Ukraine's law enforcement and central bank have detected 14 financial institutions that have laundered Hr 140 billion ($12 billion) for figures in the former government, a top prosecutor said.
“It was a clear hierarchical criminal structure that began with
governmental structures where various schemes were thought out for
laundering state funds through so-called ‘laundry banks’ and ‘tax
holes.’ Today we are doing intensive work to document all those crimes,”
a statement from the Prosecutor General’s Office quoted First Deputy
Prosecutor General Mykola Holomsha as saying.
“Law enforcement has not come across such a scale of financial and
economic abuse and offenses in the entire history of Ukraine,” he said.
“At the very start of our work we came up against a situation where
specialized units for the prevention of organized crime and authorized
officials and services that were duty-bound to document and investigate
corruption-related crimes in government, including in its top echelons,
had failed to do such work. Although journalists and nongovernmental
organizations had collected sufficient evidence, law enforcement failed
to carry out such investigations,” Holomsha said.
He expressed hope that joint action by different law enforcement
agencies would help step up work to expose alleged crimes by the former
government.
