When I moved from London to Ukraine in 2012 I remember thinking I had arrived in a country run by the mafia. Most businesses felt under constant siege by law enforcement, the legislature, the tax authorities and the judiciary. Ukraine today is far from perfect, but it finally feels as if it is now kleptocratic values that are under siege rather than businesses (admittedly a number of exceptions spring to mind).

I am certain that no person who worked for Yanukovych could claim with a clear conscience to be unaware of the regime’s huge scale self-enrichment program that was achieved by subverting the nation’s young and fragile institutions. Paul Manafort’s indictment, upon the filing by special counsel Robert Mueller, feels like the beginning of a new chapter for Ukraine, one in which the political class will think carefully before seeking rent from the state.

Although the indictment of Manafort on the face of it has little to do with special counsel Mueller’s main task – investigating links between the Trump election campaign and Russian government agents – it is perhaps more relevant to that task than it may seem. In Manafort, Yanukovych and his Russian state backers found a mercantile figure plugged into Washington.

It is unlikely therefore that his usefulness as an instrument of Russian influence in Washington ceased after the fall of Yanukovych. What is more, his crooked financial dealings left him vulnerable to blackmail by foreign agents. What is surprising is that Manafort, a citizen of a country with the most powerful tax authority and among the best law enforcement in the world, thought that his business dealings with Yanukovych would go unnoticed.

What I find most promising is that while the FBI follows Manafort’s money it may find transactions that lead to entities involved in stealing assets from the Ukrainian state. Asset tracing has a habit of drawing other tangentially related offenders into its path. Let us hope that Muller’s investigation will prove that Ukrainian politicians are answerable not only to their own country’s law enforcement, where evidence often mysteriously disappears, but also to law enforcement across the globe. It is early days yet, but perhaps this development marks a step towards Ukraine one day retrieving a significant portion of its stolen wealth.

James Hart is an emerging markets finance expert, partner of Hillmont Partners.