Private swindlers

There has been invented a scheme at the bank by means of which the clients are being credited with non-existent debts dating back to 5-7-10 years ago. And after doing that notaries do an executive inscription on the bond documents, and the debt of an unsuspecting client begins to be chased up by the Enforcement Service.

In case of the debtor objects to pay the notaries transfer the debtors’ property under the authority of the bank. And hereafter it is sold to “necessary” buyers at knock-down prices.

The leader of this scheme is a top manager named Maxym Shevchenko who is responsible for credit collection.

Mr. Shevchenko is a popular person in the field of the financial market: it was him who “cruised” by car in a sozzled state around the children's playground. And today  he is accused by the Prosecution Service directly under 6 articles of the Criminal Code.

With such a reputation he turns into an ideal executive for the gang of “state managers” under the protection of Czech guy Krumhanzl.

He does a perfect job of earning money, bleeding it out of the clients and accomplishing fraud schemes with collateralized property.

The essence of the described scheme consists in the collusion of the officials of the bank with private notaries.

The notaries, by order of bank officials, issue an instruction as to the forced disposal or return of property to the bank on the basis of a debt with the expired period of limitation of actions and the period presupposed by the article 88 of the Law of Ukraine “About Notaries”.

From the viewpoint of legal language, according to this law the notary does executive inscriptions in case the documents presented by the bank confirm the indisputability of indebtedness or other responsibility of the debtor to the executing party provided it’s been no more than three years since the day the right to sue emerged or when it comes to organizations it’s one year.

In a number of cases the lawyers have documented and presented to me the bank collects the property from clients on the basis of the 10-years-old debt. It places such operations outside the law.

That’s why the “gang” of bandits carries out this scam without ringing any alarm bells and in most cases the debtors find out about the executive inscription when the enforcement proceedings have already been initiated, the enforcement actions are being accomplished and their property has already been seized.

And as the majority of people aren’t able to retain a lawyer and in general understand the law few if any, they have to forfeit either money or real estate.

If it may seem to you that these actions are quite legal, you are wrong, because the same notaries take part in these schemes, and despite the court decisions about illegality of their actions they continue to commit these offences.

Iryna Bondar, Private Notary of Dnipro Notarial District in,“trailed” this scheme as early as in 2008, although in that period she cooperated with OTP Bank.

Or Ruslan Shvets, Private Notary of Kyiv Notarial District, who earlier worked in Donetsk and, as judged by comments on a forum, in 2013 issued a fictitious power of attorney for appropriation of a flat.

And the Private Notary of Chernihiv Notarial District named Artem Zavaliyev is fond of working on the whole territory of Ukraine and has “had a finger in the pie” of illegal property re-registration of one PrivatBank debtor in Mykolaiv.

By way of example I’d like to describe you a situation, when a citizen of Dnipro in 2007 constituted a credit contract with the PrivatBank, that was private at that time. In 10 years – on the 21^st of July 2017 – the PrivatBank decided that this client had a credit indebtedness in the amount of 117k UAH, that’s why it addressed to the “appropriate” notary and the latter collected this sum from the “debtor” by means of the executive inscription.

After that the injured person appealed to the court denoting the notary’s and the bank’s actions to be illegal, as there hadn’t been any warning of debt extinguishment. He had had certain agreements with the bank and the bank violated them. The sum of indebtedness was disputable, the violations were committed by the bank even in the process of documents submission to the private notary, because the period of limitation of actions had expired, the rights were abused, and the amount of indebtedness wasn’t non-controversial. The “debtor” also tried to settle the problem with the bank out of court, but he got a refusal.

Initially the court hadn’t took the side of the applicant, after the debtor had filed an appeal on the 5th of July 2018, the courts of appeal took his side due to the fact, that the notary was obliged to check the indisputability of the debtor’s indebtedness, and he hadn’t done that so he had to refuse the bank in doing the executive inscription.

An indisputable debt is the debt determined by a debtor and a creditor and the parties have no dispute regarding its sum that is in the absence of the debtor’s objections the creditor’s demand is supposed to be indisputable. Another reason lies in the period of limitation of actions as it has been more than 3 years since the day of incurring of the debt.

A similar situation took place in 2017 in the city of Zaporizhzhya, where the court initially took the side of the injured party and pointed out the illegality of actions the PrivatBank and the notary had undertaken.

In the court register one can find similar court decisions in Sumy, Lviv and Cherkasy regions.

So, according to the mentioned court decisions the notarial inscriptions are being done in regard to debts that were incurred as early as in 2005-2007, and in respect of which the bank has lost the opportunity to do forced collection in a judicial proceeding.

In some cases there are even court decisions, according to which the PrivatBank’s claims of indebtedness collection were rejected due to the expiry of the period of limitation.

If you analyze the court resolutions carefully you may see that mostly card credits or small sums of money were subject to money collections. Such strategy allows securing the bank from the clients’ references to the court.

This scheme contains elements of crime, presupposed by the article 365-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine – abuse of power by the authorized persons, delivering public services, and is punishable by the imprisonment for a term up to three years with deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or to perform certain activities for a term up to ten years.

Such actions on the part of the PrivatBank started to have a global character, and it isn’t the first case, when the mass media began to make this problem and methods of struggle with it public.

But we see only a top of the iceberg. I can’t even imagine how many people have already been “swindled” by means of this scheme.

But I understand the purpose of this scheme very clearly. Managers of the PrivatBank have to report on the successful work and repayment of the clients’ debts in order to have good statistics and get bonuses.

In order not to bother with it the debts are simply invented and collected from those who cannot defend themselves.