No less than eight further individuals have seen their golden passports go up in smoke and their Cyprus citizenship revoked, as investigators were led to discrepancies in the personal data submitted to the authorities.
Amongst the ‘no longer Cypriots’ is 61-year-old Igor Kolomoyskyi, also of Israeli descent, once considered the leading oligarch in Ukraine and formerly part of the inner power circle in Kyiv, after it was confirmed that the passport was secured under false pretences and withholding vital information, some pertaining to criminal charges being faced by the Ukrainian oligarch.
In a decision reached by the Cabinet on September 4th, it is further noted that even before he was considered for citizenship, it was evident that Kolomoyskyi, the 2nd richest man in Ukraine, was an individual of ‘suspicious character’, as he was referred to, with his naturalisation creating a severe risk of more bad reputation for the Republic of Cyprus.
The passport was taken away fundamentally because Kolomoyskyi failed to report in his application that he had faced criminal charges for tax evasion in Russia back in 2008, with his citizenship coming through in June 2010.
Over the past year, the Ukrainian tycoon, who owns significant shares in energy and mass media companies found himself in the whirlwind of a Zelenskyi crackdown, despite the fact that Kolomoyskyi strongly supported Zelenskyi’s campaign to unseat former President Petro Poroshenko, with the Ukrainian President, an actor by trade, having his own successful comedy show in a television station under the tycoon’s control.
In 2023, Kolomoyskyi was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on charges of money laundering and fraud, and placed under pre-trial arrest. His criminal activity is mostly connected with the Ukrnafta oil company and the Ukrtatnafta refinery. He is also accused of embezzling almost 145 million dollars from the largest private bank in Ukraine and even conspiracy to commit murder by hiring a paid assassin.
According to the Ukrainian investigation, he ordered the killing of the head of one ‘of the legal companies’, as it was referred to, who refused to succumb to a decision that benefited his own interests.
In September 2023, Kolomoyskyi was found guilty of acquiring property under false pretences and money laundering of more than 36 million dollars, transferring massive amounts of funds abroad between 2013 and 2020.
In 2021, the US put Kolomoyskyi and his family on a blacklist of no entry, accusing him of corruption and using his position as former governor of the Dnipnopetrofsk region, near the border with Russia, for personal again.
Kolomoyskyi, who also has an Israeli passport since 1995, is also being investigated for embezzling 250 million dollars from Ukrainian Privatbank, which included a Cyprus branch, while in 2020, the US Justice Ministry confiscated Kolomoyskyi properties in various states, acquired through money laundering.
Beyond Kolomoyskyi, the Cabinet also stripped seven other individuals of their Cypriot citizenship, including Egyptian investor Mohammed Salem and his dependents, as well as Russian investor Maxim Zachartsenko, his wife and two children.
Salem, who was naturalised in 2018, was considered not to have invested the amount of money he had initially declared, but only a small fraction of it, while also acquiring the naturalisation certificate under false pretences and withholding vital information.
He had initially bought a two-million-euro apartment in Limassol, but then the seller returned more than half that amount to the Egyptian man’s accounts in the UK, with authorities concluding that he never actually invested the amount that he had declared and was the prerequisite for naturalisation.
Zahartsenko had faced charges of financial irregularities in the US with his assets being frozen by American authorities, not least buying thousands of shares of public companies, illegally obtained by hackers between 2010 and 2014.
In 2019 he was handed down a massive fine of more than USD 32 million in a civil case tried by a New Jersey court.
