According to ‘Skhemy’ report, Volodymyr Zelensky and his close business partner Serhiy Shefir used a questionable scheme  to claw back their hefty deposits after the сollapsed Brokbisnesbank got a state insolvency administration.

The story dates back to  2010 when Volodymyr Zelensky and Serhiy Shefir deposited $300 thousand and $400 thousand respectively at Brokbisnesbank.

After the bank then owned by Serhiy Kurchenko, the oligarch with close ties to Yanukovych family, went under in 2014, Zelensky and Shefir moved to buy  secured debts of several bank creditors to later claim repayment of their own deposits.

Such deals allowed the indebted companies dodge paying back on their loans making Zelensky and Shefir the bank secured creditors who could now jump the line and seek far more beyond 200 thousand hryvnas compensation offered by state-run Deposit Guarantee Fund after Brokbisnesbank liquidation.

The scheme was set to help save the assets and property  for Podilsky Gospodar (260 million hryvnas’ collateral), Chynbar (260 million hryvnas’ collateral), and Kyiv Repair and Engineering Works.

In 2015, Ukraine’s High Economic Court ruled such practice were illegal.

According to ‘Schemy’ report, ‘Servant of the People’ senior MP and parliamentary finance committee chair Danylo Getmantsev criticized such deals as ‘unacceptable’ but, on learning Volodymyr Zelensky was involved , added ‘the documents must be looked into’.

‘Schemy’ journalists reached out to the Ukrainian president Zelensky’s spokesperson for comments, but their requests were left unanswered.

In his remarks for ‘Schemy’, Serhiy Shefir argued ‘[Back then] we had no time to attend to juridical issues. We granted someone the right to handle our law issues’, adding he will provide more details ‘after going back to files’. Unsurpisingly, he failed to do so before the report came out.