Former head of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Valeriya Gontareva has advised President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy to draw attention to a lack of rule of law in Ukraine and the need to preserve the achievements in cleaning the banking sector and macroeconomic stabilization.
Gontareva said in an interview with the Voice of America program that one of her most important decisions as the NBU head, the nationalization of PrivatBank in 2016, was a necessary step, which was supported by the leading international financial institutions.
Gontareva called the attempts of one of the former owners of the bank, businessman Ihor Kolomoisky, to appeal the nationalization of PrivatBank in courts “lawlessness” and “disgrace.”
She said that one of the current advisers to the newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, former Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk knows that PrivatBank was under the threat of bankruptcy, and also supported nationalization in order to save Ukrainian depositors’ money.
“PrivatBank was one of the most difficult tasks, because it was the largest bank in Ukraine: 33 percent of all deposits of the population, 20 million customers, including pensioners, students, this is an unprotected population. One can only imagine what it could be. It would be an economic and financial collapse in Ukraine,” Gontareva said.
