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Eastern Europe
July 7, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 20
growth was notably higher in the first four months of this year, reaching $24.5bn.
“If it took them five-and-a-bit years to invest $1bn in 19 projects, it’ll take them 50 years to spend
Ukraine prosecutors investigate former PrivatBank management over insolvency
bne IntelliNews
The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) has opened a criminal probe against the former management of PrivatBank over its role in taking the lender into insolvency, the bank’s board chairman Oleksandr Shlapak told journalists on July 4.
Shlapak said the investigation concerns loans
for a total of UAH133bn (€4.5bn) provided to borrowers that did not conduct economic activities and had a negative financial state, Interfax news agency reported.
The statement followed the expiry of the July
1 deadline for voluntary restructuring of loans
of PrivatBank’s former oligarch owners Ihor Kolomoisky and Hennady Boholyubov. The businessmen had failed to fulfill their obligations, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) said in a statement on July 3.
The authorities have a legal option to try to prosecute Kolomoisky and Boholyubov for allowing the bank to go insolvent. But in the
past three years there have been no precedents in Ukraine of owners of bankrupted lenders being punished under this law.
$10bn,” Alexander Gabuev, a specialist in Russia- China relations at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Financial Times, referring to previous RFDI deals with CDB and China Investment Corpora- tion.
Ukraine’s largest lender was nationalised in December 2016.
The businessmen had committed to carrying out a restructuring programme by mid-2017. If they successfully restructured 75% of the portfolio, the NBU said it would consider extending the restruc- turing of the remaining 25% to late 2017.
According to the regulator, the state and Privat- Bank have already taken steps for applying an appropriate legal strategy, but details were not disclosed. The banking procedure will be close to the usual procedure for repossession in case of overdue debts, so it is “more about foreclosure”, the NBU added.
Shlapak added that talks had begun with the for- mer owners of PrivatBank about restructuring the portfolio of loans to related parties. “No results yet, but they are ongoing,” he said.
In separate comment, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said criminal responsibility for non-compliance with the law will follow for Privatbank’s former owners. “If the obligations are fulfilled, there will be corresponding decisions on them, [and] if they are not fulfilled, and the NBU witnesses this, then criminal responsibility for non-observance of the law