's rabbi, the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine (more on that later), Moshe Azman, in Paris while smoking cigars… the same day PrivatBank filed that aforementioned remarkable civil case against its prior owners, Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, in the state court of Delaware.
Two days after that, on 23 May 2019, Kolomoisky threatened Rudy Giuliani with a big scandal. The exact events are unclear, but it would appear that Giuliani didn't understand that Azman's loyalty was to the man whom he just said Zelensky should have arrested. Azman confirmed that loyalty on 19 October 2019, when he decried an effigy of Kolomoyskyi as being anti-Semitic… even though many Jews in Ukraine don't like him — with his French champagne and Swiss chalets (no offense against Swiss chalets) — and would probably agree with the Catholic Giuliani and with the FBI that he's a criminal.
Analyst's note: in rare cases, Chabad-Lubavitchers such as Kolomoyskyi sometimes perpetrate their frauds by corrupting their religious authorities (buying them off) and by exploiting their own communities (as is probably sometimes the case with the application of Sharia law by Muslim jurists, etc.). In other words, Kolomoyskyi's donations to the Chabad-Lubavitcher community may not have been altruistic in nature (see the right-hand column), but rather may have been a means to bribe religious authorities.
A full explanation is beyond the scope of this document, but a Jewish “beth din” is sometimes used within the Orthodox Jewish community to resolve civil disputes. The Shulkhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law) calls for civil cases to be resolved by religious, instead of secular, courts (arka'oth). This is why its rare (but not unheard of) for matters of inheritance and divorce for these particular communities to make their way into secular, civil courts, and why so much (dis-)organized crime gravitates towards post-Soviet states. One could, of course, make a strong and compelling case that secular jurists in many countries, including in America, are far more compromised than religious ones (don't get me started), but *if* the use of private religious arbitration is a factor in the Kolomoiskyi case, as it appears to be (given the Giuliani meeting with Rabbi Azman), then it would be important to determine which *other* rabbi(s) might have an interest in cases concerning him and Ukraine's nationalization of PrivatBank.
Writing for Forward in 2017, Nathan Guttman explains the background of the rabbinical dispute in the Russia/Ukraine war:
❝ In the hyper-sensitive international atmosphere surrounding Russia’s 2014 forceful annexation of Crimea, even a name tag can create a crisis. (Analyst: name tags can indeed be sensitive issues.)
This lesson was learned by Chabad-Lubavitch, the Brooklyn-based Haredi group which convened its annual emissaries conference in New Jersey on November 19. Among the 5,600 emissaries, or shluchim, from across the world attending the convention was Rabbi Binyamin Wolf, the Chabad representative in Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city. His name tag, however, identified him as being from Sevastopol, Russia.
This was not lost on the Russian press, which viewed Rabbi Wolf’s name tag as recognition, on behalf of the largest Jewish organization active in Russia and the former Soviet Union, of the legitimacy of Russia’s occupation of Crimea. ❞
Is Crimea part of Russia or Ukraine? If PrivatBank was essentially functioning like Ukraine's FDIC — while engaged in a massive money laundering operation sprawling through Delaware — then one can see how PrivatBank's assets in Crimea (or at least Kolomoisky's own personal assets in Crimea) might become an issue for religious authorities.
If Kolomoiskyi “owns” Zelensky (through kompromot or otherwise) and if he's mediating his fraud though Rabbi Azman, then the issue of who, exactly, the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine is — and who the Chief Rabbi of Crimea therefore is — might actually be quite consequential for Ukraine.
Analyst's note: phrased another way: does Zelensky run Ukraine? Or does his rabbi, Moshe Azman? Or is it his rabbi's benefactor, Kolomoyskyi? Or is it his rabbi's benefactor's creditors, perhaps in Russia (or even in China)?
