UKRAINIAN OLIGARCHS ORDERED TO PAY £2.3BN AFTER EIGHT-YEAR LONDON FRAUD BATTLE
Two Ukrainian oligarchs have been told to pay $3bn (£2.3bn) in damages to the country’s largest bank following an eight-year fraud battle at London’s High Court.
On Monday, Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov were ordered to repay the funds to state-owned lender PrivatBank after a judge ruled they took part in a “fraud of Byzantine complexity”.
The case saw the two former billionaires extract $1.8bn from PrivatBank through a series of fraudulent loans between 2013 and 2014 while they controlled the lender as the bank’s two largest shareholders.
Under the terms of Monday’s ruling, Mr Kolomoisky and Mr Bogolyubov must repay the money plus $1.2bn in interest and $100m in legal fees.
The judgment ends a long running legal battle which started when PrivatBank first sued the pair in 2017. Both men had denied the claims.
The former billionaires first started PrivatBank in 1992 as one of the first privately-owned banks to open in Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Its success helped the duo rise to prominence in Ukraine, as they built a business empire through their PrivatGroup holding company by acquiring interests in everything from TV channels to utility companies.
The pair pitched PrivatBank as specifically suited for the new class entrepreneurs that had emerged in Ukraine in the “wild nineties”, before leading it to become the largest banks in the country by the early-2000s.
However, PrivatBank was later nationalised by Petro Poroshenko’s government in 2016 as part of a clean-up of Ukraine’s finance industry and in response to wider concerns about the way Mr Kolomoisky and Mr Bogolyubov were running the lender.
PrivatBank first took action to freeze the pair’s assets in 2017. The High Court later halted the trial in 2022 at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, on the grounds that Russia’s invasion had hindered their ability to prepare their cases. That case was restarted in June 2023.
It emerged during the case that the pair had syphoned billions out of the bank by issuing fake loans to offshore companies that they secretly controlled.
Mr Bugolyubov now lives in Switzerland with his family, having formerly lived in a mansion on London’s Belgrave Square.
Mr Kolomoisky is currently in pre-trial detention in Kyiv, having been charged with hiring criminals to murder one of his business rivals in Crimea in 2003.
2025-11-10T15:20:46Z