Free Republic

The U.S. Justice Department has filed a civil forfeiture complaint claiming that a piece of commercial property in Ohio was obtained with funding misappropriated from PrivatBank. Two civil forfeiture complaints were lodged earlier this year regarding properties located in Texas and Kentucky which are also alleged to have been secured with funds misappropriated from the bank in Ukraine, according to a DOJ press release. "The three complaints allege that Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholiubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of billions of dollars," according to the DOJ. "The two obtained...

In an explosive legal complaint filed last month in Delaware, attorneys for a major Ukrainian bank alleged that two oligarchs who founded the bank and controlled it from 2006 to 2016 laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent corporate loans to purchase assets in the United States and unjustly enrich themselves and their associates. Dubbed the "Optima Schemes" in the 104-page document, these "brazen fraudulent schemes" were successful, among other things, in making the oligarchs and their co-defendants the largest commercial real estate holders in Cleveland. With money siphoned from public bonds and 20 million private Ukrainian citizens who'd...