Investors never know whether anything they own legally will be taken away from them. To those prepared to take risks in exchange for potential big profit margins – welcome to Ukraine.

This week has presented a number of cases illustrating just how frustrating and scary it is to do business in Ukraine, and why the nation occupies the lousy 134th spot in the World Bank’s ranking of doing business among 185 economies. In fact, recent events make one think that the assessment is way too optimistic as major international and local investors are currently struggling with, including McDonald’s, UkrSotsBank, London & Regional Properties (the owner of Globus shopping mall), Vitmark (owned by Horizon Capital, an internal investment fund), Swissport (owned by a French private equity company), and many others.

Here are some of the stories:

On Sept. 20, 70 armed police officers from the organized crime fighting unit stormed three locations of UkrSotsBank, one of Ukraine’s biggest financial institutions. The bank is owned by the Italian UniCredit Group. The head office was paralyzed. None of the clients or staff were able to move in and out of offices between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. that day, according to one Kyiv banker. Strangely enough, the move was sanctioned by a court.

The bank is in the middle of a legal dispute with a private company that had an agreement to borrow $200 million years ago and failed to repay the loan. The bank is suing the debtor, and vise versa. Somehow, in the middle of it, armed law enforcers break into offices to confiscate documents from the bank.

The banking sector is shocked. The case is diplomatically described as an “overreaction” by the police. Others call it a raider attack or a move to make the bank owners more pliable in ongoing sale negotiations – especially about the price. A bank this size has several thousand cases pending in courts for overdue loans. Imagine if every one of them resulted in this kind of police raid.

In any case, the story features a number of typical traits of a raider attack: a court ruling that legitimizes actions of the police, force and intimidation, a confusion over documents and a sale or takeover hovering somewhere on the background.

A day later, on Sept. 21, Globus shopping mall in the very heart of the capital got raided. Again, some 50 sporty men stormed into the premises in the middle of the night, broke down doors and have kept the owners of the mall locked out of their $200 million property, according to the company representatives.

Then, the telecoms industry is holding its breath, waiting for raider attacks. Earlier this month, a number of small and medium cable operators and Internet service providers received an identical letter from a company called PII  TOV Evro Finance Ltd. Some say there were 90 letters, others say as many as 200.

In the letter, the company offers to buy the addressee and sets the deadline for the final decision: Sept. 21 in one case, for example. It does not say “or else,” but many in the sector interpreted it that way.

An offer to buy a business (often below market value) typically comes from someone who eventually takes over the business once the deadline has passed. It’s a common first step before a hostile takeover.

This letter features a number of oddities. For starters, the company makes no mention of due diligence or other procedures that precede a normal acquisition. It only lists a number to call for  the company’s representative, Serhiy Nahorniy. The same name featured as a key figure in a 2008 hostile takeover in Donetsk.

Nahorniy’s company itself is a riddle. There is only one PII TOV Evro Finance Ltd. in the government register of businesses. Last week, it figured in a public scandal around a smelting plant that it wants to build in Bila Tserkva outside of Kyiv. The firm also recently received state financing guarantees worth Hr 1.35 billion.

Media reports name Yuriy Ivaniushchenko, a close ally of President Viktor Yanukovych, as one of the firm’s owners. Ivaniushchenko, no stranger to accusations of raidership, denied being a beneficiary of  PII TOV Evrofinance Ltd. In a bizarre twist,  PII TOV Evro Finance Ltd came out with a statement that it knows nothing about Nahorniy. Meanwhile, Nahorniy says he has a firm with the same name, but a different one. The industry is waiting to see what will happen next.

In the meantime, what could have been a key step forward for Ukraine’s  economy turned into a disaster as the deal with global energy giant ExxonMobil fell apart – at least for now. The company was part of a winning tender in August 2012 to extract natural gas in the Black Sea’s Skifska field. It has been unable to sign a production-sharing agreement that would allow them to proceed with a multibillion-dollar operation that would diminish Ukraine’s dependence on Russian gas.

But the nation’s strategic interests are not enough for the government to get its act together. Despite multiple declarations that the deal would be signed on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 25, the government not only failed to solve the major outstanding issue for more than a year, but rolled out 35 additional remarks, demands and amendments to the draft agreement on the eve of the signing.

The long-standing issue is ExxonMobil’s insistence on foreign legal jurisdiction. It  has no trust in the Ukrainian court system, unsurprisingly, and wants to go to London should any legal dispute occur during the 50-year proposed agreement. But the last-minute changes inserted by the Ukrainian side a week before the planned signing make it look like the government’s authorities are stalling the process artificially.

In the end, instead of triumphantly signing a major agreement in New York on Sept. 25, the president presided over a face-saving signing of an agreement to sign an agreement within a month. It looked pathetic, and did not change a thing.

Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]