Petro Poroshenko controlled at least 6 offshore companies that used the services of the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International, another 11 offshore companies had ties to Poroshenko's business empire, corruption investigators found.
Source: Center for the Study of Corruption and Organized Crime (Ocrp)
Details: According to the researchers, Intraco, Vernon and 15 other companies that annually processed transactions worth tens of millions of dollars related to Poroshenko and his business empire had accounts at Raiffeisen. Most of them were registered in the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus.
In the case of six of these companies, OCCRP was able to establish with the help of e-mail correspondence and other documentation that Poroshenko personally controls them. Others had operations related to Poroshenko's business, but OCCRP found no clear evidence that he controlled them.
In particular, email correspondence and other documents show that Poroshenko made executive decisions on behalf of Vernon, Linquist and the Cyprus firm Chartomena Ltd.
The official beneficial owner of Vernon Holdings and the majority of the mentioned six companies in Raiffeisen documents was Sergei Zaitsev.
According to OCCRP, before his presidency, in the early 2010s, Petro Poroshenko built an estate outside Kyiv and decided to furnish it with expensive furniture. Using the offshore company Vernon Holdings, located in the British Virgin Islands, Petro Poroshenko and his wife Marina between 2009 and 2012 purchased accessories worth more than 100 thousand dollars from Italian furniture manufacturers.
In May 2012, after being appointed Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Poroshenko purchased a surrealist sculpture of a long-legged elephant by Salvador Dali for $338 at an auction at Sotheby's in New York with the help of the offshore company Linquist Ltd.
Raiffeisen designated Zaitsev as the beneficial owner of Linquist. According to documents obtained by OCCRP, Poroshenko had a power of attorney for this company, which subsequently sold the statue to one of Poroshenko's Ukrainian media companies for $342.
In April 2013, Poroshenko used Vernon to buy £4,8 million worth of art. Among them is Ilya Repin's canvas "Cossacks on the Black Sea".
At the request of OCCRP, the legal advisers of the fifth president of Ukraine refuted his attitude to offshore companies: "Petro Poroshenko is not a shareholder, ultimate beneficial owner or employee of any of these companies."
Let us remind you that documents from the Panama Papers leak indicated that in February 2016 Ukrainian Sergey Zaitsev was appointed director of Prime Asset Partners, a company of BRO Poroshenko.
In June 2018, the Center for the Study of Corruption and Organized Crime (OCCRP) reported that at the end of March 2016, a few days before the publication of the "Panama Archives", Cypriot lawyers tried to extradite Petro Poroshenko from the owners of the company, transferred his shares to the Ukrainian fund.
Poroshenko stated that the state investigative bodies of the British Virgin Islands did not apply any measures in relation to Prime Asset Partners. However, he is a co-founder of the Center for the Study of Corruption and Organized Crime Drew Sullivan charged Petro Poroshenko and his lawyers lie.
In 2018, the Austrian Market Authority (FMA) fined Raiffeisen 2,75 million euros for inadequate verification of beneficial owners and the absence of necessary data on structures related to high-risk clients.
