How Ukrainian Oligarchs Secretly Became the Largest Real Estate Owners in Downtown Cleveland

SCENE ^ | Jun 11, 2019 | Sam Allard

[Pontiac]

In an explosive legal complaint filed last month in Delaware, attorneys for a major Ukrainian bank alleged that two oligarchs who founded the bank and controlled it from 2006 to 2016 laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent corporate loans to purchase assets in the United States and unjustly enrich themselves and their associates.

Dubbed the "Optima Schemes" in the 104-page document, these "brazen fraudulent schemes" were successful, among other things, in making the oligarchs and their co-defendants the largest commercial real estate holders in Cleveland. With money siphoned from public bonds and 20 million private Ukrainian citizens who'd opened accounts with PrivatBank, the oligarchs Igor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov doled out corporate loans to shell companies that they controlled. They used PrivatBank "as their own personal piggy bank," in the words of the complaint.

Those loans were then laundered in multiple digital transactions, sent through dozens of other shell companies that had been created exclusively for the purpose of laundering. These accounts were managed by co-conspirators at PrivatBank's branch in Cyprus.

The true origin of the money thus concealed, funds were then shipped to LLCs in Delaware (hence the legal filing there). Those LLCs — "One Cleveland Center, LLC," to take just one example — were used to acquire properties and metalworking facilities in the U.S. Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov are mineral magnates and own mining factories and metalworking plants in Ukraine.

[Lowell1775]

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“How Ukrainian Oligarchs Secretly Became the Largest Real Estate Owners in Downtown Cleveland
SCENE ^ | Jun 11, 2019 | Sam Allard”