It's Complicated - Zelenskyy Turns Out To Be Not So Squeaky Clean - Far From It, Actually

The people of Ukraine are the poorest in Europe, despite the fact that their country is extremely rich in natural resources. It turns out that the country is essentially run by a set of oligarchs, who get their money from frankly criminal enterprises, including human trafficking and outright theft. And at least one of them has taken over a factory at gunpoint, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who got hit by US sanctions a year ago… and he’s the biggest supporter of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the current President of Ukraine. Meanwhile, people’s lives are being destroyed in what looks like a battle between Russian oligarchs and Ukrainian oligarchs, and the people are either being driven off, killed, or subjected to poverty and privation. If Zelenskyy wins, his gang of oligarchs stays in power, and Ukraine is (relatively) free, so the people benefit in that way. But they’re still going to be robbed blind. If Putin and his Russian oligarchs win, the people will get screwed six ways to Sunday, the country will be effectively colonized by Russia - and ruled by another rather worse rapacious criminal gang. As I said, it’s complicated.

On Zelensky:
"Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.

Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.

The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.

The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.

The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.

A comedian and actor who had been famous since the 2000s, Zelensky began his political rise a few years after taking on a starring role in the political satire “Servant of the People,” which began airing on the oligarch’s network in 2015. The show starred Zelensky as a humble history teacher whose anti-corruption rant in class is filmed by a student, goes viral online, and wins him national office.

In a case of life imitating art, Zelensky ended up winning the real-world Ukrainian presidency just three-and-a-half years after the show’s launch, with more than 73 percent of the vote.

Zelensky capitalized on widespread public anger at corruption, but his 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his anti-graft bona fides, given that his campaign was boosted by media belonging to Kolomoisky — who is accused of stealing US$5.5 billion from his own bank and funneling it offshore in concert with his partner, Hennadiy Boholiubov.

In the heat of the campaign, a political ally of incumbent President Petro Poroshenko published a chart on Facebook purporting to show that Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms that allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoisky’s Privatbank.

That ally, Volodymyr Ariev, didn’t provide evidence, and his accusations have never been proven. But the Pandora Papers show that at least some of the details in this alleged scheme correspond to reality. The leaked documents show information on 10 companies in the network that match structures detailed in Ariev’s chart.

The new documents show that part of the network was managed with help from Fidelity Corporate Services, an offshore consultancy that was one of 14 firms whose documents make up part of the Pandora Papers leak. The documents show that Zelensky and his partners used companies based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Belize, and Cyprus.

Two of Zelensky’s associates in the offshore network, who were also part of his TV production company, now hold powerful positions. Serhiy Shefir is Zelensky’s top presidential aide, while Ivan Bakanov heads the Security Service of Ukraine.

These powerful positions also come with risks. Shefir narrowly escaped an apparent assassination attempt when his car was fired on outside Kyiv on September 22. He was unharmed, but his driver was wounded.

Zelensky has repeatedly pledged to rein in oligarchs. The day after the attack on Shefir, the country’s parliament passed a bill that would create a register of oligarchs and bar them from financing political parties or taking part in privatizations. Zelensky said that the attempt on Shefir’s life will receive a strong response and will not influence his fight against vested interests.

A spokesman for Zelensky declined to comment. Shefir and Bakanov did not respond to questions." https://www.occrp.org/en/the-pandora-papers/pandora-papers-reveal-offshore-holdings-of-ukrainian-president-and-his-inner-circle

On Ihor Kolomoyskyi:
”March 5, 2021

MOSCOW — The United States placed sanctions Friday on a Ukrainian business tycoon seen as the most powerful figure in the country outside of the government, signaling an aggressive new approach by the Biden administration to dealing with corruption in Ukraine.

The businessman, Ihor Kolomoisky, an oil and media magnate, was already under investigation in the United States on accusations of embezzlement and fraud, and of using the proceeds to buy commercial real estate in Cleveland, Ohio.

At home in Ukraine, he is one of the most prominent of the ultrawealthy class of post-Soviet oligarchs and has been both an ally and a political albatross for President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Ukrainian oligarchs exercise outsized influence in the country, controlling the news media and at times financing entire factions in Parliament at odds with American and European efforts to strengthen Ukraine’s pro-Western geopolitical orientation. They have done so even as they kept money in Western banks and investments and sent their children to live or study in Europe and the United States.

The sanctions were announced on Friday by the secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, and bar Mr. Kolomoisky and members of his family from traveling to the United States because of “involvement in significant acts of corruption.”

The penalty does not have a financial element though some of Mr. Kolomoisky’s assets have already been seized in separate actions by the Justice Department. Mr. Kolomoisky’s portfolio of American real estate has been estimated to be worth several hundred million dollars.

In a statement, Mr. Blinken said Mr. Kolomoisky had used a position in government as a regional governor in Ukraine for his personal benefit. While acknowledging that the Ukrainian holds no official role today, Mr. Blinken said he posed a risk for “ongoing efforts to undermine Ukraine’s democratic processes and institutions,” an apparent reference to his efforts to influence the Zelensky administration. Mr. Zelensky has denied he is beholden to the businessman.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/world/europe/ukraine-sanctions-oligarch-kolomoisky.html

And this wouldn’t be complete without ties to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and Burisma Holdings, LLC, that controversial Ukrainian gas company:
”Kolomoyskyi also, reportedly, has a controlling interest in Burisma, the Ukrainian oil and gas company which put Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, on its board of directors in 2014. In 2016, at a time when top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating the notoriously corrupt Burisma Holdings, Joe Biden acknowledged on camera that, when he was vice president and spearheading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.”

The Rise of Zelensky from Comedian to President of Ukraine – Buckle Up

“Kolomoisky, who built his fortune during the lawless years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, reportedly has a controlling interest in Burisma, the Ukrainian oil and gas company which put President Biden’s son, Hunter, on its board of directors in 2014 at a salary of $50,000 per month. Kolomoisky dispatched his private army to take over companies and destroy a Russian-owned oil and gas refinery in Dnipropetrovsk in 2014, according to reports.

Kolomoisky and a partner, Gennadiy Boholiubov, are accused of taking out billions in fraudulent loans and lines of credit from PrivatBank, which they co-owned, funneling the cash through a “web of entities” created by Korf and Laber.” https://nypost.com/2021/03/06/businessmen-accused-of-ukraine-money-laundering-gave-millions-to-ny-charities/

And there’s still more:
”Vadym Pozharskyi is the mysterious “advisor” to the head of Ukraine’s notorious Burisma oil and natural gas company — and the man at the center of the latest Biden family scandal.

As operatives for Ukrainian oligarchs go, Pozharskyi, 41, is one of the toughest, trained in the trenches of one of the world’s most corrupt countries, say sources familiar with him.

He’s been linked to Hunter Biden, 50, since Biden joined the company’s board in 2014. The son of then-Vice President Joe Biden was useful to Pozharskyi as a liaison to the powerful in Washington, DC. At home, Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board at a salary of $50,000 a month would give a shiny patina to what had sometimes been seen as a corrupt company.

Since 2014, four journalists have uncovered links between the myriad offshore companies that are part of Burisma Holdings and Ukraine’s most powerful, ruthless oligarch, Igor Kolomoisky. Shrouded in secrecy, Burisma has been described as “a big shell company network of a classic British kind, with ownership and control completely obfuscated.”

According to emails obtained by the Post, Hunter introduced his veep dad to Pozharskyi less than a year before Joe Biden leaned on government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the $400 million company.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote to Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015. “It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

An earlier email from May 2014 shows Pozharskyi asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The Biden campaign has denied that Joe Biden ever had an “official” meeting with Pozharskyi but later admitted it couldn’t rule out that the two men had ever met.

Pozharskyi met plenty of powerbrokers during his frequent forays to Washington and New York. He was pictured with US Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker, who served as a US special representative to Ukraine, and Daniel Fried, US Ambassador to Poland, at meetings of the Atlantic Council, a DC-based think tank partially funded by Burisma.

Hunter Biden left Burisma in 2019 but Pozharskyi, the No. 3 executive at the company, is believed to still be connected to it. Pozharskyi’s current whereabouts are unknown. He did not return emails from The Post, nor did anyone at Burisma. Phone calls to Burisma’s offices in Kiev, Cyprus and London went unanswered.

But being at the center of a U.S. election scandal is not something that would likely rattle the battle-hardened veteran of Ukraine’s lawless past, when corporations literally were at war.

Pozharskyi forged his career at a time in post-Soviet Ukraine when, analysts say, ruthless businessmen like Kolomoisky used their own private armies to wrest control of other companies. Because the military was so weak, private military battalions funded in part by oligarchs often operated with impunity in the country – both fending off Russian separatists and lining their own coffers by strong-arming energy companies they wanted to take over. …

Less well known, but potentially more sinister, are Pozharskyi’s reported ties — by way of his position with Burisma — to Ukraine’s most thuggish billionaire, the larger-than-life Kolomoisky.

In 2015, veteran Russian writer and investigator John Helmer, author of “The Man Who Knows Too Much About Russia,” suggested that Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi were front men for Kolomoisky at Burisma.

He is not the type of “businessman” the Bidens would want to be associated with, said one Ukraine expert. In August, the U.S. Justice Department accused Kolomoisky of robbing billions from the PrivatGroup bank he owned and using the many companies he has all over the world, including the U.S., to launder it.

The Bond villain-like Kolomoisky, 57, reportedly kept a live shark in a huge tank in his office to intimidate visitors, and once called the 5-foot-7 Russian President Vladimir Putin a “schizophrenic dwarf.”

But his bloodthirstiness reportedly matched his bravado. He crushed Russian separatists with his own private armies, according to numerous Ukrainian and international media reports, and he allegedly ordered contract killings, including a hit on a Ukrainian lawyer as well as the murders of gang members involved in the hit, the Daily Beast reported.

Some of the allegations surfaced in UK court proceedings in a case ultimately settled out of court, the Telegraph reported.

Kolomoisky has never been charged with murder. He has refuted such allegations and also denied involvement with Burisma. Mike Sullivan, a U.S.-based attorney for Kolomoisky, did not return phone calls or emails from The Post.

He has three nationalities — Ukrainian, Cypriot and Israeli — and is reportedly worth about $1.2 billion. He backed the election last year of Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a TV comedian known for, among other things, playing the piano with his penis.

“Kolomoisky was a known thug in his business practices and his organizing of armed militias,” Russ Bellant, an expert on Ukraine and the author of “Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party,” told The Post.” https://nypost.com/2020/10/31/hunter-bidens-ukraine-contact-allegedly-fixer-for-rulers/

Part of that Bellant piece:
”Enter Burisma, the natural gas conglomerate, headed by Ihor Kolomoisky — a citizen of Ukraine, Cyprus (the money-laundering capital of Europe), Austria and Israel. Known for business practices that would bring to mind Al Capone, he took over Ukrainian gas companies, funded politicians and was the poster boy of corruption in a country  ranked by the World Economic Forum as one of the most corrupt on the planet.

Burisma became the funding conduit as Azov’s weaponry went from clubs and chains to trucks and heavy machine guns, to artillery and tanks. On their website they would portray their new wealth as contributions from grateful citizens. As they formed they were moved east to start killing rebelling Ukrainians.

It was at this time, in May of 2014, that Hunter Biden was put on the board of Burisma, as was Devon Archer, a financial adviser to then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Thereafter the largesse to Azov increased. So conspicuous was their growth that Congressman John Conyers initiated a bill to ban CIA funding of nazis in the Ukraine, which passed unanimously. The Azov website was taken down. Months later the administration reached out to Congressional Republican leadership and got the Conyers bill repealed.

Hunter Biden, who had no background in utilities or European markets, was reportedly paid $3 million to attend Burisma board meetings. If Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee and the Burisma/nazi story was told, questions would be raised about whether Joe got some of that money…and how his unqualified son got on the board of a US funding conduit when his father was the overseer of the operation. Was some of that $3 million actually US taxpayer money? And what do Hunter and Joe know about Burisma’s role in the burning and shooting deaths of over 100 people in a trade-union building in Odessa…and moving a Burisma-funded paramilitary unit into  a region where Burisma’s interests were being challenged by Ukrainian regional authorities. Burisma won that fight.

When Biden was asked a question by an Iowan citizen about the Burisma ties, Biden blew up at him in front of the press and thus Iowa voters. He thereafter dived in the polls. Can you see that getting replayed in a general election if he was the brokered nominee? It will be if the GOP gets its way. The death toll in Ukraine from the civil war that Biden helped midwife is now over 14,000, with cities destroyed. Can he justify that? What has saved him to date is that no one knows and thus no one asks.” https://fighting-words.net/2020/03/04/biden-ukraine-and-the-nazis/

And then, of course, there’s the WEF playing a major role:
”World Economic Forum

While there are no obvious ties between Kolomoisky and the World Economic Forum (“WEF”), there are obvious ties with Zelensky. For starters, he has a profile on WEF’s website.

It is no surprise then that the World Economic Forum (WEF) have thrown their support behind Ukraine, vowing to do “whatever is possible to help” the country. As RT reported: on Sunday, Schwab and WEF President Borge Brende said they “deeply condemn the aggression by Russia against Ukraine” and “the attacks and atrocities.” 

But could there be more to WEF’s intervention than simply networking with one of its members? Could their Ukraine stance be because WEF, or rather the select financial institutions, corporations and individuals it represents, has vested interests in Ukraine?

During a February 2020 speech to the World Economic Forum, which took place just a few months before the WEF’s controversial “Great Reset” meeting, the newly “elected” Ukrainian President Zelensky said:

“I would like to note the projects of the Forum for Ukraine, and namely: Scenarios of the Future for Ukraine; Geneva initiative for Ukraine; the new economic vision for Ukraine. And I thank you for what has already been done and I count on the further fruitful cooperation.

Looking at the projects Zelensky thanked WEF for, it makes one wonder who is actually running Ukraine and who is actually to blame for Ukrainian people now finding themselves at the center of what Boris Johnson calls “the biggest war in Europe since 1945.”

Scenarios for Ukraine is where 300 decision-makers, government, business and civil society leaders as well as leading experts sketched out different pathways for Ukraine’s future economic development. These WEF “decision-makers” published their report on 11 April 2014.

Geneva Ukraine Initiative is where business leaders from Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Europe and the United States gathered in Geneva, on 14 September 2014, and worked out 10 proposals, to help resolve the conflict. “The group [of business leaders] calls for a summit of top political leaders as soon as possible,” the WEF announced.

Zelensky’s speech at Davos 2020 continued:

“The topics which are debated here in Davos always focus on the state of the modern world and elucidate the challenges facing humanity. And this year for united the leaders to discuss extremely important topic the cohesive and sustainable world.”

The biggest threat to a cohesive and sustainable world was security, Zelensky told Davos.  He also called for “western investors” to become “the stakeholders, shareholders of the success of a new Ukraine,” and said Ukraine was “a place where miracles come true.”

The Rise of Zelensky from Comedian to President of Ukraine – Buckle Up

Here’s who the OCCRP - the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project are:
”OCCRP can trace its origins to 2003, when Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu first met at an International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) training in Bulgaria. Paul had recently founded the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism in Bucharest, while Drew was in the process of starting up the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIN) in Sarajevo.

'I was supposed to be giving a talk on trafficking in human beings,' recalls Drew. 'But when I talked to Paul, I quickly realized that he knew a lot more about trafficking than I did. So I asked ICFJ if he could become a co-trainer for the next training and that's how we started working together.'

During the next couple of years Drew and Paul were in weekly contact, trading advice on safety, cybersecurity, public records – and above all the people of interest whom they were trying to track across borders. They found they were often working in parallel – tackling the same issues.

‘We were looking at the same people. So we looked at other countries where these same criminals were busy,' Paul said.

Their first joint effort came in 2005, when they joined to follow a cluster of companies operating in the energy sector.  Recruiting friends and colleagues from Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Romania, they pooled their resources on what became the Power Brokers Project, which won the first-ever Global Shining Light Award from the Global Investigative Reporting Network (GIJN).

In its award announcement, GIJN described it this way: "The project investigated an energy crisis that caused massive power outages across Romania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Albania. The series exposed questionable deals by shadowy businessmen operating across the Balkans that returned huge profits to power traders but resulted in exorbitant electricity rates applied to impoverished citizens."

To them, the experience proved the efficacy of cooperating regionally. They felt encouraged to take it further.

'That was a wake-up call. We realized that we could do more together than separately,' says Drew. 'And we could save money by centralizing some of the more burdensome costs like media insurance, access to commercial databases, tool development and even research and fundraising.'

The United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) funded them on building this central hub and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project was born.

‘The name OCCRP came from the title of our original grant proposal – it even sounds like a grant proposal title,' Drew says. 'But OCCRP became the tool we needed.'

The OCCRP network opened an office in Sarajevo sharing offices with CIN and immediately started to grow with new centers joining on a monthly basis. But Radu soon left to accept a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University.

The departure was a blessing in disguise.  At Stanford, Paul saw what the best minds were designing in Silicon Valley and the power of technology. Energized from the experience, Paul immediately began designing new tools including the Investigative Dashboard, or ID, which is a virtual research center that helps expose complex networks of crime and corruption. This grew directly out of the needs of centralizing research and finding more efficient ways to follow money all over the world.

ID was launched after Paul’s fellowship, then recalibrated and renewed with help from Google Ideas several years later. Meanwhile, Paul designed a complementary tool: a data visualization instrument called Visual Investigative Scenarios (VIS). This illustrates the type of complex international networks revealed by ID research. Both VIS and the ID would not have been possible without significant contributions from OCCRP and GIJN members - as well as contributions from hackers and visual artists.

As OCCRP kept growing, Paul and Drew registered the Journalism Development Network, or JDN, and made OCCRP a trade name. They formed a board of directors including some of the most respected journalists in the business. Drew became JDN's executive director, and Paul became executive director at OCCRP, but it’s their close working relationship, cooperation and communication that has shaped OCCRP. OCCRP expanded again by opening an EU-based branch in Bucharest in 2011, co-located with the RISE Project (another OCCRP member, co-founded by Paul).  It has full-time editors working in Tbilisi, Belgrade, Kyiv and Moscow.

Over the years, OCCRP has grown from six journalists working in five countries to more than 150 journalists in 30 countries. Its staff and collaborators are some of the best journalists who are active today, winning every major award and speaking around the world.  And during this time the model of networked, country-based centers working together has proven its value over and over – and is now being imitated around the globe.

The country-based center model inspired the formation of similar centers in Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, and other countries across the world.  OCCRP covers the world by cooperating with other partners including Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), Connectas and InsightCrime in Columbia and others. OCCRP is a member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

OCCRP has quietly become one of the world’s largest and most effective investigative reporting organizations, regularly winning international awards and working with the best news organizations globally. The network is active from Europe to Central Asia but also works in Latin America and the Middle East/North Africa.

‘We have been told that OCCRP is an ideal model for media development,' Drew says. 'That's great. But its design has always been driven by the immediate needs of our reporting and our members. And it always will be.'“ https://www.occrp.org/en/history-of-occrp

(A tip of the hat to Dimitryi Sizonenco for a comment on a previous article, which spurred my curiosity and produced this rather deep dive into this cesspool of corruption, which has apparently deep roots going back to Washington, DC and the National Security State - and the Roosevelt quote applies as much to that as it does to Ukraine, Russia, and the WEF.)