In 2019, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky ran for the presidential election against the oligarchic President Petro Poroshenko, and his main slogan was to fight corruption. Zelensky, who had played the lead role in the series "Servant of the People," where he plays the role of a president who fights corruption, succeeded in transferring a role from acting to reality after winning 75 percent of the vote against 25 percent for his rival Poroshenko.

Sociologists and politicians analysis attributed Zelensky's victory to the Ukrainian people's frustration with the corruption that spread in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the scandal sparked by the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh presented an opposite image of the man and shed light on his involvement in corruption.

Zelensky embezzled $400 million according to Seymour Hersh

A few weeks ago, the well-known investigative journalist Seymour Hersh accused President Volodymyr Zelensky of embezzling $400 million in Western aid intended to support Ukraine's war effort against Russia. Seymour Hersh said the embezzlement was part of brokering operations to buy diesel fuel for Ukrainian forces. It was CIA Director William Burns who raised this issue with Zelensky, in which he mentioned the names of dozens of Ukrainian officials involved in the operation alongside Zelensky. And it seems that the information reached the CIA by generals in the Ukrainian army who were angry at Zelensky because he did not share with them the embezzled funds.

Burns provided Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the US government. This prompted Zelensky to dismiss more than ten officials whose names were included in the list, including the President of the Supreme Court of Ukraine Vsevolod Knyazev and Acting Minister of Development Vasily Lozinsky, while the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Ukrainian Army, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, announced his resignation from his post.

The facts reveal that Zelensky's involvement in corruption is not new but dates back to before his election as president. It is worth noting that the facts that were revealed after that indicated that Zelensky himself was corrupt and that the elections in which Poroshenko lost were nothing but a process of settling scores between the pillars of the Ukrainian oligarchy, of which Zelensky was a mere front for some of its pillars.

Relations with some pillars of the Ukrainian oligarchy

Before Zelensky became president, he was in contact with a number of Ukrainian oligarchs, led by Ihor Kolomoisky, a billionaire businessman who owns the TV channel that was broadcasting the program "Servant of the People," in which Zelensky played a starring role. Kolomoisky publicly supported Zelensky, especially since he wanted revenge on Petro Poroshenko, who had issued a decision to confiscate Kolomoisky's "PrivatBank". Kolomoisky is known to have made his fortune in the banking and energy sectors and was the co-founder of PrivatBank which was the largest commercial bank in Ukraine. In 2016, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko nationalized the bank due to financial irregularities. Therefore, Kolomoisky took advantage of his great influence and his possession of shares in a large number of companies, including media, aviation, and real estate to use them to support Zelensky against Poroshenko.

It is also known that Zelensky has a relationship with another Ukrainian oligarch, Sergey Taruta, a billionaire businessman and politician who served as governor of the Donetsk region during the Ukrainian crisis. Zelensky appointed Taruta as his advisor on economic development after his election as President of Ukraine. Sergey Taruta is known to own large shares in steel and agricultural companies in Ukraine, especially in the Donbass region, and he is the founder and owner of the industrial union of Donbass Corporation, the largest Ukrainian steel-producing company. Taruta held the position of Governor of Donetsk Oblast from March 2014 to February 2015. His corrupt practices as a governor were one of the reasons for the outbreak of the crisis in the Donbass region in 2014, which led to the outbreak of war with Russia in 2022. Taruta was also a member of the Verkhovna Rada, representing the Party of Regions from 2007 to 2012.

Pandora documents scandal

It is worth noting that the United States knows a lot about Zelensky's corruption, but it did not raise this issue until the Ukrainian President embezzled American aid money allocated to Ukraine. Two years ago, a huge scandal arose and revealed Zelensky's involvement in corruption when his name was mentioned among the international figures involved in smuggling and money laundering, a case known as the Pandora Documents. In a report prepared by Luke Harding, Elena Loginova, and Aubrey Belford for the British Guardian in 2021, Zelensky's corruption was revealed in the Pandora documents that were leaked to the International Federation of Journalists.

The documents revealed that Zelensky was part of a network of jointly owned offshore companies with his old friends and television business partners, including Sergey Scheffer, a former producer of Zelensky's shows, and Boris Scheffer, the older brother of Sergey Scheffer, who is a playwright. In addition to these, Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend of Zelensky, was the general manager of the Kvartal 95 studio owned by Zelensky. They are all from the town where Zelensky was born, Kryvyi Rih. The group also included Andrei Yakovlev, a Zelensky film director who was appointed by the Ukrainian President as his advisor.

The Pandora documents showed Zelensky's ownership of Film Heritage, which, in turn, owns 25 percent of Diverga, a holding company registered in Cyprus. Next to it, Diverga owns another company, Multix Multicapital Corporation, which is registered in the Virgin Islands tax haven. The documents showed that Zelensky and his business associates used companies based in the British Virgin Islands, Belize, and Cyprus to launder money belonging to Ukrainian companies owned by Ukrainian oligarchs close to Zelensky.

The assets owned by these offshore companies are extensive and include real estate in London, including a three-bedroom apartment in an Edwardian mansion building in Regent's Park bought in 2016 for £1.575m, and another three-bedroom flat in nearby Baker Street opposite the Sherlock Holmes Museum and purchased for £2.2 million. Meanwhile, Yakovlev's BVI subsidiary Candlewood Investments owns a luxury apartment in a Victorian mansion building on Artillery Row Westminster.

Zelensky; a mere facade to Kolomoisky!

In a report by journalist Katya Gorchinskaya published in 2020 on the history of corruption in Ukraine, the focus was on Zelensky's relationship with Ihor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky controls multiple assets across various sectors in Ukraine, including heavy industry, oil and gas, intermediates, ferrous metals, chemicals, agriculture, and air transportation. In the years preceding Zelensky's presidency, Kolomoisky fled from prosecution in Ukraine and took refuge in Switzerland and the Zionist entity. As noted above, Kolomoisky's media empire backed Zelensky during the elections against Poroshenko, Kolomoisky's arch-rival. The Ukrainian President had a relationship with the wealthy oligarch that dates back to 2012 when Kvartal 95 signed a contract with Kolomoisky Media Holding for the production of series and films.

It is worth noting that there are more than 400 lawsuits and counterclaims related to Kolomoisky's PrivatBank in a number of countries including Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland, as the bank's new management is trying to prove the existence of large-scale fraud and obtain compensation from the oligarch and his various companies. The bank, which was nationalized in 2016, was returned to Kolomoisky after Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine, while Valeria Gontareva, a former governor of the National Bank widely credited for cleaning up the banking sector and going after PrivatBank, was subjected to a series of assassination attempts which Kolomoisky was accused of. This included an attempt to run her over in London and burn her house outside Kiev, in addition to burning her daughter-in-law's car in Kiev, and a sudden search of her apartment by unknown masked law enforcers in Kiev.

Unresolved issues related to PrivatBank have clouded Ukrainian politics, especially relations between Ukraine and the International Monetary Fund. The fund agreed to give a new aid package to Ukraine in December 2019 but stipulated that Ukraine pass a law that prevents former bank owners from challenging nationalizations and obtaining compensation, and soon it was called the "Anti-Kolomoisky Law" in Ukraine.