At a hearing in the London High Court on 23 May, it was confirmed that the billionaire oligarch former owner of PrivatBank, Igor Kolomoisky, is not prepared to support his defence to PrivatBank’s claims under cross-examination at the upcoming High Court trial due to start in London on Monday, 12 June. The trial relates to PrivatBank’s multibillion fraud and financial misappropriation claim against, among others, Igor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov. It was also confirmed that none of Mr Kolomoisky’s witnesses is prepared to give oral evidence at trial.

This news follows the sudden announcement at the pre-trial review on 29 March that Mr Bogolyubov is not prepared to testify at trial. As a result, there will be no witnesses giving factual evidence for Mr Kolomoisky or Mr Bogolyubov at trial.

No reasons have been given for the Defendants’ and their witnesses’ refusal to testify. However, it is a clear indication that Mr Kolomoisky and Mr Bogolyubov have no good answer to PrivatBank’s allegations that they perpetrated a fraud on the Bank.

As previously reported, in a judgment handed down in October 2019, the English Court of Appeal held that the evidence was “strongly indicative of an elaborate fraud” and “money laundering on a vast scale" and that “the supply agreements were shams and were used as a deceptive basis on which to justify very large sums of money flowing out of the Bank”. The court went on to note that Mr Kolomoisky and Mr Bogolyubov had admitted “a good arguable case of fraud on an epic scale”.