Feb. 19, 2025, 7:12 p.m.
(PHOTOS: Ukraine Criminal)
The State Financial Monitoring Service has received more than 1.7 million reports of financial transactions that need to be checked. 82% of them concerned large sums, and 99% of the reports came from banks. Most of the cases were referred to the National Police and the SBU for investigation.
According to the Opendatabot monitoring service, the number of reports increased by 23% over the year, including suspicious transactions - 18% in 2024, compared to 5% in 2021. Threshold transactions accounted for the majority - 82%, or 1.44 billion notifications.
After verification, more than a thousand materials were sent to the relevant authorities. The total amount of recorded transactions amounted to UAH 62.59 billion. Most of the materials were sent to the National Police - 31%, or 323 cases, to the SBU - 27% (289 materials) and to the NABU - 15% (156 cases). The total value of these cases is UAH 37.39 billion.
After the outbreak of full-scale war, the number of materials sent to the SBI increased 3.3 times, reaching 118 cases. At the same time, the number of materials sent to the Tax Service decreased by 2.5 times to 95 cases.
The lowest number of materials was sent to the Prosecutor General's Office - only 7% (71 materials). One more material was sent to the intelligence agencies.
The State Financial Monitoring Service checks two types of financial transactions: threshold and suspicious. Threshold transactions are defined by the amount exceeding UAH 400 thousand and have signs related to the risk of terrorism, separatism, falsification of accounts and other violations. Suspicious transactions do not depend on the amount, but appear due to suspicious behavior or information provided.
In 2024, the NACP also verified 734 declarations, 46% of which contained errors worth UAH 1.856 billion. This confirms the existence of serious problems in financial reporting.
And under the article "Fraud", 64,978 criminal proceedings were opened, which is 21% less than in 2023. However, this figure is 2.7 times higher than before the full-scale invasion. Last year, in the south of Ukraine, in particular in Mykolaiv, Odesa and Kherson regions, some fraud cases were related to public officials.
Recently, law enforcement officers detained Yuriy Kormyshkin, a former deputy of the Mykolaiv Regional Council. The court imposed on him a pre-trial restraint in the form of arrest with the possibility of bail. Also, as a result of large-scale operations in Odesa, seven members of a criminal group were detained. This includes the founder and top managers of a local company that supplied electrical equipment to Russian military facilities.
Since independence, more than $100 billion has been withdrawn from Ukraine. To recover such assets, the National Agency for Finding, Tracing and Management of Assets (ARMA) developed and approved a new procedure for the sale of seized assets abroad in July 2023.
Анна Бальчінос