Kolomoiskyi, Firtash, and Kliuiev became targets in an international anti-corruption investigation
Ukrainian oligarchs Dmytro Firtash and Ihor Kolomoiskyi, and politician Andrii Kliuiev, were among the subjects of FinCENFiles international anti-corruption investigation.
On the evening of September 20, the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) began publishing a vast array of FinCEN data – of the US Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Units.
Among the first 20 targets in the FinCENFiles journalistic investigation were three Ukrainians, Dmytro Firtash, Andrii Kliuiev, and Ihor Kolomoiskyi, Interfax-Ukraine reports.
"SARs (suspicious activity reports) reflect the concerns of compliance professionals and do not automatically indicate criminal behavior or other offenses," the ICIJ said.
The consortium added that these categories of "corruption" or "fraud" also did not necessarily signal misconduct.
The section on Igor Kolomoiskyi provides information on 34 banks, 13 SARs, 277 transactions worth $308.6 million in 2012-2017.
Regarding Firtash, the consortium's materials refer to files of 50 banks with 38 SARs and 756 transactions totaling $2.37 billion from 2003 to 2017.
The section on Kliuiev provides information on 65 banks, 5 SARs, 752 transactions worth $244.9 million in 2010-2015.
According to the Slidstvo.Info agency, which belongs within ICIJ, the American publication BuzzFeed was the first to receive access to FinCEN documents, which they then shared with colleagues from the consortium.
As a result, 400 journalists from 88 countries spent almost a year and a half investigating and verifying suspicious transactions with totaling $2 trillion.
"Among the operations that the US agency considers suspicious are done by companies related to Kolomoiskyi, Akhmetov, Kliuiev, and other well-known Ukrainians. Publications around the world will publish further journalistic investigations in the coming days and weeks," the editor-in-chief Slidstvo.Info Anna Babynets stated in the first piece on FinCEN files.
To recap, on Sunday, September 20, BuzzFeed News released the results of two-year research of bank reports, including transactions for 2 trillion dollars. The leak showed that the world's largest banks were doing business with customers they suspected of corruption, still allowing criminals to transfer "dirty" money around the world.
