Monaco resident Vadim M. Shulman and his philanthropic foundation claimed in a US lawsuit last Friday, August 23, that billionaires Igor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov cheated him out of $30 million by operating a $100 million fraudulent loan scheme. Mr Shulman has been pursuing his case in other jurisdictions since 2015, according to reliable sources.
The claim lodged in Delaware says that businessmen Igor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov were at the head of a “series of large-scale and coordinated schemes” which misappropriated millions of dollars that Schulman and his foundation are owed, through false representations.
The three oligarchs had been involved as business partners in several business deals spanning several years, both in Ukraine and later in the US. Stakes were held in various steel and coking plants, where the shareholder stakes were often not transparent. In one of the major deals, in 2007, Roman Abramovich offered to buy Kolomoisky’s stakes in his Ukrainian plants for $1.06 billion in cash plus a stake in his company Evraz Group.
In December 2016 the Ukrainian government rescued PrivatBank to the tune of $5.5 billion, its balance sheet having been severely damaged by its owners – including Kolomoisky – who had used it as their own piggy bank. In the wake of the state rescue of the bank, at a meeting in the Hotel de Paris, Kolomoisky asked Shulman not to “beat a man who is down.” He offered to repay the debt to his former business partner.
More recently, Kolomoisky returned to Ukraine after a two-year absence following the election of comedian Volodymyr Zelensky to the Presidency. The oligarch has close ties to Zelensky, who has denied being under Kolomoisky’s influence.
ORIGINAL SOURCES: Kyiv Post, Law360, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project PHOTO: Vadim M. Shulman Ukrainian Tennis Federation
