Businessman Ihor Kolomoisky has commented on the statement made by ex-governor of the National Bank of Ukraine Valeriya Gontareva about threats reportedly made to her.
“Remember, she said that I made some kind of threat to her to send a plane. Let me clarify that I promised to send a plane, not a car,” Kolomoisky told journalists at the Yalta European Strategy (YES) annual meeting in Kyiv on Sept. 13.
As reported, on Sept. 12, law enforcement authorities conducted searches at Gontareva’s family apartment in Kyiv. She said she regarded the action as a ratcheting up of pressure against her and her family.
On the night of Sept. 5, the car of Gontareva’s daughter-in-law was doused with gasoline and burned in front of her house in the center of Kyiv. Gontareva, who is now undergoing treatment at a hospital in London after a car hit her, said she believes the two events are related and that her opponents have gone from making verbal threats to taking real steps.
Earlier, Kyiv’s Pechersky District Court ordered that Gontareva be interrogated by the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) as part of an investigation into abuse of power. The SBI ordered other law enforcement agencies to implement the court ruling.
In April 2019, summons were published in the press for ex-Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Oleksiy Filatov, Gontareva, and co-owner and managing partner of the ICU investment Group Kostiantyn Stetsenko to appear at the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) to receive notices of suspicion from investigators and to be questioned as suspects in criminal proceedings against Ukrainian businessman Serhiy Kurchenko.
The former central bank governor said that “she was not involved in any deal, upon which the suspicion notice was based, according to which they invented the notice.” Gontareva said she is living and working in London and is ready to meet with prosecutors there to answer their questions.
“They more than once have flown to [ex-PrivatBank owner Ihor] Kolomoisky in Switzerland, to [Ukrainian businessman Dmytro] Firtash in Austria, so let them fly to London. Let me say one thing: I am Kolomoisky’s worst enemy. He has not hidden this in his public interviews. So, the whole world knows this, not just him,” she said.
