Oligarchs Forced to Pay $3,000,000,000 After Masterminding ‘Highly Complex’ Bank Fraud Scheme: Report

Two former Ukrainian billionaires will shell out more than $3 billion after they were found liable for carrying out a fraudulent scheme that cost the state-owned lender PrivatBank PJSC billions of dollars.

A London judge ordered the bank’s former owners, Igor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, to pay about $1.8 billion in damages and $1.2 billion in interest, reports Bloomberg.

The judgment also requires them to reimburse PrivatBank for the $100 million that the bank spent on litigating the case. 

Says a spokesperson from the bank,

“To the extent that these sums are not paid voluntarily, PrivatBank will immediately commence the recovery stage of the process and seek to enforce the judgment against the former owners’ assets to obtain compensation for the Bank and, by extension, its shareholder, the Ukrainian Government.”

PrivatBank claims that from 2013 to 2014, Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov used sham loans and trade documents to funnel $1.9 billion to secretly-owned companies in England and the British Virgin Islands.

In 2016, the bank was forced to take a bailout and nationalized. Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov’s global assets were frozen a year after.

 The two contested the case claiming that the allegations were politically motivated but failed to testify at the trial. In July, a court ruling also found Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov guilty of operating a highly complex loan recycling scheme.

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