Serhii Leshchenko, a member of Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s largest Rada faction with 135 seats in the Ukrainian parliament, has said that a reliable, unnamed source has told him that a High Court judge in London has decided against PrivatBank in a key legal procedure by the owners to recover billions of dollars they claim were embezzled by the bank’s original owners, oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholyubov.
The decision will be made known officially early morning in London on Nov. 22.
A Kyiv Post source close to PrivatBank, who did not want to be identified, would not reveal which way the decision went but hinted that it was not the way PrivatBank desired.
The two oligarchs owned PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank, and are accused of defrauding it for years before the Ukrainian government nationalized it in 2016 and was forced to inject $5.5 billion in public money to replace missing cash.
PrivatBank brought proceedings in the London High Court early last year, which led to a worldwide freeze of the two men’s assets to the tune of $2.5 billion.
This summer Kolomoisky and Boholyubov’s lawyers argued that English courts did not have the right to conduct legal procedures in the case and that the correct jurisdiction for the issues was Ukraine. None of the proceedings in England have so far involved hearings or trials to decide whether the two Ukrainian businessmen were guilty of the alleged massive fraud.
If the judge announces that England isn’t the correct jurisdiction for PrivatBank to bring its case, it will almost certainly lead to the two men’s assets being freed up and make it very unlikely that they could be tried for the alleged fraud there. PrivatBank’s lawyers will be allowed to appeal if the decision is not in their favor.
PrivatBank wanted any trial to be held in England because of concerns that Kolomoisky and Boholyubov, who always feature in any list of Ukraine’s wealthiest businesspeople, would be able to influence Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt courts.
Lawyers for PrivatBank, during proceedings in the summer, argued the case should be “anchored” in England because both men had been resident there and some of the companies involved in the alleged fraud are registered there.
