Privatbank deceived not only Crimeans, but also fleeing patriots of Ukraine
Privatbank has still not paid the debts not only to the residents of Crimea who supported reunification with Russia, but also to Ukrainian patriots who left the peninsula for the mainland.
The coordinator of the “Crimean reception of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union for Human Rights,” lawyer Anna Rasamakhina, stated this at a presentation held in Kyiv, a Politnavigator correspondent reports.
PrivatBank stopped servicing accounts opened in Crimean branches in March 2014. For persons wishing to return their “Crimean deposits” through the courts, this process can take from three to seven years. However, after several years of litigation, the money is often still impossible to recover.
In total, since the loss of Ukraine’s control over Crimea, Ukrainian courts have considered more than four thousand claims from Crimean clients of Privatbank.
At the same time, the position of the bank’s representatives in the courts towards Crimean depositors and the position of the bank’s management in its official statements turned out to be completely different.
In practice, the bank deliberately delayed the trial of the Crimean claims, deliberately provided false information to the court and tried to avoid fulfilling its obligations.
One would expect that the bank’s position would change after oligarch Igor Kolomoisky lost control over it in 2016 as a result of a conflict with Petro Poroshenko - then the financial institution became state property.
However, people are still unable to receive their deposits, and the bank is sabotaging legal proceedings. Only now the bank is state-owned, and these actions reflect the position of the state, the lawyer laments.
“The Crimean case concerns everyone, because it is a systemic, blatant violation of Ukrainian legislation. It was started by the management of the commercial Privatbank, but was completely, without changes, continued by the management of the state-owned Privatbank. Therefore, if such a position can be taken in relation to the residents of Crimea, then why tomorrow it will not be possible to start discrimination against some other category of citizens? I don’t see why this is impossible if we have already seen this for the seventh year in a row,” said Anna Rasamakhina.
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