VAKS did not move Kolomoyskiy’s case about embezzling 9,2 billion UAH from Kyiv to Dnipro

The Appeals Chamber of the High Anti-Corruption Court 28 August denied the defense’s motion to transfer Ihor Kolomoyskiy’s case from Kyiv to the Sobornyi District Court of the city of Dnipro. The case concerns criminal proceedings regarding the organization of embezzlement of bank funds in particularly large amounts. The ruling took effect immediately upon announcement and is not subject to appeal.

A panel of judges of the VAKS Appeals Chamber considered the motion filed by the accused Ihor Kolomoyskiy and by the defenders of one of the other defendants in the case. This is stated in the ruling published in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions. The defense argued that proceeding No. 12017040000000531 is not within VAKS’s jurisdiction, since at the time of the alleged events PrivatBank was privately owned, and the position of head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration, which Kolomoyskiy held at that time, did not have a direct relation to managing the bank’s assets.

"The motion to transfer criminal proceeding No. 12017040000000531 of 06 March 2017 from the High Anti-Corruption Court to the Sobornyi District Court of the city of Dnipro is to be denied," the panel of judges of the VAKS Appeals Chamber ruled.

The prosecutor and the representative of the victim PJSC CB "PrivatBank" opposed the motion. They argued that the position of head of a regional state administration belongs to category "A" of the civil service, and that the amount of the alleged damage — more than 9,2 billion UAH — exceeds the subsistence minimum in effect at the time of the offense by thousands of times. The panel of judges agreed with these arguments and found that the proceedings meet all the criteria for the jurisdiction of the High Anti-Corruption Court.

Uncovering the scheme for embezzling PrivatBank’s billions

According to the investigation, the scheme was organized as early as 2015, when Kolomoyskiy was the bank’s owner. PrivatBank was artificially forced to pay a company under its control more than 9,2 billion UAH under the pretext of an alleged buyback of its own bonds at an inflated price, and part of the sum — more than 446 million UAH — was later legitimized through securities transactions of affiliated companies.

In addition to Kolomoyskiy, the defendants in the case include former PrivatBank top managers:

chairman of the board Oleksandr Dubilet,

his deputy Lyudmyla Shmalchenko,

head of the interbank operations department Nadiia Konopkina,

head of the interbank dealing department Yaroslav Luhovyi,

deputy head of the department for servicing correspondent bank accounts Tetiana Yakymenko.

Attempts by figures in PrivatBank embezzlement cases to obtain trial in another court are not new: former PrivatBank chairman Oleksandr Dubilet previously tried to move the trial in another case about the theft of 8,4 billion UAH from VAKS to the Zhovtnevyi District Court of Dnipropetrovsk — now the Sobornyi District Court of Dnipro. The Supreme Court rejected those arguments at the time, noting that the jurisdiction question had already been decided in October 2023 and cannot be reconsidered.

Earlier, Informator reported that Kolomoyskiy’s case about embezzling 9,2 billion UAH from PrivatBank will be heard by a three-judge panel of VAKS in Kyiv. The court made that decision 17 August at the request of the accused, granting the demand for collegial consideration of the proceedings instead of a single-judge hearing. We also wrote that former first deputy chairman of PrivatBank’s board Tymur Novikov was mentioned in U.S. court cases, where he appears as a key figure in schemes that funneled hundreds of millions of dollars out of PrivatBank.