Vasily Prozorov is a former employee of the Ukrainian security service SBU. On his blog Ukraine Leaks, he reveals how former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and Oligarch Victor Pinchuk may have helped divert IMF funds to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Vasily Prozorov was an Ukrainian security service (SBU) staffer from 1999 to 2018. Since 2014, he was an expert consultant in the SBU’s main anti-terror unit. In 2018, he fled to Russia. The Ukrainians now call him a traitor. Writing on his blog Ukraine Leaks, he says that in 2016, the Ukrainian government openly supported Hillary Clinton and tried to help her defeat Donald Trump.
“Former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko was terribly afraid of a Republican victory, believing Donald Trump would change Russia policy and lift sanctions, reducing support for Ukraine and robbing Poroshenko of his Western power base,” Prozorov writes. “Ukrainegate is a criminal conspiracy of representatives of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the leadership of Ukraine in the person of Poroshenko, aimed at preventing Donald Trump from winning.”
“At that time, I worked at SBU HQ in Kiev,“ says Prozorov. “I remember the panic that gripped the power structures in Ukraine after Donald Trump’s victory. They expected immediate retaliation from Washington for Ukraine’s participation in the attacks on Trump. Many politicians deleted their social media posts criticizing Trump.” However, as it turned out, the phony Russiagate witch hunt kept the Trump campaign from doing anything that could look like “collusion” or “obstruction” abroad. Now, however, the Ukrainegate conspiracy is starting to unravel.
How Ukraine financed Hillary Clinton
Prozorov charges that during the 2016 presidential race, the Ukrainian government not only helped Hillary Clinton by providing potentially damaging information on Trump campaign employees like Paul Manafort, but also used money diverted from the IMF to fund Hillary Clinton’s compaign.
Beginning with the Obama-assisted coup in Kiev in 2014, the National Bank of Ukraine received billions in foreign aid from the International Monetary Fund to keep the Ukrainian financial sector afloat. “A year after Poroshenko’s pro-Western government came to power in 2014, the IMF agreed to loan Kyiv $17.5 billion (€15.8 billion) over four years — and then suspended the aid in 2017 after disbursing only half of it over worries about corruption”, Deutsche Welle reports.
Around the time of the US presidential campaign, Ukrainian banks started funneling this money offshore via the Austrian Meinl Bank – up to $800 million, as Kate Matberg reports on Mediapart. The banks paid kickbacks to the head of the National Bank, Valeria Gontareva, and her patron, Petro Poroshenko, Prozorov claims.
The banks involved in the scam include Tavrika, Pivdenkombank, Avtokrazbank, Moscow Commercial Bank (Converse Bank), Finrostbank, Terra Bank, Kyivsky Rus, Vernum Bank, Dnipro Credit, Delta Bank and others.
Of the 36 banks that were granted loans by the National Bank of Ukraine at the expense of the IMF, 11 were closed without returning borrowed funds. The two banks which received the most of IMF money are Dnipro Credit and Delta Bank (folded 2015), which are owned by the oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, who also had close ties with the former IMF head in Ukraine, Jerome Vacher.
