Ukrainian President allegedly used offshore scheme to benefit his close aides: Report

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has allegedly used an offshore scheme to provide benefit to his close circle, including family and friends, from their unregistered businesses overseas, reported the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), citing Pandora Papers. Zelensky won the Presidential elections in 2019 on a wave of public outrage against the country's political establishment, including some former leaders who used secret firms to store their wealth overseas. Leaked documents now show that Zelensky and his immediate entourage have their own offshore company network, and two of the President's partners' money was used to purchase expensive properties in London, reported OCCRP. The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in Kvartal 95, a television production company, established a network of offshore companies in 2012 when the company began producing regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, who was facing multibillion-dollar fraud allegations. 

The documents also show that shortly before Zelensky was elected president, he gave his ownership in a significant offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-based Maltex Multicapital Corp., to a business partner who would later become his senior presidential assistant. Although he gave up his shares, the documents show that an agreement was quickly reached to allow the offshore to continue paying dividends to a business owned by his wife. Amid the 2019 presidential campaign, Volodymyr Ariev, a close ally of the then President Petro Poroshenko, posted a chart on Facebook purporting to show that Zelensky and his television production partners were the beneficiaries of a web of offshore companies that allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoisky's Privatbank. However, Ariev could never provide evidence to substantiate his claims, and his assertions have never been confirmed. 

'Pandora Papers based on a leak of 11.9 million data'

On the other hand, the Pandora Papers revealed that at least some parts of the details in this purported conspiracy are accurate. The released documents reveal the details of at least ten companies in the network that correspond to the structures depicted in Ariev's diagram, reported OCCRP. The new documents indicate that Fidelity Corporate Services, an offshore consultant that was one of 14 firms whose documents were leaked as part of the Pandora Papers, assisted in managing a portion of the network. Zelensky and his partners used corporations based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Belize, and Cyprus reported OCCRP. It is worth mentioning here that on Sunday, October 3, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a new leak on the purported financial secrets of over 35 current and former world leaders, as well as over 330 politicians and bureaucrats from across the world. The publication, dubbed Pandora Papers after the 2016 Panama Papers incident, was based on a leak of 11.9 million data, according to the ICIJ. 

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