Four months have passed since the details of Operation Midas were made public.
What began like a category-five hurricane quickly subsided into a moderate breeze that now does little more than raise dust during court hearings. The supervisory board of the Energoatom national energy company was replaced, but the company’s leadership was not — despite the fact that the current acting head of the management board, Pavlo Kovtoniuk, appears on recordings obtained by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU). People familiar with the situation say that the so-called “barrier scheme,” under which contractors had to pay a 10–15 percent kickback in order to receive payment for their services, has not disappeared either, since Energoatom can still block payments to contractors. Only now nobody talks about it any more, and NABU has stopped the wiretapping. Former deputy prime minister Oleksii Chernyshov has been released on bail. Bail is being sought—and will be found—for ex-minister of justice Herman Halushchenko. Timur Mindich and Oleksandr Zuckerman, businessmen linked to the scheme, are in Israel. Andrii Yermak, former chief of presidential staff, now heads some committee in the National Bar Association. The president continues to convince everyone—and himself—that corruption in Ukraine is at the level of any EU country. As though nobody had noticed that there are four luxury apartments in the Dynastia residential complex, while the potential owners appear to be only Chernyshov and Mindich.
Yet the most interesting thing is that nobody has answered the central question of this entire story: how did the participants in the scheme manage to launder more than $100 million?
First, if such a possibility exists, it ought to be closed off—because “barrier schemes” are unlikely to disappear. Second, it would be worth asking those responsible what exactly blinded them to the extent that they failed to notice an amount equivalent to the annual budgets of Zhytomyr or Chernivtsi leaving the country. What is particularly unsettling is that the real money-launderer-in-chief behind this scheme—Ivor Omson, a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis and the Seychelles—was already laundering money from the notorious “Boyko oil rigs” case years ago. Yet despite all the supposed progress in combating the legalization of criminal proceeds, he appears not to have lost any opportunity in Ukraine to provide his highly specialized services. Even more striking is that most of Omson’s clients are not Ukrainians but Russians. Which means the story includes cooperation with the aggressor state and potentially even the financing of terrorism—a perfect storm for financial monitoring authorities. And this has been happening for years, right under everyone’s noses. How so?
Ukraine’s State Financial Monitoring Service is an organization of little interest to the general public, largely because only a handful of people really understand what it does. Yet every time your bank asks you for additional documents, requests updated information or even freezes your account while it clarifies the circumstances, those requirements come from the financial monitoring regime. Banks collect all these valuable and sometimes not-so- valuable details about the origins of your hard-earned money not for themselves but for the Financial Monitoring Service. The idea is that the vigilant eye of a financial intelligence officer will detect suspicious transactions and immediately stop a wrongdoing. The only accurate part of that sentence is that the Financial Monitoring Service really is a financial intelligence unit.
Fine—the Boyko oil rigs affair belonged to wilder times, when money was carried around in BMW plastic bags. The long-running extraction of funds from PrivatBank was supposedly such an innovative scheme that nobody could have spotted it. But what excuses exist today?
We are no longer living in the wild west. Year after year, we tighten requirements and restrictions, automate processes and even go a little too far in our caution.
Ukrainian banks are soon going to become world champions in the number of risk criteria they apply, as even pensioners are now asked to provide income statements. Ukrainian employees will start to fear pay rises, lest their income no longer matches their “declared financial profile.” Public authorities are already facing a severe staffing shortage because the lifetime status of PEP (politically exposed person) carries lifelong heightened risk. Financial monitoring in Ukraine satisfies neither citizens nor banks, while at the same time it does not trouble corrupt actors—or the Financial Monitoring Service itself—in the slightest.
Its chairman, Filip Pronin, is something of a legend in narrow circles. ZN.UA has published more than one article about Pronin’s peculiarities since his time at the Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA) (see here, here and here). Suffice it to say that he remains true to himself even now.
The Financial Monitoring Service’s news feed resembles a vanity fair.
“In October, the Financial Monitoring Service demonstrated the highest results since the beginning of the year, with 208 reports having been transferred to law enforcement agencies…” Right next to it appears another announcement: “Over ten months, we transferred more than 300 reports to law enforcement agencies… 14 times more than last year.” So October alone accounts for 208 reports, but ten months together amount to only 300? And if that is 14 times more, then last year there must have been about 20? But then data for eleven months appears, showing 1,200 notifications, which, modestly this time, is only four times more than the year before. So was it 300 last year? Or 20? Time and again we are showered with records, multiple-fold growth and astonishing explanations that all this is “the result of systematic analytical work and properly structured processes.”
In general, the Financial Monitoring Service is a normal institution. It has clear reporting criteria, indicators, defined terminology and everything necessary to communicate its results properly. But if one actually looks at the reports themselves, the records fade away. Pronin became head of the Financial Monitoring Service on 31 December 2024. That means the whole of 2024 was not his achievement, whereas all of 2025 belongs entirely to him. We would gladly provide you with more recent data—but there isn’t any yet. It is already March, and the reports have not been published. Presumably, the records are too large to fit into an Excel table.
For example, according to the reporting periods, the following materials were sent to NABU: 156 reports worth UAH 7.6 billion in 2024 and 125 reports worth UAH 7.4 billion in 2025. In sheer numbers, which Pronin apparently considers an acceptable reporting method, the trend is clearly downward. But let us look at the substance. Yes, the sums are almost identical. The difference is that in 2024 the lion’s share concerned top officials, civil servants and managers of state enterprises, while in 2025 the money is attributed to a mysterious category labelled “other persons”. Oops.
At the same time, NABU has repeatedly complained publicly about difficulties obtaining information from the Financial Monitoring Service. At a parliamentary investigative commission examining Operation Midas it emerged that in 2025 NABU submitted 109 requests and received responses to only 50 of them. There was nevertheless a record: NABU waited 319 days for one response. Pronin replied that this was “simply incorrect statistics.” Indeed. His own statistics are far better: they show more responses than requests, apparently 14 times more.
In the specific case of the $100 million scheme, NABU received nothing at all from the Financial Monitoring Service—neither before nor after the investigation became public.
It is understandable that NABU does not personally appeal to Pronin.
Pronin also features in a case involving embezzlement in the construction of fortifications by the Poltava regional administration, which he headed at the time. His deputy there was Bohdan Korolchuk—now also his deputy at the Financial Monitoring Service. (No, they are not conjoined twins.) The investigation includes 14 separate incidents of varying degrees of audacity, including the creation of a network to help people dodge mobilization. There are also the results of a search of Korolchuk’s premises after he had already moved to the Financial Monitoring Service. Investigators discovered what looked like a ready-made cash-conversion center: company seals of various resident firms, documents belonging to non-resident companies, dozens of SIM cards, $300,000 and 3m hryvnias in cash, and a folder labelled “ARMA.” Charming.
Yet NABU is not the only institution the Financial Monitoring Service. The Economic Security Bureau (ESB) has been more discreet. For now, officials complain in whispers in the corridors, but our sources within the bureau confirm that the grievances are similar: it is almost impossible to obtain information, and the time and effort spent far outweigh the usefulness of what eventually arrives. ESB staff even went to speak with bankers to ask whether Ukraine’s information-gathering system was really failing so badly. The bankers replied that everything was collected and transmitted as required—except that it simply seemed to disappear somewhere inside the Financial Monitoring Service.
For Pronin, memory lapses are not unusual. Judging by his financial declaration, he does not know how much his wife earns, how much money she holds in her bank accounts, how much she has invested in securities or even the value of her two BMWs. One might have expected him at least to glance at the Financial Monitoring Service’s own reports.
Yet when necessary, his memory works perfectly well. We described previously how Pronin organized trade in confidential information during his time at ARMA and even demanded access to the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations in order to expand that business. The “ARMA” folder discovered at his new workplace suggests that the business continues on. Pronin was hired for the new position fully aware of these talents—and it was evidently those very qualities that attracted employers from the Presidential Office They needed someone ready for anything, someone without scruples but with initiative, to lead the Financial Monitoring Service. The fact that Pronin did not even wobble after new investigations into his activities—or after Operation Midas—clearly shows that the Presidential Office is still interested in his “best” qualities. For truly black-and-white schemes do not exist. Any laundering or transfer of money abroad, especially under today’s restrictions, is visible and waves bright red flags. And Pronin is precisely the sort of person who will fail to notice those flags and ignore all investigative requests about them. If necessary, he will leave on a business trip to Tanzania instead of attending a parliamentary commission meeting. If pressure increases, he will simply go on sick leave. A convenient man.
During all these months, nobody in the government has uttered a single word about his dismissal or rebooting the Financial Monitoring Service. Nobody has asked why even the guards at the presidential parking lot will soon be chosen through open competition, while the head of the country’s financial intelligence unit is still appointed behind closed doors and without any professional qualifications required.
We will continue bringing documents and explanations to banks, proving the origin of every penny. We will keep dragging people into public service with great difficulty—people who are unsure whether the illusory chance to change the country for the better is worth a lifetime PEP status with all the burdens it entails, including for their relatives. Only to discover later that yet another enormous sum of money has been taken out of Ukraine, with nobody even asking how that was possible.
Incidentally, in the same asset declaration, Pronin claims that he himself is not a PEP—despite being a former top-tier civil servant, a former deputy head of ARMA and the current head of the Financial Monitoring Service. He has managed to outsmart everyone even here.