Oleksiy Tsymbalyuk, a former deputy chairman of the board of "Imexbank", owned by former MP Leonid Klimov, helped to withdraw funds and property from the financial institution to avoid its transfer to the state.
The editors learned about this from analysis of court registers, as well as their own investigation of the case.
For the last few years, Oleksiy Tsymbalyuk has been working as the director of the Southern Macro-Regional Department of PrivatBank, which is now state-owned. The irony is that it was Tsymbalyuk who previously helped Klimov to actually "steal from the state". Let’s look at this in detail.
Oleksii Savovych Tsymbaliuk was born on 5 March 1978 in Odesa. In 2000, he graduated from the Higher School of Business Administration (IAPM) with a degree in organisational management.
At the same time, he was hired by Ukrsotsbank, where he worked until 2003, rising from senior cashier to head of the corporate clients department. Since 2003, Oleksiy Tsymbalyuk has worked at ProCredit Bank, where he allegedly worked as an executive director until 2013. In March, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Board of Imexbank.
During the Yanukovych era, the bank controlled the "Chornomorets" stadium and the corresponding football club, the "Shevchenkivskyi" business centre, the "Chorne Morye" hotel chain and the block around the " Pryvoz" market.
After the Revolution of Dignity, the bank of the Party of Regions member Leonid Klimov started having problems. At the end of January 2015, the bank was declared insolvent. This was a painful blow to Odesa. Among other things, pensioners’ and state employees’ money was stuck in the bank. From time to time, they had problems getting their money back and had to stand in long queues. But before the bankruptcy, a number of interesting events happened at the bank.
In 2011-2014, about 40 companies took out loans from Imexbank for tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of hryvnias. They never fully repaid the money. There were several major criminal cases, but only the Deposit Guarantee Fund conducted a real investigation.
The fund has collected sufficient evidence about the withdrawal of funds by management from the bank in favor of its owner through scheme lending to 36 borrowers (41 loan agreements or almost 56% of the balance sheet loan portfolio). The borrowers were associated with Klimov and had unsatisfactory financial condition. Considering the requirements of current legislation for credit risk management, such borrowers should not receive bank loans at all.
Despite the non-repayment of loans, since 2013 the bank has repeatedly provided the mentioned borrowers with deferred payment of debt and removed highly liquid collateral from the collateral. The list of lost collateral includes: property rights to unfinished construction projects, luxury country cottages in the Odesa region, commercial real estate, deposit funds. The withdrawal of collateral worth more than UAH 7.1 billion has been documented. All this is a scheme to avoid collection of funds through collateral.
Due to the actions of management, the only collateral for these loan agreements remained the Chernomorets stadium, with the value of significantly less loan debt. At the same time, the valuation of the property was unreasonably increased several times by the appraiser hired by the bank: from UAH 2.1 billion in December 2011 to UAH 7.8 billion in December 2014. This exceeds the cost of twice the size of the Olimpiyskiy NSC, given in open sources. As a result, loan debt of 13.4 billion hryvnia remained outstanding.
Further, the DGF filed a lawsuit with the Kyiv Commercial Court seeking damages of approximately UAH 8.4 billion against Leonid Klimov and the bank’s former management: Nataliya Krainya, Tatyana Klimova, Oleksandr Kryzhanovskyi, Yuriy Khatkovyi, Lyudmyla Levchenko, Olha Yakimenko, Iryna Krayushkina, Oleksandr Marchenko, and the aforementioned Oleksiy Tsymbalyuk.
Why were we interested in this particular manager? The fact is that he was the founder and owner of two companies through which the property was withdrawn. These are Shevchenkivskyi Development LLC and Office Development Group LLC.
Part of the premises of the Shevchenkivskyi Business Centre was leased to Shevchenkivskyi Development. Its ultimate owners are lawyers from the firm Arshument. People with such passport details used to work in the legal department of the Chornomorets football club. And the Business Rents company became the tenant of part of Novyi Privoz, several buildings in the Klimovskyi Quarter, Odesa’s Central Department Store and warehouses near the airport. Its co-owner is Oleksandr Kryzhanovskyi, son-in-law of Leonid Klimov.
It was not by chance that these buildings could be provided for long-term lease. According to the Civil Code, the lease agreement continues to be valid even if the owner of the property changes.
“What this means is that the tenant—those related entities—can use the property while that lease is in effect. It was concluded for 10 years, which is quite long and atypical for Ukrainian realities. This also means that when this property is sold, there will not be any real buyer, because no one will want to buy the property together with a tenant for 10 years,” lawyer Bohdan Borovik told Radio Liberty.
In addition, in December 2014, PJSC Football Club Chernomorets transferred the Chernomorets stadium complex to management for Chernomorets Stadium LLC, which in 2019 entered into a lease agreement with Office Development Group LLC. This company was also founded by Oleksiy Tsymbalyuk.
That is, a man who is directly related to the withdrawal of funds from Imexbank occupies a high position in a state bank. In addition, he is a defendant in the case for the recovery of 8.4 billion hryvnia. In the position of head of the department, a man can take actions or do nothing so that the state, represented by PrivatBank, loses funds.