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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
⚖️ The Commercial Court of Kyiv 30 in September dismissed the claim by Etrecom Investments Limited, a company associated with the agribusiness holding Kernel, which sought to recover nearly 39 million dollars jointly from the Cypriot Greatford Limited and the state-owned Sense Bank.
According to the document, the plaintiff did not justify the court’s jurisdiction of the Commercial Court of Kyiv. Also, the contracts between Etrecom and Greatford stipulated that disputes concerning their terms were to be resolved exclusively by English courts.
Etrecom is a Cypriot company described as the financial center of the large Ukrainian agricultural group Kernel. Greatford is also registered in Cyprus and historically linked to the corporate circle of the former owners of Alfa-Bank Ukraine.
In 2021 the two offshore companies entered into a number of agreements regarding Loan Participation Notes (LPN) — loan participation bonds issued by the Dutch E.M.I.S. Finance B.V. Greatford sold several tranches of these papers to Etrecom and was to repurchase them under certain conditions. The repurchase later did not occur, and Kernel would have to wait for the redemption of its LPNs until 2029.
In 2026 Etrecom turned to the courts in Ukraine, bringing the state-owned Sense Bank into the case as a co-defendant. In the author’s view, Kernel’s lawyers artificially tied a private dispute between two Cypriot offshore companies to Ukrainian jurisdiction. The involvement of the Ukrainian bank was intended to create a formal basis for hearing a private dispute between two Cypriot companies in Kyiv.
The claim amounted to approximately 1,75 billion hryvnias at the current exchange rate. Greatford has no money, so the co-defendant on the claim — the state-owned Sense Bank — would have had to pay for it.
Sense Bank was nationalized in July 2023, so any losses at the bank could ultimately become a state problem. A significant deterioration of capital could have forced the state to recapitalize the bank at the expense of the budget.
Sense Bank’s lawyers were remarkably passive. Greatford’s lawyers acted more actively than the representatives of Sense Bank and the Ministry of Finance, even though the state bank bore the significant financial risk. Greatford was primarily defending itself. Its private interest in this case objectively coincided with Ukraine’s property interest. However, the behavior of the state lawyers looked very suspicious.
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