US Justice Dept. Investigating Jewish-American ‘Humanitarian Volunteers’ Who May Have Helped Ukrainian Tycoon Launder Hundreds of Millions in ‘Misappropriated Funds’ from Kiev into US Assets

How 2 U.S. Religious Aid Workers May Have Helped a Ukrainian Tycoon Launder Millions

By Todd Prince | 19 August 2020

RADIO FREE EUROPE — In the early 1990s, Mordechai Korf and Uriel Laber traveled to Ukraine as Jewish humanitarian volunteers as the country gained its independence and ended Soviet restrictions on religion.

Korf was still a teenager just out of a rabbinical institute when he arrived in 1991. His friend Laber, whom he met at a religious school in Detroit, came a few years later.

When they returned to the United States more than a decade later, they were — on paper at least — running a commercial empire from Miami whose assets ranged from steel and alloy plants to industrial tires and real estate that cost more than $1 billion to cobble together.

Korf and Laber purchased lavish homes in Miami Beach. Each were donating millions of dollars to Jewish charities, earning themselves reputations as generous philanthropists.

Now the story of two young humanitarian workers with little to no business experience striking it rich during Ukraine’s turbulent — and sometimes violent — transition to a market economy is under question.

They are accused by the U.S. Justice Department of helping two Ukrainian tycoons over the course of a decade launder hundreds of millions of dollars in misappropriated funds from a Kyiv-based bank and then invest the ill-gotten wealth in U.S. assets, profiting handsomely in the process.

One of the tycoons is one of Ukraine’s wealthiest and most influential citizens, a businessman who helped propel a former stand-up comedian and TV actor into Ukraine’s presidency in 2019.

That man, Ihor Kolomoyskiy, and his associate, Hennadiy Boholyubov, have denied the accusations, saying the money used to purchase the U.S. assets that Korf and Laber now run came from the sale of their Ukrainian steel business to a Russian competitor for $2 billion. […]

The Kolomoisky Pyramid Started with Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland of the State Department Plus Christin Lagarde of the IMF

By John Helmer | 30 June 2019

DANCES WITH BEARS — When Igor Kolomoisky financed anti-Russian units operating with the Ukrainian Army in the Ukrainian civil war, he was a staunch ally of Petro Poroshenko’s government in Kiev and the Obama Administration’s chief Ukraine policymakers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland.

They in turn dominated the voting on the board of directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), led by managing director Christine Lagarde. Following the US regime change which installed Poroshenko’s regime in the spring of 2014, the IMF voted massive loans for the Ukraine to replace the Russian financing on which the regime of Victor Yanukovich had  depended.  More than a third of the fresh IMF money was paid out by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), the state’s central bank, into PrivatBank controlled by Kolomoisky and his partner, Gennady Bogolyubov.

At the time, investigations of Kolomoisky’s business and banking practices, and the special relationship he cultivated with the NBU, reported he was stealing the money through a pyramid of front companies lending each other the IMF cash which was not intended to be repaid. Clinton, Nuland, Lagarde and the IMF staff and board of directors ignored the evidence, as they continued to top up Kolomoisky’s pyramid. Criminal investigations by the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were also reported at the time; they were neutralized by their superiors. […]