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Weekly Lists
January 19, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 27
bne:Banker EBRD posts another
record year
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on January 18 reported another year of record lending, amounting to €9.7bn in 2017 compared to €9.4bn in 2016.
In climbing to a new high, the multilateral development bank again overcame its suspension of financing to Russia – previously its top investment destination – a move which was insisted on by the US and European country shareholders in 2014 after Moscow annexed Crimea.
A release of preliminary figures from the EBRD also showed that the number of individual projects it financed in 2017 climbed to
a record 412 from 378 in 2016. “We are in excellent operational health,” EBRD president Sir Suma Chakrabarti said.
Turkey was the biggest recipient of investment financing, with €1.6bn, although that was less than the €1.92bn awarded in 2016. Financing to Egypt, which became an EBRD destination in 2015, almost doubled to €1.41bn. That made it the second biggest invest- ment location for the development bank. Ukraine took third place, with lending rising from €581m in 2016 to €740m last year. Poland ranked fourth with €659mn compared to €776mn in the previous year. Greece was in fifth on €614m, up from €485m in 2016.
Ukraine’s PrivatBank was the “object of large scale and coordinated fraudulent actions” which led to the loss of $5.5bn, corporate sleuths Kroll found in a report on the collapse of Ukraine’s largest commercial bank at the end of 2016.
PrivatBank, formerly the property of Ukrainian oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Bogolyubov, was drained of cash by
the use of dodgy loans made to shell companies controlled by
the shareholders in November 2016, as revealed in an award- winning investigation by bne IntelliNews. The ensuing scandal led the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) to nationalise the bank six weeks later and then hire Kroll to investigate the bank’s loan book. Eventually the NBU said that 99% of the loans in the bank’s loan book were fake and that the shareholders had walked off with over $5bn in deposits.
"The investigation has identified that PrivatBank was subjected to a large scale and coordinated fraud over at least a 10-year period ending December 2016, which resulted in the bank suffering a loss of at least $5.5bn," reads a report on the NBU's website.
Owners looted $5.5bn from PrivatBank, says Kroll report