The 5th annual Tiger Conference kicks off on Nov. 29 with six panel discussions and an evening awards program.
When organizing the event, we chose the subject of asset recovery – presumably a big political goal of leaders who say they are trying to track and recover the $40 billion stolen (by official estimates) during ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s regime from 2010-2014. The sum equals the government’s annual budget.
But in assembling the guests and talking with experts, we came to the conclusion that the unofficial policy of President Petro Poroshenko is “keep what you stole” rather than “we are going to search for you with all the resources at our disposal and will never stop until everyone is held accountable.”
It’s obvious, and it’s sad.
The nation’s top political leaders chose to bypass an opportunity to talk about the importance of asset recovery and establishing legal responsibility for grand-scale theft. The panel is represented by intelligent, competent and committed experts who are the first to acknowledge that they have limited influence in setting the policy and budget priorities of politicians and law enforcement.
So, we are left with a Deposit Guarantee Fund that has made little progress in recovering assets under its control from the 80 closed and insolvent banks in the multibillion-dollar bank fraud of the last decade. The fund wrongly puts its emphasis on criminal bank-fraud convictions (which don’t exist) rather than the more useful civil lawsuits to recover assets.
General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, taking over a hopeless institution that existed to protect rather than prosecute corruption, hasn’t gotten around to forming a special bank fraud unit – even though the National Bank of Ukraine and Deposit Guarantee Fund have forwarded hundreds of clear-cut bank fraud cases for investigation.
Meanwhile, those who looted the banks with insider lending are freely walking the streets, including Mykola Lagun of Delta Bank and Oleg Bakhmatyuk of VAB Bank and Financial Incentive Bank. Or their assets remain safe and under their control in Ukraine, like those belonging to exiled oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who owes the central bank Hr 12 billion. He got this loan without putting up any lasting personal guarantees or collateral. His Nadra Bank failed spectacularly.
The dismal status quo is best illustrated by the fact that prosecutors are still trying to recover the $270 million stolen by ex-Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko in the 1990s. At this pace, the money will be long gone and we’ll all be long dead before anybody moves on the lion’s share of the $40 billion looted during the Yanukovych era.
