CourtBrief
Ukraine's anti-corruption court awards NBU UAH 503m in Real Bank stabilisation loan case
A director used in the 2013 scheme gets eight years; NABU says the UAH 800m loan was secured on collateral overvalued seven times.
Ukraine's High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) on 9 October sentenced the director of a private company used in a scheme to take a National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) stabilisation loan through PJSC Real Bank to eight years in prison, and ordered the defendant to pay the NBU more than UAH 503 million, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) said in a statement on its official channel. The defendant has been in hiding in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine since 2014, according to NABU.
The ruling concerns events of 2013, so the first-instance verdict came about 13 years after the loan. According to the statement, members of a criminal organisation ran a series of operations through Real Bank, which they controlled, that artificially worsened its liquidity and created grounds to ask the NBU for a stabilisation loan. The NBU then lent Real Bank about UAH 800 million against collateral whose value had been overstated seven times.
Once the money arrived, the bank's management and other members of the organisation moved it through sham transactions on the accounts of controlled companies with signs of being fictitious, then laundered it by withdrawing part in cash, converting part into foreign currency and sending it abroad to non-resident companies, NABU says. The convicted director agreed, for payment, to head one of the companies controlled by the organisation and acted to conceal the scheme.
What the verdict requires
The court found the defendant guilty under Part 1 of Article 255, in the wording of Law No. 2341-III of 5 April 2001, and under provisions of Articles 28, 191 and 366 of the Criminal Code, according to the statement. The sentence is eight years in prison, a three-year ban on holding posts with organisational, administrative or economic duties at any enterprise, confiscation of all the defendant's property and a fine of 750 non-taxable minimum incomes. The court partly granted the NBU's civil claim and awarded it more than UAH 503 million.
The statement does not name the defendant, the other members of the organisation or the bank's former managers, and does not say how the court will enforce the sentence against a defendant in occupied territory. It does not give the size of the NBU's original claim.
In the first half of 2026, 55 HACC guilty verdicts against 76 people came into force, according to NABU and SAPO's results for the period.
The verdict can be appealed within 30 days of its announcement, until 8 November 2026.
Authorities
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