Ihor Kolomoisky

Ukrainian dictator Vladimir Zelensky (center) meets with Kolomoisky, September 10, 2019.^[1]

Ihor "Benny" Kolomoisky, also Igor Kolomoisky or Kolomoyskyi, is a Ukrainian-Israeli-Cypriot oligarch who funded the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion^[2] and comedian/actor Volodymyr Zelensky's rise to political power. Kolomoisky owned the bank through which the bribes and kickbacks were paid to Hunter and Joe Biden.^[3] He is known as a rabid Russophobe. Kolomoisky has been described by Gonzalo Lira as "a cancer cell on the soul of Ukraine."^[4]

In 2010 Kolomoyskyi was appointed as the president of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC).^[5] Some western European ECJC board members described his elevation as a "putsch"^[6] and a "Soviet-style takeover".^[7] After several board members resigned in protest, Kolomoyskyi quit.

Call center owned by Kolomoiysky discovered by Russian troops during the liberation of Donbas.^[8]

Kolomoisky, with the help of his partner Gennady Bogolyubov, built his multibillion dollar financial base partly thanks to his mastery of “raiding,” the Ukrainian version of mergers and acquisitions. According to Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, who has made a special study of the practice of "raiding", “there are actual firms in Ukraine . . . registered with offices and business cards, firms [that specialize in] various dimensions of the corporate raiding process, which includes armed guys to do stuff, forging documents, bribing notaries, bribing judges.” Rojansky describes Kolomoisky as “the most famous oligarch-raider, accused of having conducted a massive raiding campaign over the roughly ten years up to 2010,” building an empire based on banking, chemicals, energy, media, and metals, and centered on PrivatBank, the country’s largest bank, holding 26 percent of all Ukrainian bank deposits.

These raiding schemes included, among others, a literal raid on the Kremenchuk steel plant in 2006, in which hundreds of hired football hooligans armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws forcibly took over the plant. Aerosvit Airlines, which according to the media was controlled by Kolomoisky, declared bankruptcy in 2012, stranding thousands of Ukrainians in Ukraine and abroad. The Financial Times, when reporting on Kolomoisky’s conflict with UK company JKX Oil & Gas, stated in no uncertain terms, that “in Ukraine they [Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov] are called ‘The Raiders’”. Privat Group has been involved in several court cases and arbitration proceedings in the US, UK, and Sweden. In 2009, a US court made clear its distrust of Privat representatives: “the Court has become increasingly skeptical of these gentleman [at Privat] and the credibility of their statements.”^[9]

Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, owners of PrivatBank, loaned themselves $470 billion through their shell companies. The oligarchs used the bank deposits of Ukrainian citizens to acquire property all over the United States through shell companies operated in Miami. The Chairwoman of Ukraine’s Central Bank says Igor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov stole $5.5 billion outright, which is 5% of Ukraine’s GDP and 33% of the entire country’s bank deposits. Most of this money was laundered into the US.

See also: Maidan coup and Donbas war

In April 2014, Kolomoisky mobilized his workforce into a 20,000-man private army in two battalions, Dnipro-1 and Dnipro-2. The forces later became the Azov Battalion and were incorporated into the Armed Forces of Ukraine;^[10] receiving American funding, weapons, and NATO training.^[11] while relieving Kolomoisky of the burden of paying their salaries.

After Zelensky's election in 2019, Kolomoisky merged his two enterprises, the Zelensky regime and Azov Battalion, into a full scale effort to attack the independent Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Also in April 2014 the IMF rushed an international aid package to Ukraine in response to what IMF managing director Christine Lagarde^[12] called a “major crisis.” She went on to hail the government’s “unprecedented resolve” in developing a “bold economic program to secure macroeconomic and financial stability.” Over the next five months the IMF poured the equivalent of $4.51 billion ($2.97 billion in “Special Drawing Rights”) into the National Bank of Ukraine— the country’s central bank. Much of this money was urgently needed to prop up the local commercial banks. In theory, the IMF appeared to require direct supervision of how the Ukrainian banks used the aid. In fact, it appears the local banks got to select their own auditors.

As the largest bank, Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank stood to garner the largest share of the international aid. Published estimates put this share as high as 40 percent. Despite the torrent of cash, the banks’ situation did not improve; nine months into the program, the IMF announced: “As of end January 2015 . . . the banking system’s capital adequacy ratio stood at 13.8 percent, down from 15.9 percent at end-June.”

The Ukrainian watchdog group Nashi Groshi (“Our Money”) documented how $1.8 billion was maneuvered offshore, in the first instance to PrivatBank accounts in Cyprus, and thence into accounts in Belize, the British Virgin Islands, and other locations.

Biden at the Council on Foreign Relations: "‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money'...Well, [SOB], he got fired."^[13]

As revealed in a series of court judgments of the Economic Court of the Dnipropetrovsk region reported by Nashi Groshi, worked like this: Forty-two Ukrainian firms owned by fifty-four offshore entities registered in Caribbean, American, and Cypriot jurisdictions and linked to or affiliated with the Privat group of companies, took out loans from PrivatBank in Ukraine to the value of $1.8 billion. The firms then ordered goods from six foreign “supplier” companies, three of which were incorporated in the United Kingdom, two in the British Virgin Islands, one in the Caribbean statelet of St. Kitts & Nevis. Payment for the orders—$1.8 billion—was shortly afterwards prepaid into the vendors’ accounts, which were, coincidentally, in the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank. Once the money was sent, the Ukrainian importing companies arranged with PrivatBank Ukraine that their loans be guaranteed by the goods on order.

But the foreign suppliers invariably reported that they could not fulfill the order after all, thus breaking the contracts, but without any effort to return the money. Finally, the Ukrainian companies filed suit, always in the Dnipropetrovsk Economic Court, demanding that that foreign supplier return the prepayment and also that the guarantee to PrivatBank be cancelled. In forty-two out of forty-two such cases the court issued the identical judgment: the advance payment should be returned to the Ukrainian company, but the loan agreement should remain in force.

As a result, the loan of the Ukrainian company remained guaranteed by the undelivered goods, while the chances of returning the advance payments from foreign companies remain remote. Thanks to the need to use the economic court as a legal fig leaf, the scheme operated in plain view. Despite this brazen raid on Ukraine’s dwindling assets, no one in Kyiv regime seemed to care.^[14]

Claim to Fame: Zelensky, considered by Western media as the "21st century Winston Churchill" playing Chopsticks on the piano with his sex organ.

Kolomoisky ran for president in 2014 and received slightly more than 2% of the vote.

Kolomoisky owns 1+1 Media Group which included comedic actor Volodymyr Zelensky as a partner.^[15]

In 2015 Kolomoisky created a television program called Servant of the People and recruited Zelensky for the leading role. The show is premised on a schoolteacher who makes a viral video about corruption in Ukraine and gets elected president. As president he advocates joining the European Union and NATO. The show was a success. Zelensky organized the Servant of the People Party three years later and was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. The show also made Zelensky rich while squirrelling away millions of dollars in offshore Caribbean bank accounts.

Kolomoisky selected Zelensky's cabinet.

In March 2021, Kolomoisky was banned from entering the United States allegedly due to his corrupt activities.^[16] Kolomoisky faces fraud charges in both the United States and United Kingdom.^[17]

In a massive P.R. stunt and overreach that backfired, Zelensky tried to strip Kolomoisky of his Ukrainian citizenship by presidential decree in order to distance himself from his boss as the corruption scandal took on international proportions. Under the Ukrainian constitution, the president does not have power to strip anyone of their citizenship.

On February 1, 2023 it was reported that Zelensky had turned on his old friend and benefactor, Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky's home was raided by the Ukrainian gestapo allegedly in connection with the embezzlement of oil products worth $1.09 billion and customs duty evasion "of astronomical amounts."^[18]

• Biden family corruption
• Aidar Battalion
• Arsen Avakov