16:49 28.04.2017

Yanukovych gang's money to be confiscated on Friday – PGO head

2 min read
Yanukovych gang's money to be confiscated on Friday – PGO head

Some UAH 40 billion on almost a hundred different accounts belonging to disgraced ex-president of Ukrainian Viktor Yanukovych and his entourage, which by a court ruling will be confiscated by the state, will be transferred to the State Treasury account on Friday.

"We are talking about a hundred accounts where members of Yanukovych's criminal gang placed their securities. This operation will surely be completed today," Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said at a briefing in Kyiv on Friday.

Lutsenko says he is in constant contact with representatives of the state-owned Oschadbank, as well as investigators and prosecutors who are staying in the premises of the financial institution.

The prosecutor general also said that the funds which will be confiscated have been frozen since 2014 on the accounts of a number of banks, while the bulk of the frozen funds is concentrated on the accounts of Oschadbank. At the moment, they are establishing the exact amount of the funds, including in the form of securities, Lutsenko said.

According to him, the amount of confiscated funds totals $1.5 billion, but the exact sum will be named late on Friday when all the funds will be transferred from these numerous accounts to a single account of the State Treasury together with the interest which accumulated during this time.

Lutsenko stressed that these funds do not belong to Yanukovych per se, but were illegally accumulated by members of a criminal group led by him, including Ukrainian businessman Serhiy Kurchenko, former minister of income and tax Oleksandr Klymenko, former first vice premier Serhiy Arbuzov and others.

He said that the decision to confiscate the funds of Viktor Yanukovych's entourage in favor of the national budget of Ukraine was passed by the Kramatorsk Court (Donetsk region) about a month ago and the period for filing an appeal has expired today. When answering a question, why the materials of the case were transferred to this court, the prosecutor general explained that it was there that the military prosecutor's office launched relevant criminal proceedings.

He noted that the funds stolen by the then government were taken out of the country through some 500 companies through a number of offshore jurisdictions and then returned to Ukraine for buying the government loan bonds with the annual yield of 8% in foreign currency.

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