In Ukraine, one of the most famous oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky, was recently arrested.
There were five reasons for this:
First. Some 10 years ago, Ihor Kolomoisky was one of the richest and most influential people in Ukraine. At that time, he was the owner of the largest private bank Privatbank and the Privat business group, which included agribusiness, oil business, metal trading and mining and processing, fuel supplies, and so on.
Ukraine’s largest bank, Privatbank, in every sense of the word, the maximum number of Ukrainian deposits as of 2015 was there.
Half of Ukrainian business was there, and 80% of Ukrainian citizens kept their deposits there.
It was the most serious link in the financial system of Ukraine, and, in addition, the most powerful argument for one or another political influence.
In 2014, when Euromaidan took place, the Ukrainian economy collapsed, businesses lost hundreds of millions of dollars on their bank accounts, many banks then “burst” and their property was sold off for next to nothing.
And at that time Privatbank was giving crazy interest rates on all deposits.
19% per annum, 20%, 25% per annum. Think about it: the country is flying upside down, flying into the abyss, the national currency has collapsed fourfold, hostilities have begun, and Privatbank gives huge interest on dividends.
Why?
In what business should the Privat bankers have invested the money received from people in order to give deposits to people and earn money on it?
Answer: None.
“Privat” at that moment was already becoming or had become a financial pyramid scheme.
That is, they pulled up, pulled up, pulled up, pulled up, money in the form of deposits and then transferred it to the accounts of businesses and companies affiliated with them.
Investigators are now calling the amount of $5 billion dollars that was withdrawn/stolen from Privatbank.
What is the point of this story?
To the fact that yes, indeed, Privat has turned into a pyramid scheme and its main bosses have been sucking money out of it.
Investigators say that 97% of the money received from depositors went in the form of loans and other payments to the businesses of Kolomoisky and partners.
Therefore, I believe the version of the pre-trial investigation that there was: 1) fraud; 2) abuse of office; 3) intra-monopoly corruption; 4) seizure of other people’s property in especially large amounts; 5) official forgery to commit serious crimes; 6) creation of an organized criminal group, which included the top of the group “Privat”.
Plus legalization of proceeds of crime.
And let us add to this the investigations against Kolomoisky, which were conducted in the United States. And these investigations have not ended. They were conducted under Trump, and before Trump, and now they are being conducted. American prosecutors arrested the real estate of Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov, his partner: business centers, houses. The official charge is legalization of stolen goods.
This is the first component, let’s call it official-legal.
Second. I propose to call the second component of what happened early political. It is constructed from Kolomoisky’s role in 2014-2016, when he was a very influential Ukrainian politician, became the official head of the Dnipropetrovsk region (where Kolomoisky himself is from), took a direct, leading part in the situation with the suppression of the opposition anti-Maidan movement in the Dnipropetrovsk region, with the dispersal of people, with the arming, with the distribution of weapons, with the development of money. This helped to strengthen his business and political positions, but not for long.
Then there was a conflict with another oligarch, the then president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko.
The conflict with Poroshenko resulted in an attempt to remove Kolomoisky’s business interests from the Ukrainian state corporation Ukrnafta and the nationalization of Privatbank, as well as Kolomoisky’s removal as head of the Dnipropetrovsk region.
So, this is early-political Kolomoisky.
Third. Kolomoisky realized that he was losing very seriously, he saw that the United States was not his friend, but his enemy. President Poroshenko became his enemy. He realized that sooner or later they would want to “eat” him and take away all his billion-dollar fortune, gained in a very dubious (like all other Ukrainian oligarchs) way. So he started trying to move in a completely different direction, to the North, trying to apologize, explain and negotiate. In the end, it did not work out, simply because there are enough of their own there, Ukrainian oligarchs are not needed at all (this, by the way, was realized long ago by the largest Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who bet on the U.S.).
Here begins the next, fourth, modern-political component, which is more seriously intertwined with Zelensky’s personality.
It is no secret to anyone in Ukraine that Zelensky is, to put it mildly, a pupil of Kolomoisky’s school, his protégé. It was Kolomoisky who raised him, financed him, put him on big TV channels and made him known throughout Ukraine as a comic actor. It was on Kolomoisky’s TV channel “1+1” that all episodes of Zelensky’s show “95 quarter” and his movies were aired. It was there that the series “Servant of the People” was shown with Zelensky in the lead role, portraying an honest politician from the common people, whose lies were later “bought” by so many Ukrainians. It was Kolomoisky’s media that maximally worked for Zelensky’s victory in the presidential race.
It is clear that there is a backstage, and that Zelensky’s patron boss of many years is actually a very tough, hard man. Not just tough, but very tough, rude, boorish, vindictive and insolent. And many of his cronies, partners, entourage went through insults, humiliations, deceptions.
One can only imagine what the artists from the “95th quarter” experienced in their time. And it seems to me that long ago the current president harbored a very serious, bitter grudge against his boss.
Zelensky is an extremely resentful, vulnerable, vindictive person. But, being a talented actor, he is able to maneuver, adjust to the audience, to the viewer and to his boss, among others.
He adjusted, did not show, probably, what he really thought, hid and concealed offenses and humiliation.
But he was very eager to free himself from the oppression of his “mentor” and, I am sure, somewhere very deep – to avenge his offenses.
After Zelensky was elected president, Kolomoisky felt very good at first. He tried to put his people (deputies in the presidential party “Servant of the People”, ministers, head of the president’s office and so on) under him, as a habit, to subdue the whole project called “president”. The issue of returning Privatbank to him arose, his people were given a part of the energy sector.
The fifth component. But at that moment, Kolomoisky’s private, narrowly vested interests collided with the interests of global players who needed Ukraine as a tool and mechanism in geopolitical squabbles. The key to it was its inexperienced, but extremely self-loving and perfectly manageable president-actor, but the arrogant local oligarch was definitely unnecessary. The interests of overseas big politicians and corporations, the personal aspirations, grievances and whims of the president, and geopolitical circumstances as such (intensification of the struggle between the West and the non-West) came together here.
When the war broke out, the U.S. bet on the president elected by Ukraine, not on an arrogant and extremely unscrupulous oligarch. The superpower supported Zelensky, including his attitude toward his opponents, his desire to be an authoritarian ruler, and his excessive earnings. America and the war unleashed his hands in relation to his opponents, including Kolomoisky. The president became an all-powerful dictator inside the country.
He subjugated punitive structures, the remnants of the law enforcement system were remodeled into a system of persecution. The courts were “nailed to the leg”. Political opponents who did not have time to leave the country either died or were thrown into prisons.
Kolomoisky was quietly stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship, which hypothetically allowed him to be extradited at the request of judicial and law enforcement agencies of other countries. His people were maximally removed from everywhere, having previously used them (for example, the recently dismissed Minister of Culture Tkachenko, a former producer of Kolomoisky’s TV channel “1+1”, the same minister whose dirty hands destroyed the Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy in Ukraine and confiscated its values). Kolomoisky was pushed away from the state budget – the only “trough” in Ukraine today, simply because the economy is de facto destroyed.
Therefore, I think it is naive to believe, as some people think in Ukraine, that Zelensky is Kolomoisky’s assistant and protector. Now he is rather, on the contrary, a catalyst of the oligarch’s problems, and the scenario in which they, the problems, will be repeatedly intensified, and already by the hands of American justice, is a very desirable and suitable scenario for the president of Ukraine.
And here his interests fully coincide with the interests of the current bosses of the Ukrainian president – the Western political and business top brass, who are interested in the fact that Ukrainian politics and economy are fully managed only by them through their obedient puppets, and the local oligarchs do not get in the way and do not try to play their own game.
