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Kyrgyzstan|opinion & analysis|December 19, 2014 / 06:27 PM
AsiaUniversalBank's offshore partner appears in Ukraine

AKIPRESS.COM - AUB The international watch dog organization Global Witness released a report entitled Grave Secrecy dedicated to investigation of the AsiaUniversalBank (AUB) scandal in 2010.

AsiaUniversalBank's scandal partner appears in Ukraine

By Svetlana Moldogaziyeva, an independent expert

Grave Secrecy revealed that many offshore companies used for dubious financial transactions in fact were administered by a small handful of offshore corporate service providers. Among those named was a Seychelles-licensed firm, Apollo Business Solutions (Pty), Ltd., part of a large offshore services group with Russian roots – Apollo International. Its main marketing and sales offices are in Kiev and Moscow.

It was reported that some of the offshore companies serviced by Apollo were supplied with nominee owners and directors who in fact had no idea their passports were used by the offshore incorporators. One extreme case cited by Global Witness was that a corporate resolution was 'signed' in Apollo's London office by a man who died three years before that.

In April 2014, the U.S. FBI arrested a well-known Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash in Vienna, Austria for allegedly paying millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials for mineral rights. It was then revealed that one of the firms which supplied offshore companies implicated in the FBI investigation was Apollo Business Solutions – the same company mentioned by Global Witness.

It was later revealed that the very same Apollo Business Solutions certified corporate documents for a bank account used by a Russian cyber-gang in the Seychelles. The account was frozen by the Seychelles Financial Intelligence Unit.

Just very recently news emerged from the Ukraine that Apollo got yet again into a criminal scandal. This time it was theft of shares in a Ukrainian agricultural enterprise named Chumaki which was accomplished by their re-registration in the name of a Seychelles firm incorporated by Apollo. The re-registration was on the basis of fake papers where signatures of the shares owners were forged. As it transpired from copies of papers obtained in the course of Ukrainian police investigation, the Seychelles company used for the crime had a director whom neither the Police, nor the victim's lawyers are now able to locate. Very probably, this is another case of someone's passport used by offshore crooks to make the company truly 'anonymous'.

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