Page 44 - BNE_magazine_04_2019

44 I Eastern Europe bne April 2019
ously unknown firm is for instance Halpane Consulting Corp, set up in 2015 in the British Virgin Islands, owned on paper by Zaitsev and banking in Vienna.
According to a contract found among the leaked files, in July 2016 Halpane received exactly $1mn from a Panamani- an offshore, Petron Holding Corp, bank- ing at Latvian bank Regional Investment Bank. The payment was documented as being for the delivery of five tractors.
Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) investigated Petron in 2016, alleging it was being used to embezzle money from the giant state-
Ironically, despite the money laundering allegations against ABLV, it was ABLV that was tough on offshores owned
by Zaitsev and Hladkovskiy. In 2016 ABLV refused to carry out transactions between them in which an ABLV officer could “see no [business] sense.”
In the correspondence, Dmytro tries to persuade ABLV to make payments from Zaitsev’s Laurent Services to HUDC Holding, a Cyprus firm owned by Hlad- kovskiy. The pretext for the transaction were payments on loans extended from one to the other. But ABLV’s officer – feeling the pressure from
US regulators – now declined to carry
with Russia’s Novoschakhtinsk refin- ery, which was supplying fuel to the occupied territories [in Donbas] of LNR [the Luhansk People's Republic] and DNR [Donetsk People's Republic],” they wrote in a guide to the documents for journalists.
Who is behind Ukrainian Papers? The link to the Ukrainian Papers site was first posted by star journalist Oleksandr Dubinskiy. “I expected something like this before the elections, but I didn’t expect anything of this scale,” Dubinskiy wrote.
Dubinskiy is a well known journalist
on oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky’s TV channel 1+1, but denies acting on behalf of Kolomoisky. Poroshenko nationalised Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank in December 2016, after a cover story by bne IntelliNews “Privat investigations” exposed the extent of stealing in
the form of fake loans made to shell companies belonging to the owners. Kolomoisky disputes the nationalisation, calling it a “corporate raid.”
A cyber security expert who requested to be unnamed said "while the scale of the data is massive putting it in the public domain seems more likely the work of hactivists."
Kolomoisky is now regarded as backing another 1+1 TV star, actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for the presidency. With the backing of 1+1, Zelenskiy has surged to take the lead in opinion pol. Third place in the first round of voting on March
31 would end Poroshenko’s tenure. “Zelenskiy is the leader with a stable rating of around 25% of active voters and a clear lead ahead of the rest ... And among undecided voters, one third say they trust Zelenskiy,” says Volodymyr Fesenko, political scientist at Penta research lab.
“A first glance at the data indeed shows that Poroshenko’s pals’ network of offshores extends far further than previously known”
owned chemicals plant, Odesa Portside Plant, one of Ukraine’s largest export- ers, according to court documents. The investigation has since stalled.
Zaitsev could not be reached for com- ment on the transaction. Lytvynets was not answering his phone.
AML at ABLV
The leaks documents contain further clues that Poroshenko’s pals used shad- owy channels to move money around offshore. One of Zaitsev’s offshores, Laurent Services Ltd, banked with now defunct Latvian offshore bank ABLV that collapsed last year after being caught in the centre of a huge money laundering scandal. Laurent Services was apparent- ly used to shift money around between the offshores and other businesses under the pretext of loan agreements, according to an officer at ABLV quoted in the documents.
In 2017, Latvian regulators fined ABLV for breach of UN North Korea sanctions. In February 2018, US anti-money laundering agency Fintech accused ABLV of “institutionalised money laundering”, and cut it off from dollar transactions. The bank is now self- liquidating as a result.
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out transactions it may have previously allowed. “Why are you giving a loan
to a company that still owes you money?” she asked.
“On the phone you said you owned the company, I need confirmation of this,” says the ABLV officer finally. “I meant ‘we’ own it, not me personally,” Dmytro explains. The ABLV officer then asked for the account to be closed.
Elections looming
The main political fallout from the leak will be the question of whether Porosh- enko has made money in Russia while Ukrainian soldiers were dying in the struggle against Russian-backed separat- ists in the Donbas
According to the anonymous organisers of the leaks, this is exactly what they show. “Poroshenko’s offshores trade
“One of Zaitsev’s offshores, Laurent Services Ltd, banked with now defunct Latvian offshore bank ABLV that collapsed last year after being caught in the centre of a huge money laundering scandal”