Thursday, March 10, 2022

Did Anybody Even Pretend To Imagine Zelensky Was More Than A Juan Guido Type Trick?

nakedcapitalism |  Let’s begin with the money man.

The Billionaire: Igor Kolomoyskyi

Long-time Naked Capitalism readers will recall that our own Richard Smith introduced us to Igor Kolomoyskyi[2] eight years ago, in 2014:

Kolomoyskyi is one of the oligarchs charged with holding down the Eastern provinces of Ukraine[3], and recently mocked Putin, reputedly sensitive about his height, as a “schizophrenic shortarse” (apologies for the English intonation: American alternatives are invited); definitely a bridge-burning moment. Putin, meanwhile, shut down as much of Kolomoyskyi ’s bank as he could, in Crimea and Moscow. I’m not sure who started it, but we can certainly mark it down as a first-rate spat.

While that was brewing up, Kolomoyskyi might well have wanted something that looked an American protector, and got it, in the form of the VP’s son[, Hunter Biden]. Another guess: Kolomoyskyi is far too ebulliently Jewish to look like a neo-Nazi. A US connection with Kolomoyskyi might play well in circles keen to counter Russian complaints that the interim Kiev regime is dominated by “Fascists”.

No, I’m not going down this Hunter Biden rathole; those are not the transactions I am interested in now. I will note in passing that Kolomoyskyi ‘s style could be considered — let’s just go ahead and say it — crude. Kolomoyskyi and his running buddy, Gennadiy Bogolyubov, were business partners and founders of a thing called Privat Group:

Kolomoyskyi and Bogolyubo]fostered strong reputations as corporate raiders in the mid-2000s, becoming notorious for a series of hostile takeovers. Hostile takeovers Ukrainian style, that is, which often included the active involvement of Privat’s quasi-military teams. These schemes included, among others, a literal raid on the Kremenchuk steel plant in 2006, in which hundreds of hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws forcibly took over the plant.

As of this writing, Kolomoyskyi was #1750 on the Forbes billionaires list, with a real time net worth (assuming Forbes didn’t outsource the data gathering to CDC) of $1.8 billion. Kolomoyskyi has also fallen out with the United States, amusingly including the Atlantic Council, but I assume all these tiresome bureaucratic obstacles will at some point be swept away, so that’s another rathole I’m not going down. Suffice to say that Kolomoyskyi still has his billions, which I expect go farther in Ukraine than they would here, and isn’t at all shy about funding thugs. Kolomoyskyi, like any billionaire, holds a portfolio of projects in the political field. I don’t know how many he has in toto, but there are at least two. Let’s look at them.

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