The long running PrivatBank saga passed an important milestone after a London court ruled that Ukrainian oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Boholiubov are liable for damages after they stole billions of dollars from dispositors at Ukraine’s largest bank.

bne IntelliNews caused the bank to be nationalised after it ran a cover story “Privat Investigations” in November 2016, exposing the extent of the fake loans the founders and former owners had made, whisking the money away to offshore havens.

A subsequent National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) audit of the bank found that almost all of the loans made to these shell companies were fake. The bank was then nationalised in December that year and needed a $5bn bailout to prevent it from collapsing – by far the largest bailout of any bank in Ukraine’s history.

The bank is now owned and managed by the state and although it is the most profitable bank in the sector, half of its loans (50.6%, or $8.4bn) remain non-performing, although the overall NPL ratio in the sector has fallen to 27.9% as of June this year, following a clean-up that ended before the war with Russia broke out.

NPLs % of loan book
	Jun 23	Jun 24	Jun 25
ratio of non-performing loans, %	39.12	35.03	27.89
incl. banks:
with state participation, of which:	52.69	47.92	40.46
PrivatBank	66.47	57.48	50.61
state banks ex-PrivatBank	41.71	40.88	33.39
Foreign owned	22.17	14.57	9.8
Privately owned	22.21	14.03	9.82
Insolvent	0	0	0
Source: NBU

The state has brought cases against the two oligarchs, focusing on London and Cyprus which were both used to launder the stolen assets, and is in a years-long legal battle to recover the stolen money. At the start of the London case, a London judge froze $2bn of Kolomoisky assets until the case is resolved.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s former mentor and business partner who funded his 2019 election campaign, Kolomoisky was arrested in September 2023 by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and charged with money laundering and fraud. He has been stripped of his Ukrainian nationality and is also under US sanctions and charged with money laundering through shell companies in Delaware. The US Grand Jury opened an investigation into Kolomoisky in 2020 for laundering over $600mn through US property deals in a five-year-long spending spree and other scams.

Seeking the missing money

The London $1.9bn fraud case was brought by the state-owned lender PrivatBank and is a significant victory for Kyiv in its efforts to hold the former uber-oligarch accountable for his theft.

High Court Justice William Trower concluded that the two businessmen misappropriated funds through what he described as a “highly complex loan recycling scheme” between 2013 and 2014. The court found that Kolomoisky and Boholiubov funnelled $1.9bn from PrivatBank through a network of shell companies, many of which were identified in the bne IntelliNews report after our investigative reporter Graham Stack got hold of the bank’s entire loan book and looked into the companies named in the list. Many of the companies were registered in the British Virgin Islands and England and used fictitious loans and trade documents, the court found.

After the nationalisation, the NBU hired corporate investigators Kroll to carry out a forensic audit to find the missing money. The total value of the claim could exceed $2bn once interest and legal costs are factored in, with the precise sum to be determined in a later hearing.

“This was a highly sophisticated refinancing scheme that operated in the interests of the individual defendants,” the new management of PrivatBank said in a statement following the judgment on July 30. “The full amount to be paid to the bank, including interest and legal costs, will be determined at the next hearing later this year.”

The Cypriot case is ongoing and contains similar charges and accusations.

The case, filed in London in December 2017, followed the Ukrainian government’s nationalisation of PrivatBank a year earlier, after it was found to be undercapitalised by about $5.5bn.

The bank initially obtained a worldwide freezing order on the defendants’ assets—valued at over $2.5bn—across at least 33 jurisdictions. Although the High Court originally dismissed the claim in 2018 on jurisdictional grounds, the decision was overturned on appeal in 2019, allowing the case to proceed to trial in June 2023.

Kolomoisky and Boholiubov have denied wrongdoing. Their defence maintained that PrivatBank failed to demonstrate specific actions by the former owners that were illegal under Ukrainian law or directly led to the bank’s losses. Judge Trower rejected this argument, finding both men jointly and severally liable for the fraud.

The six corporate entities named as co-defendants were found to have limited liability, with the judge stating that further hearings would be needed to determine their share of responsibility.

In parallel to the UK proceedings, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) have brought multiple criminal cases against Kolomoisky. Set up in 2016 at the EU’s insistence, both bodies were stripped of their independence by Zelenskiy last week with the now notorious Law 21414 that effectively concentrates all law enforcement power in the hands of the president via his control over the Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko.

NABU investigators allege that, as the former governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region in 2015, Kolomoisky orchestrated schemes to siphon more than UAH9.2bn ($228mn) from PrivatBank to inflate its capital via fraudulent bond repurchases. NABU has linked him to at least four episodes of alleged embezzlement totalling nearly $600mn. However, while Kolomoisky was living openly in Kyiv following his return to Ukraine after Zelenskiy’s election, it was unable to arrest or prosecute him for emptying PrivatBank of money.

Kolomoisky is currently under investigation alongside several former top executives of PrivatBank. NABU noted, “Ultimately, the funds were transferred to the personal account of the ultimate beneficiary of PrivatBank. He disposed of them at his own discretion.”

Today the bank continues to serve over 18mn clients via 1,186 branches and employing over 19,000 people and is the market leader. The new management has managed to reduce the amount of what it told bne IntelliNews it calls “fraud loans” to less than 50% in the intervening years. All these non-performing loans (NPLs) have also been fully provisioned for ensuring the stability of the bank.

“The transactions are fundamentally considered to be fraudulent. The recovery will come from those locations, as that is where the transactions occurred,” Sharon Easky, an independent director on the board of PrivatBank in an exclusive interview with bne IntelliNews in June 2020.

Despite the legal battles, PrivatBank has reported record financial results in 2025. Net profit in the first half of the year reached UAH34.9bn ($833mn), a 14% increase y/y, driven by growth in net interest and commission income. The bank’s net loan portfolio expanded by UAH17.4bn, with total deposits climbing 13% to UAH487bn.

Kolomoisky’s return and downfall

After Zelenskiy's election, Kolomoisky returned to Ukraine from Israel and used his tight relations with Zelenskiy to lobby for the return ownership of PrivatBank or a payout of several billion dollars in compensation. He launched hundreds of legal cases against the NBU as part of this campaign, bringing him into increasing conflict with Zelenskiy.

As Ukraine’s partners became increasingly nervous that the state would concede control of PrivatBank, eventually the Rada was forced to pass the so-called anti-Kolomoisky law in May 2020 that made it impossible for the former owner of a bank that has been nationalised to retake control of it. The anti-Kolomoisky law in May 2020 that made it impossible for the former owner of a bank that has been nationalised to retake control of it kicked off a radical change in direction for the Zelenskiy administration. He made his landmark oligarch speech in March 2021 where he broadened his policy to contain the influence of all oligarchs in the country and followed that up with an oligarch law in September of the same year that codified the restrictions on oligarchs’ interactions with the government.

Former Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) from 2014 until 2017 Valeria Gontareva who was negotiating with Kolomoisky told bne IntelliNews that he personally threatened her life when she refused to return PrivatBank to his control. Her house was later burnt down, and the car of her daughter-in-law was hit with a Molotov cocktail and burnt. She finally quit her job as governor when a coffin with a mannequin dressed as her was delivered to the doors of the NBU. She fled to London in fear of her life where she was later knocked down by a car while crossing the street in what the London police described as “suspicious circumstances.”

The subsequent senior management of the NBU also came under verbal attack and accused Kolomoisky by name of running a campaign of terror against its staff in 2019. Kolomoisky was still not arrested until 2023.

The dacha of former Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine Valeria Gontareva was burnt down by unknown arsonists after she clashed with Kolomoisky over PrivatBank’s ownership.