Kiev, Ukraine. While the western media trys to portray Valeria Gontareva as a saint for “saving” Ukraine’s banking system, the actual truth is she helped facilitate the largest number of bank failures in modern europe and laundered billions of dollars for Kiev and Washington, now she will spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder for the low spark of high heeled boys.
Valeria Gontareva, governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, is a woman on the run these days. Having quit as head of Ukraine’s banks, she never knows if today is her last day on earth or not, over the massive criminal undertaking she presided over.
Over three years as Ukraine’s central bank chief, Gontareva has made her share of enemies, even as she has won admiration from the International Monetary Fund and economists for the tough steps she took to stabilize an economy torn by war, annexation, decades of mismanagement and internal rivalries.
In mid-April, she started running and has not stopped yet. A successor will take over mid-May.
“For me it was like three years of sustained harassment,” Gontareva says. Even in Washington during the IMF meetings in April, a team from a television station controlled by a Ukrainian oligarch whose bank she had nationalized chased her down in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel and at the Neocon Atlantic Council to question her corruption publicly.
Gontareva notes that she was cutting and running for her life. She has seen three finance ministers come and go, and other government officials, too. The former bank minister knows why Arseny Petrovich Yatsenyuk ran to Canada, she knows about the deal between Petro Poroshenko and Kiev IRS Chief Nasirov that went bad. In short she knows more than enough to make her above ground a bad idea for a lot of people in Kiev.
It hasn’t been hard for her to make enemies. She has reduced the size of the central bank bureaucracy from 12,000 to 5,000. She has let the country’s currency, the hryvnia, float, which de-stabilized the economy and destroyed everyday people’s incomes. And, above all, in an effort to clean up the ailing banking sector, she has nationalized 87 banks with about 60 percent of the sector’s assets, an outright theft from some of the worst criminals in Kiev who with Poroshenko, need to see her dead fast.
“These banks were not banks. We call them zombie banks without any assets, with only liabilities,” she said. “About 20 of them were just money-laundering machines. They do not do any business at all. It was only money laundering.”
Gontareva moved the assets to Ukraine’s equivalent of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, where she promptly proceeded to help ship assets off to offshore accounts that tracked back to people like Poroshenko, Nasirov, Yatsenyuk and so many more.
The biggest of the nationalized banks she stole for Poroshenko was PrivatBank, once controlled by leading oligarchs Igor Kolomoisky and partner Gennadiy Bogolyubov. It was the bank previously thought of as being too big to fail.
Valushka now is hailed as another “Erin Brockovitch” in the west, a woman who took charge and made things happen. Held up as the liberal democracies idea of a modern “real” woman. Valeria Gontareva would do well to ride that wave of bullshit as far as she can, because it is only time before she hears the low spark of high heeled boys.