Politician: Only a fraction of the money stolen by Yanukovych was returned to the Ukrainian budget
The billions that Yanukovych obtained by corruption were invested in domestic government bonds. The story of the bonds did not end with Yanukovych’s flight from Ukraine. Only a small part of this stolen money was returned to the Ukrainian budget, writes Yehor Firsov, head of the Alternativa political movement wrote about this in his article for ZN.UA. The author notes that the bonds were used not only as a tool for storing funds but also for withdrawing money from state-owned banks.
"State Bank signed a contract for the sale of government bonds, and another bank, usually a state bank, bought the same amount of government bonds in a day or two. They did not sign any contracts with each other but used intermediaries, particularly OTP Bank, Investment Capital Ukraine and some merchant company called Fondovy Aktiv (Stock asset).
These companies carried out a number of transactions between each other. While doing this, they artificially inflated the value of securities before selling them to another bank. The difference between the price for which the state banks bought and sold the bonds, was appropriated by the intermediaries, mainly by the Fondovy Aktiv Company.
According to the documents, from June 7 to July 13, 2012 alone, $120 million to $180 million was withdrawn from Oschadbank and Ukrgasbank in this way," the article says.
The Fondovy Aktiv Company is connected with the now renowned Ukrainian company Investment Capital of Ukraine or ICU. Firsov notes that this company in turn is “associated with Petro Poroshenko. It should be noted that by the end of 2012, ICU became the leader in several transactions with government bonds. Its share was 10.29%, followed by Sberbank of Russia, though this is a completely different story which should be talked about separately."