Grubstakers - Episode 107: Igor Kolomoisky and the Trump/Biden Ukraine Scandal

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

On this episode we cover the misdeeds of Ukrainian Billionaire Igor Kolomoisky. His efficiency knows no bounds he once sent armed to cease physical control of UKRNAFTA. His story includes and pissing matches with Putin about who is more corrupt. Thanks for reading this stickers are on the horizon, and we will be filming Andy licking the Wall street bull soon stay tuned. CORRECTION: The first version of this episode had Sean saying Asst. Secretary of State Victoria Nuland met directly with Dmytro Firtash to ensure the election of Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko. Though there was a meeting where Firtash got one of Poroshenko's main opponents in the race to drop out it was not true to say the Nuland met with him directly. We edited the episode to remove this claim. The Andrew Cockburn article mentioned is a good read on how the US role played out: https://harpers.org/blog/2015/08/undelivered-goods/

I want to be held accountable for what I'm doing. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. Jesus is smart. This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. In 5, 4, 3, 2... I got the loot, Steve! Hello, welcome to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined here by...

Yogi Poliwog. Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. And so, on this podcast, we wanted to change things up a little bit. We don't usually talk about current events, but I thought this week we could. I wanted to talk a bit about what's going on with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the Ukraine. It's all over the news now. They're going to remove Trump from office.

They're going to take him down, finally. Nothing's going on, if you ask me. There's collusion and fake news. That's all I've heard. We'll be right back. Hey there, I'm Chris Hayes from MSNBC. I wanted to talk specifically about the Ukraine part of it. I want it to hopefully do the best of our, to the best of our ability to give a brief introduction to the recent history of the Ukraine.

Because I think most Americans, myself included, just have no idea about what's going on there. And this is so important to, you know, this, the end of the Donald Trump presidency. Well, it's such a different place because, you know, thing that we have in america that they don't have over in ukraine what's that warning shots what a country uh andy's research for this episode was he found out that yakov smirnov is actually from the ukraine odessa a city in the ukraine which he claims that he is from russia so yakov smirnov is actually on a one-man quest to annex ukrainian territory into the russian empire i mean i think he assimilated into america perfectly which you know if one thing's more american than anything else it's lying about your ethnic origins oh yeah i like how sean said brief

as if a two-hour introduction to Ukraine is a brief introduction. We're going to get it done in one hour, 45 minutes. If we're lucky. But I guess what I wanted to do is provide this introduction through the lens of our subject today, which is a billionaire named Igor Kolomoisky. Igor! Ukrainian billionaire. He's a coordinator of Forbes. As of October 2019, he's worth about $1.1 billion. And I'm conflicted talking about Igor Kolomoisky because the theme of this podcast has been there is no such thing as a good billionaire.

Right, right. However, Igor Kolomoisky became a billionaire by stealing $1.8 billion from the IMF, which is the most ethical way to become a billionaire. Just fucking rob the criminals. I'm much more ethical than creating Facebook fucking make children kill themselves platform. Yeah. I mean, you know, people are going to die if you're going to make a billion regardless. But stealing a billion certainly is one of the better ways to do it.

I mean, you could argue that kids are going to kill themselves anyway. So you might as well make a platform where they can show their friends while they do it. Yeah, you might as well set up like a video service so they can use that to encourage others to follow them. But I guess what I want... Isn't it so sad how Twitch is taking the live streaming violence away from Facebook? Like, it makes you feel old. Just imagining the video engineers being like, one day this technology will connect humanity

by showing the live stream of mass murder in a mosque. Among other places. Yes, and a synagogue. It will connect all of the religions by showing a mass murder in every one of their temples of worship truly the the coexist bumper sticker come to life yep indeed um but i guess for recent history of um the ukraine i watched actually the the netflix documentary winter on

fire it's uh it's done in a very pro- perspective, but it's very clearly an inspiring story. It was a mass movement of people coming out in the streets saying the police are not going to beat us up. We're not going to handle this corruption. We're not going to take it. And forcing a very corrupt President Yanukovych to flee the country. People were saying, we are going to do neoliberalism. Well, that's exactly it. We are going to echo American imperial sentiment. Well, that's exactly it. We are going to echo American imperial sentiment.

Well, that's exactly it. So the documentary, Winter on Fire, you can watch it on Netflix. It ends with a very optimistic note. It has a little bit of text at the end, but it's all very optimistic. The people won. Everything's great. And then immediately after the documentary ends, the IMF goes in and imposes austerity. And now there are nazis everywhere in

ukraine for some fucking reason right right because well russia also invaded yes so i mean the story uh in a nutshell is that um in 2014 i'm sorry ukrainian freedom fighters declared their independence in crimea thank you andy yes get the facts out don't ask region it'd be so great if yakov smirnov went over to entertain the troops Thank you, Andy. Get the facts out there. Don't ask region. It'd be so great if Yakov Smirnov went over to entertain the troops. He's just like, what a country. And they're like, we know. It's so good to be back in my hometown of Russian Odessa.

But so the nutshell history is, you know, there's this revolution. haven't seen this many ss uniforms since i opened my grandpa's closet so fashionable and warm unlike american love in soviet union kgb assets trip you uh but so the brief history uh 2014 this revolution president flees the country they have new elections they get a new president who's um a fucking chocolate oligarch oh great he was the chocolate president yes he's uh backed by the west he left office with something like an eight percent approval rating because like within a month after his election, you know, the eastern part of Ukraine has a lot of primarily Russian speakers.

So of course, you know, Russia invaded, but also there were lots of pro-Russia separatists who launched revolutions and, you know, want to get absorbed into Russia. So all these riots and chaos. They needed protection from volunteer missile launchers. All these riots and chaos starts, of course, that's terrible for the economy. They needed protection from some missile launchers all these riots and chaos starts of course that's terrible they

need protection from some missile launchers that were on vacation they were taking a break from doing drills and decided to take some time some so the missile launchers decided to um have a nice uh a nice summer shooting down malaysian airplanes there were all these pro-russian separatists were begging putin for help from the noise of commercial airliners they were trying to sleep and were so tired of this flight route going directly above their heads and president putin and his infinite wisdom took care of that problem once and for all you imagine like once they realized that they'd shot down a mal Malaysian plane,

they were like, well, at least they'll find this one. But so, yeah, so there's, you know, these riots, these uprisings, of course, that tanks the Ukrainian economy. So within a month of this guy getting elected, the IMF says, okay, we'll give you an emergency loan, but you have to do austerity. Oh, wow. How kind of them. Yes. They're good dudes.

They said you have to freeze the minimum wage. You have to cut all fuel subsidies. So, of course, what that does for people is now gas costs a ton more, which is a very regressive form of pricing. You know, of course, the poor people are most impacted by this. And they made some, like, tertiary thing about, oh, you have to do- I think it's good for the environment. They made a show of, oh, you have to reform the oligarchs. But of course, that's not what happened. And our subject today, Igor Kolomoisky, he ran, at the time, the largest bank in the country, Privat Bank, I believe was the name. And I think 40% of this IMF money ended up going through his bank.

So he was able to move at least 1.8 billion of it out of the country. This is like 17 billion in IMF loans. So should we talk about what the IMF is now, do kind of a brief overview? Because my understanding of the IMF is, I'm not entirely clear what the IMF is. My understanding of the IMF is,

I don't have much of My understanding of the IMF is I don't have much of an understanding of the IMF. Well, it is, I think Steve can explain it better, but I will just say one thing is the IMF, the International Monetary Fund has been, monetary fund has been, you know, bailing out countries from financial crises and their strategy has always been, okay, well, you have to do austerity. You got to to like cut spending you got to like really punish the population and um every single time this fails it to the point where in 2014 when the imf does this bailout with ukraine they'd even written like position papers within the imf being like hey that austerity shit is failing every time and then they did it again and now there's fucking nazis everywhere um but maybe steve you could explain the international monetary fund a bit better

than i could oh okay well it's the international bank that's headquartered in dc actually and 20 i think 29 different member countries contribute capital to it and it helps it ostensibly is supposed to help countries with their, if they enter into like a balance of payments crisis. So like they can't find enough foreign exchange reserves

to meet all of their obligations to get imports and stuff like that. So they're like a charity. Yeah, exactly. Charity with exorbitant interest. Right, right. What was the IMF?

A lot of their ideology comes from neoclassical economics. Oh. Which says that you should do austerity until things get better. Which, as Sean's mentioned, always works, apparently. So you shouldn't have minimum wage increases, and you should privatize land and capital. They're like, we'll give you this money, but you've got to promise you're going to create Nazis. We need a lot of Nazis. Honestly, I think Ukraine would have a lot less Nazis if they kicked them off Twitter.

Has Ukraine and the IMF considered canceling their Nazis? It works in the United States. I don't see why they don't do it. Yeah, just de-platform them. So wait, are these Nazis a new group of people, or have they always been there, and now they've joined up together to rule Ukraine? There's always been Nazis to some degree in Ukraine,

but they've never been better organized than almost now. Right, so it's like herpes. Since the actual World War II. We've never lost it. It's always been there, but now it's certainly a flare-up. There's actually this documentary on that. There's this documentary. It's always been hiding there in cracks and crevices i mean but it's in there

i you know you get stressed out and it comes flaring out there's really the flavor gets locked in for a while oh yeah it just gets released cold sore on fire um there's this actually this documentary on Netflix. That one also had an optimistic ending. It was just Marc Maron yelling at his exes. Lock the gates! You gave me mouth herpes. Yeah, now you're an adult.

Yeah. That's what he used to say about his ex-wife. Charming fellow. Yeah. charming fellow yeah um but on this netflix documentary it follows uh the sons of uh two former prominent nazis and then the documentary itself was made by actually an american jewish man whose family survived the holocaust and it all happened in the ukraine like um his many of his relatives were killed in the Ukraine, and many of these sons of Nazis, their fathers, were operating in the Ukraine. And one of them is just, like, absolutely hates his dad.

And it's clearly the, like, protagonist of the two. And the other guy clearly had a fond relationship, or had, like, a very positive relationship with his dad. And so he's like, he doesn't want to criticize his dad. And then there's a scene where they're in Ukraine and there's like, quote, reenactors. And one of them is in an SS uniform. And, you know, the Nazi who the not the Nazi, the son of the Nazi who hates his dad was like just disgusted. And then the other guy that like dumb guy just like sees the guy in the SSs uniform and his eyes light up and he like shakes his hand and gets a picture

with them wow so when i'm sorry he was like i have the best dad he was always bringing me home new pairs of shoes like three a day and new clothing and watches fillings So one more thing about the IMF is they have, so all of the member countries that contribute capital, their votes are based on how much they contribute. Oh, really? Unlike this workers' co-op that we're in, where one man gets one vote. Yeah, that's the Grubster.

Universal male suffrage. Right, and then three of us voted to make Yogi edit all the episodes. That's democracy. Yeah, we definitely voted. us voted to make Yogi edit all the episodes. Wow. That's democracy. Yeah, we definitely voted. Yeah, that's a vote that I agree with. Three of us voted to make Yogi do double the work. Well, guess who's the number one vote-haver at the IMF? It's like the United States, but then in really small font it says,

actually Israel. It is the U.s yes and then uh number but number nine is russia and then number two is japan and number three is china seriously well it is something where uh just briefly before we transition to the uh biography of igor kolomoisky i want to just kind of talk about corruption in the Ukraine, because it is a story. It's obviously a very corrupt country. Yeah. According to the World Economic Forum, out of 148 nations, Ukraine ranks number 133 for, quote, favoritism in decisions of government officials.

Number 130 out of 148 for, quote quote irregular payments and bribes as of 2014 according to the hill uh the wealth of a dozen ukrainian oligarchs made up roughly one-fifth of the country's entire gdp so you know you can as an american you can look at that and say oh that's a corrupt backwards country but it's like the story of why ukraine is a corrupt backwards country is a story of america being a corrupt backwards country right because it is very similar to the story that we saw in russia is very similar where after the fall of the soviet union in 1991 there was a massive privatization effort where uh government officials took bribes or even just gave formerly state-owned assets to straight up mobsters and the people who

are the billionaires in the Ukraine today are the people who are most violent, most corrupt in this era. And they hoovered up all of this former public property. And the West, you know, in terms of the banking system, lawyers, accountants, everybody were happy to go along with it. All of these assets transferred offshore. You know, they flew through London banks or wherever else. And just one more very prominent example here, Igor Kolomoisky, his bank PrivatBank, he stole, it's alleged in U.S. court, he stole about five...

No, that's a private bank, right? It was nationalized. But before it was nationalized, it's alleged by the bank itself in u.s court he's told about he stole five billion u.s dollars out of this bank uh its accountants were one of the big four u.s accounting firms uh price waterhouse coopers they were they were auditing the books they were looking at the books every year and they were like oh i didn't notice five billion fucking dollars was missing so you know it's uh at every level. And then, you know, of course, we'll talk a bit about Hunter Biden getting money and Paul Manafort, other American government officials. So let's try that at every different level.

U.S. government business has profited off of this asset stripping that has destroyed the economy of Ukraine and left it in a situation today where far-right paramilitaries are getting more popular partly on the fact that they are denouncing corruption and saying, the establishment is corrupt, but we are not. Yeah, makes sense. They're getting away with it. Why would they stop doing it? But are you saying that they copy the U.S.?

We should screenshot their Gab accounts and email it to their employers. That could work. Look, as long as we keep them from getting SNL writing jobs, I think this will be okay. But yeah, and I think it's, you know, that whole context of the Ukraine and what we have done to the Ukraine, I think that is how you should read all of this news about Trump trump and biden and everything that's going on with the impeachment and all this stuff is like you know we're all of the american political establishment is knee-deep in this shit um but i guess before just before we transfer to the uh biography of igor kolomoisky i do want to mention because this is kind of an ongoing story we're recording this october 10 2019 today

uh two uh aides for rudolph giuliani were arrested a guy named lev parnas and igor fruman couple of florida boys yeah they were both arrested uh for campaign finance violations when they were trying to flee the country today they had like one-way tickets i think to vienna trying to get out of the country they were arrested uh and they're charged with campaign finance violations uh steering uh probably dirty ukrainian and russian money into um super PAC supporting donald trump into uh campaign stuff for uh kevin mccarthy uh mitch mcconnell among others um and it's interesting where the allegation here is that Rudolph Giuliani was running a shadow foreign... Rudolph, really? We're going to use full name? Rudy Giuliani was

running a shadow foreign policy in the Ukraine where he was sending these two, as well as others around the Ukraine, to just go to everybody and be like, hey, we'll give you money if you can give us dirt on Joe Biden. Right, right. To the point where the subject of today, Igor Kolomoisky, according to a political article, Kolomoisky told the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a consortium of investigative journalists, that the businessmen arrested today, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, approached him about a natural gas venture, but they instead used the meeting to seek an audience for Giuliani with the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Kolomoisky. Vladimir. Vladimir Zelensky. Not Voldemort. He was doing so well. This episode is going to be long enough. We don't have time to make fun of my pronunciation. No, that's the only thing we have time for.

Volodymyr Zelensky. Volodymyr Zelensky. The oligarch Igor... I think his dad shrunk the kids. Kolomoisky said he refused this request for Giuliani to meet with the new president. Well, Giuliani has claimed that Kolomoisky defamed his two partners.

And according to this... That is how this went down. But so. Hey there, I'm Chris Hayes from MSNBC. According to this political article, Kolomoisky has been telling people that he has dirt on both. Political or politico? Politico. According to Politico, Kolomoisky has been telling people that he has dirt on both Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. And there's an FBI investigation ongoing into Igor Kolomoisky. So the allegation is that he's been telling people like, hey, you know, if the Trump administration leaves me alone, I can give you this this shit on Biden. Right. Right. Right. So and we'll get a good shoulder rub. Can't fix. No, no. But just like one other thing that was... You can't shoulder rub your way out of this Biden, okay? This is the real deal here.

But so one other thing that was reported today is Rudy Giuliani apparently also had a ticket to leave to Vienna, but he canceled at the last minute. So most optimistic take possible is by the time this is released, Rudy Giuliani is under arrest. But we'll see. He had a ticket, huh? He was going to get out.

So yeah, both of these guys had one-way tickets, one-way international tickets. And Rudy? No, I don't know if he had a one-way ticket. I mean, not to say that he would need a one-way. He probably could come back if he needed to. But I just love that they were in Florida, the state that's got the most amount of bullshit corruption, has some perfectly blatant political corruption like this. It could have been from any state, you know what I mean?

But Florida is just the one that gets it done. Yeah, it is something also where, you know. Wouldn't it be great, though, if like those guys that because those guys are clearly picked up to like because they want to flip them. Right. Like how great would it be that Giuliani, the guy who made his name prosecuting mobsters, got taken down by his subordinates diming on him? It is true. With those fucking pinky rings, like, he does look more and more like a mobster. It's like, that's the ultimate.

Apparently, his dad had mob connections. And part of the reason he was so hard on the mob is he, you know, had political aspirations and wanted to kind of get that pushed in the background but that's just like the evolution of the guinea is the older you get the more of a mobster you become and he just happened to have the power that he could act on some of this most of them are just like fucking watching sopranos and recliners and the fucking old folks home what if he's what if he's like, you know how he kind of seems sort of insane and riddled with dementia when he's on TV. Like what if he's trying to pull a Vinny the chin gigante move and he's actually like this brilliant strategist.

It's just like 12 dimensional chest, pissing himself on CNN, just like exposing his-dimensional chess pissing himself on CNN. Just like exposing his fucking diaper. Dementia chess. The fucking Southern District has to drop the charges because he fucking fills up his diaper and throws it at Don Lemon live on the air. He's actually technically the president, but in the Oval Office, they're not allowed to refer to Giuliani as the president but like in the oval office they're not allowed to refer to giuliani

as the president uh yeah and we should have mentioned uh vladimir vladimir zelinsky the new president of ukraine is um he's backed by igor kolomoisky he was the star of a political comedy in the ukraine it's on netflix called servant of the people about a teacher who goes on a viral rant against corruption and then gets her elected president and then they elected the actor in that tv show the president which like as an american your first instinct is like haha look at that backwards country and then you forget oh we just elected the fucking apprentice guy right president um but it is something where he won the election in April 2019 with 73% of the vote. He's made overtures to getting a permanent peace with Russia, which is very popular. People are

sick of the war. But he is backed by Igor Kolomoisky. There's allegations that while Igor was in exile, he was meeting with him. Igor Kolomoisky paid for his security during the campaign and these other things. Does Igor own the network that People of the Servant was broadcasted on too? Yes, he owned the television network. And Igor Kolomoisky will get to, had to flee the Ukraine in 2016. But since the election, he's come back. So it's a worry that now his guys in the government, he'll be able to exert corrupt influence again. I watched the first episode of the show People of the Servant.

And it's fine. It's the first episode of the show People of the Servant and like it's, you know, it's fine. It's like an IFC political show, but it ran from 2015 to 2019, I believe. And before he even announced his presidency, Vladimir, on December 31st of 2018, before they did like the presidential New Year's announcement, he already had like 70% of the people's vote to become president. become president so you know as much as i think we can look at like oh wow

an outsider comedian is being a president of ukraine this could be good for the world it is the sensationalism that is the uh media frenzy that we're currently in where if you're popular in the media you have more influence than any person that's got i don't know good ideas and experience oh and it is interesting you know with the two large shows about ukraine on netflix i just find it funny that they elected the president is the guy from the fictional one right right right yeah not anybody from the real one right uh but i guess we can start the biography of igor kolomoisky and hopefully that'll give I guess an overview of recent history of Ukraine just through the lens of what he did and you know what happened to him because I think it's it's pretty instructive um I should just start here according to the hill

uh Igor Kolomoisky and his partner who uh they started the Privat group uh they are uh known uh in the private group they are known in the ukrainian business world it's actually nationalized they are known in the ukrainian business world as the quote the raiders and uh they well that's just because they like oakland right they're big fans of the oakland raiders i don't see why so that's wrong you know they do hostile takeovers in like the most hostile sense possible uh according to this hill article um what they do is they will buy and they did this throughout the early 2000s up through late 2000s they will buy a minimum stake in a company uh by one of their from one of their many companies and then a mix of phony

court orders often involved in corrupt judges or registrars and strong arm tactics are deployed to replace the existing members of the board of directors with men loyal to the privat group and then they have one example translation is a private group uh they give the example of the krim and shook uh steel factory in 2006 where it was a literal raid where they hired an army of thugs to descend upon the plant with baseball bats, gas and rubber pistols, iron bars, and chainsaws to take over this steel factory in 2006. And he's been linked to contract killings and all this shit. So it is, again, this typical story of post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia.

What were the chainsaw guys doing? Just being cool. Just fucking revving them, you know? Very intimidating when you do that. They were karaoke-ing Eminem songs. Just to add the intimidation factor. You see a Ukrainian rap Eminem, you fucking freak the fuck out.

I can imagine one of them trying to intimidate the people at the factory and takes the chainsaw to say like a um a steel truss and then it just jams and it's like hold on carrying out a hostile takeover in ukraine in odessa with to lose yourself uh and so according to john helmer.net uh kolomoisky has the memorable quotation quote give me a one percent stake and i will take over the entire company so that is how his business is operated um and again this is really there's a lot of overlap between underworld crime mafia

figures and billionaires in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia. And it's very clear he falls into that. According to a Heretz profile... For the country. According to a Heretz profile in his office before he had to flee the country, he has a massive... This is from, I think, 2014 or 15.

He has a massive shark tank. During business meetings, he enjoys pressing the button on his desk that releases live shrimp into the water and then watching his visitors reaction to the feeding frenzy. Fucking straight up James Bond villain shit. Just the kind of shit where you, if you saw that in a Bond movie, you'd be like, this is Russia phobia. I just, man, you got straight, he's feeding shrimp to sharks during meetings. Just like, Oh, what a great tactic. Trichophobia. He's feeding shrimp to sharks during meetings. Just like, oh, what a great tactic.

Because it's technically not illegal. It's not like a wrong thing to do, but boy, it's flexing your nuts as hard as you can. It's Khalil Mack on Sundays, if you know what I mean. You guys got to increase your Patreon contributions so that we can do that during our meetings with book publishers. we're trying i'm just gonna bring a small goldfish bowl and a piranha it's been like eight hundred thousand dollars on a huge shark shark size exhibit now i gotta imagine that's gotta be less intimidating than you think because it's like well i'm much bigger than a shrimp than a shrimp right yeah and and obviously they're full now i don't know i think somebody pitching us on an ad read right no we

go to harper collins and we're like yes 10 million for 500 wikipedia articles copy pasted sounds fair we'll give you a book of billionaires unless Unless you want to hang out with the tiger sharks Fucking put your reputation on this one That's a dogfish Shut up They don't have tiger sharks at Petco Anymore So the biography

Beep beep lettuce bought all the tiger sharks The biography of Igor Kolomoisky, as far as the early life goes, it's pretty truncated, at least in the English press. I found this article in Financial Times from 2015 that I think gives a decent overview. I should just note, I'm going to fuck up the name here. There's a province in central Ukraine called Dnipropetrovsk. D-N-I-P-R-O-P-E-T-R-O-V-S-K. Province in central Ukraine. This is where he's born.

Dnipro is its largest city, the fourth largest city in the Ukraine itself, the administrative capital of this province. And so he's born there in 1963 in what is then the Soviet Union to a Jewish family of engineers. He graduates from the Dniprovsk Metallurgical Institute in 1985. And of course, the Ukraine gets its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. And according to this book, well, I guess here, let me just give you the early biography from Financial Times. From an early age, he's born 1963, from an early age, he showed an entrepreneurial flair. In his 20s, he bought rose chips and squash seeds

and traded them in for electrical goods in the village shops. These he then sold at a huge profit in the markets of Deniprovetsk and Odessa. You're telling me the guy that business practices show up with chainsaws and bats had at one point an entrepreneurial flair

because he traded fucking what? Seeds for electrical parts? Rose chips and squash seeds. I'll tell you what that is. How about you give me these electrical parts? I'll give you these seeds and I don't shoot you in the face. That's what that is. I do like to imagine in Odessa he ripped off a young Yakov Smirnoff.

He told me that it was a magic squash that would get me to the Giants. What a country. He's like watching him on The Tonight Show like, dude, this idiot gave me electrical cables for fucking squash seeds. No wonder he thinks Odessa is in Russia. Continuing from the financial times biography in 1989 visiting relatives from the united states brought him a computer an ibm

xt which he sold to a local factory uh quote the profit was more than i made from rose chips in an uh from rose hips an entire month he says he then He then started traveling to Moscow, buying PCs and selling them to Ukrainian enterprises and quickly became a ruble millionaire. In 1992, he and his partners created... He had $447. Okay, got it. In 1992, he and his partners created Privat Bank, one of Ukraine's first private lenders. Again, the Soviet Union collapses...

That's collapses national bank the soviet union collapses ukraine gets its independent in 1991 he creates this bank in 1992 um it was uh at the 2015 article in financial times at that time it was the largest in the country accounting for one quarter of all deposits in the national banking system it grew from 1992 to encompass media interests, energy, petrochemicals, aviation,

and mining, as well as banking. And I wanted to just quote a little bit of background from this book, the gates of Europe by Sergei Plokhy. Sergei Plokhy. Just a little bit on the, the background of what happened here. I like that.

It's, it's not so much that you know how to pronounce it as you're like, well, if I just go to the back of the throat to say it. It'll sound right. Right, right. I'm going to try with the back of my throat. That's the place to pronounce words correctly.

We're like trying to get the Red Scare listeners who are just turning off in disgust as we try to pronounce fucking Slavic words. He's from Ukraine. Odessa. Yeah. So, according to this book, The Gates of Europe, in the Deniprovetsk region.

Talk the gates of Europe. In this region, two local businessmen divided major metallurgical assets... You know how Ukraine actually broke away from the Soviet Union? How did they? In Berlin, they unlocked the gates. Oh. So the book states that he was one of the two metal billionaires. Like, you know, all these formerly state-owned, you know, copper or whatever else, natural gas.

He becomes one of two oligarchs to be able to buy these former state-owned assets because, of course, he has, you know, he's a millionaire in rubles and he employs... I've heard of the prog rock billionaires. He employs these violent tactics and he has the capital. And just from the book, most of the privatization of Ukrainian industry took place on the watch of President Leonid Kuchma, K-U-C-H-M-A, between 1994 and 2004. Kuchma, who had been a, quote, red director himself, presided over the process that ultimately benefited the oligarchs, gaining him their economic and political support. It talks about how he came to power in 94. In 99, he's reelected with help from the oligarchs, but also the West, just like Boris Yeltsin, where he presented himself as the only one able to stop the communists from taking over again in the election. Interestingly enough, he's supported by George Soros and the Open Society Foundation. And foundation and so you know you look at all these kind of western links into this um and he's you

know giving all these oligarchs sweetheart deals to take over state-owned assets um and then russian intervention in the american elections is completely unprecedented uh according to the book uh president kushma's downfall began in the autumn of 2000 with the release by opposite opposition leader, the head of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, of tape recordings made secretly in Kuchma's office by some of his bodyguards. The tapes documented Kuchma's dealings with local officials involved in privatization schemes, his bribe-taking, and his efforts to suppress opposition media. One journalist whose name was mentioned on the tapes was Jorge Gongadze, the 31-year-old founder of a web newspaper called Ukrainian Truth. Kuchma wanted him detained and sent to Chechnya, where insurgents were fighting the Russian army. In September 2000, Gongadze's corpse was found beheaded in a forest near Kiev.

So, yes, totally unrelated. He has found this journalist that the president was on tape talking about how they have to take care of him was found beheaded in a forest. Yeah, he fell. No, he was driving. These guys drove 300 kilometers to buy some marijuana. That's what happened to that dude too. I'm pretty sure that the...

I heard he hung himself with a bed sheet. They had Dallas Police Department's consultants fly out to take care of this journalist. What we saw in Kiev is that the same assailants drove out here

in their hydrojet to buy marijuana from Ukraine. But that gives you an overview of, you know, the people who are billionaires in Ukraine today. The president who sold them all their shit was deeply corrupt and probably involved in the murder of at least one journalist. Minimum. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, and again, this is how Igor Kolomoisky gets his fortune. According to Forbes, he and his partner started building up a stake in one of their most lucrative investments, Ukrnafta, which is an oil and, I swear to God, UKRnafta.

Ukrnafta. Why not? You know, when we did that, I think the Saudi Arabia or maybe the Middle East episode, we got like a anonymous message that was just like, you guys need to learn how to pronounce Middle Eastern names. Yes. So I'm pretty sure we're going to get those messages for this episode, too. They're just going to be mad that like 40 minutes of the episode will be fucking with pronunciations. I'm sure you're going to like the back of your throat, but you're still doing the flat American A. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You'll get Nafta. Right, right you're still doing the flat American A. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll get that NAFTA. Right, right. Because that's got to be correct. It's just like, I'm not an American pronouncing it if there's not enough nasal on it. Yeah. But look, this is the largest producer of oil and natural- It's from Kiev. The largest producer of oil and natural gas in the country so the early 2000s they build up like a

42 percent stake uh and then the ukrainian government owns the other half but it's funny according to the financial times ukrainian law stipulated that annual shareholder meetings were only ever in quorum if investors controlling at least 60 plus one shares were present whenever the state-owned gas company tried to change the management or board uh privat would simply not show up thereby blocking it and so what they did is they blocked all state changes to management and then they uh would have the governor the company sell its oil to privot controlled traders at below market prices in monthly auctions so this is this half state-owned oil company where they're uh throughout the 2000s up until 2015 they're just

stealing oil from the state right putting it in their own pockets is it money laundering technically but with oil yeah i mean they're all there's a very complex well of shell companies offshore where they send all this shit around, and then they have Cyprus and other subsidiary shell companies that bounce the money around and send fake invoices to make it all. Sure, comasetic. Yeah, so you could spend a lot of time getting dug into it, but journalists I trust have reported on this,

and we can certainly link in the show description. So he's able to keep that until he has to flee in around 2000, 2015. But, you know, so throughout the 2000s to 2010, he conducts a massive raiding campaign from 2000 to 2010. You know, we mentioned showing up with people with bats and chainsaws to take over companies, using corrupt judges to take over companies. He just builds up a huge stake from his little Privat Bank in banking, chemicals, energy, media, metals, and of course Privat Bank holds 26% of all deposits as of 2015, according to Harper's,

and government employees get paid through Prevot Bank and all this other shit where he can skim money off the top. Thank God that nightmare of socialism is over. But so, I wanted to talk here. You know, people abusing the system for their own self-serving needs. Well, Andy, don't even rig it up. You know, it's over.

I don't know why we keep talking about it. So, like, the most information we have on him is from this lawsuit in London court where another Ukrainian oligarch named Viktor Pinchik sues him in London court because, of course, the Ukrainian courts are all corrupt. So he sues him in London court and he alleges that... Unlike our American court system. That's just perfect uh igor kolomoisky he alleges um they promised to sell him a mining company and then they never like they took i think 100 143 million from him in 2005 and they said hey we'll sell you this

mining company and then they never transferred it to him and then they sold a 50 stake in it to another person so not only did they never give it to him but% stake in it to another person. So not only did they never give it to him, but they also sold it to another person later. So he sues them in London court over this. Classic communist move. He sues them in London court, and this is settled out of court right before it goes to trial in 2016. But the allegations are where we know that there were allegations of murder

against Igor Kolomoisky because he accuses Sviatoslav Piskun was the three times prosecutor general of Ukraine from 2002 to 2003, 2005 and 2007 until he got fired. But so this prosecutor general of Ukraine, according to this lawsuit, basically looked the other way of Igor Kolomoisky murdering his bodyguard and one of his henchmen. I guess I'm just quoting from The Independent here. Incidentally, that henchman also named Igor, but unrelated. Actually, it's pronounced Igor. According to The Independent, this other oligarch alleges in court that Kolomoisky ordered a Ukrainian lawyer to be attacked for refusing to leak details from a client he had. So the gang he sends beats up the wrong lawyer.

Then they go beat up the right lawyer. But Kolomoisky is mad. Oh, my God. So according to The Independent, quote, Kolomoisky then arranged the killing of the gang members who botched the attacks and sought to cover up these murders. The story is that Kolomoisky's bodyguard is found dead floating in a Ukraine river. The attack, the leader of the gang who who fucked up the attack was also found dead with two slashed wrists. There was no autopsy in either case, and the gang's leader's death was recorded as a suicide from slitting his own wrists.

A gunshot wound under his chin was apparently overlooked, the other oligarch's legal team stated in court. So the Dallas PD might be involved in this, is what you're saying. They actually might be involved in this, is what you're saying. They might. They actually might be. According to... I think it just is a testament to the tenacity of Ukrainians. When they set their minds to something. They get it done. Yeah.

So, and again, according to these legal filings, Kolomoisky's bodyguard, the official report originally suggested he'd received no injuries. His body was later exhumed and discovered to have received 10 stab wounds. What? Wait, is this the two wrists and gunshot wound guy? No, so this is two murders. He kills the gang leader and he kills his own bodyguard, both because they fucked up this hit.

Andy, that's a different murder. You got to keep up on this. Fucking crazy. Yeah, so his bodyguard was pulled out of the river and the autopsy or the official report said no injuries, and then he was later exhumed and discovered to have received 10 stab wounds, according to this legal filing. Okay, what about his hyoid bone?

His what? His hyoid bone. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Was he involved in any marijuana deals? It's like 4,000 in cash was found in his apartment So case closed 80,000 rubles

Yeah So according to this other oligarch's legal team He was killed by some people who drove from Finland To buy marijuana off of him So according to the oligarch Suiling Kolomoisky, according to his legal team statement, they cite an official

Ukraine prosecutor's office resolution that Kolomoisky threatened the lawyer with murder a few days later when the lawyer had not complied with Kolomoisky's demands. The lawyer decided to murder the lawyer out of revenge for failure to comply with his

instructions but so an official in the ukraine prosecutor's office was seeking kolomoisky's arrest but mr piskin who was at the time the prosecutor general of the ukraine in the mid 2000s he instead squashed this he was asked by an intermediary working for kolomoisky to squash this arrest order and this is all alleged in london court and it was settled before it went to trial but this is like kind of where we know about most of the shady shit igor kolomoisky was involved in uh is another oligarch suing him and making these allegations but it is just should be noted he founds this private bank in the 90s he gets a bunch of state-owned assets and then through contract killings and murder and intimidation, he builds up his stake.

And, you know, so it goes on from there. He originally is running his business empire from Switzerland. Then the Ukraine revolution happens in 2014. He comes back to his home province of Dniprovetsk after the revolution, where all these pro-Russia separatists are rising up in the east of Ukraine. So this province is in the center, and he goes in because he has money. There's chaos and riots all around, but he spends at least, according to Herod, 50 million of his own dollars just paying security forces and uh conscripting people in his company to become private security he's appointed i like how you put the accent on her audits and still mispronounced it he's uh he's a he's appointed the emergency governor of the province. He spends, you know, X million of his own money hiring security forces, and he becomes oligarch governor. Where it's interesting, you know, even people who are interviewed for this article for Haaretz, they talk about, you know, there's no crime.

Like, it's okay because this is the safest it's ever been since Soviet times because he has his private gangs running around the streets keeping order. And they talk about how he also set up like a meeting with underworld figures and said, hey, you have to keep crime under control. And he also drafted a battalion and sent a bunch of people east to fight the war against Russian separatists in the east. You know, we're like 10,000. He commissions building the mech from Robocop

and you know and he gives this interview in the first week that he's governor where he attacks Vladimir Putin and calls him short and apparently Putin hates that and Putin makes some allegations about him being corrupt and like has his assets seized in Crimea and all this other stuff so he gets into this back and forth watch this space but it's interesting where Horowitz makes I think I'm Chris Hayes from MSNBC

thanks for watching MSNBC uh Horowitz says it makes a very credible allegation where Igor Kolomoisky always says i did this as a patriot and he always appeals to you know ukrainian nationalism anti-russian sentiment i had to stop the russian sentiments i had to bring law and order and i used my own money to do that to give back for all the you know wealth i have been given to give back but harrits makes i think very credible allegation that um he his operations as governor were also about preserving his business interests where because you know if separatists had taken the region of course all of his assets could have been seized his accounts could have been frozen whatever else so he goes in he takes

over suddenly he has a militia and not only is he not getting his shit seized but he's more powerful than ever and is actually a for a time expanding his influence even away from the central government in kiev so it's a pretty interesting story and then what happens is he actually sends armed men in 2015 to try and straight up seize uh the um the ukrainian gas company we mentioned earlier. He sends some armed men in 2015 to seize it right in the capital and then they're evicted by special forces and he has to flee the country

because it doesn't work. But it was like he tried a little mini military coup and he had to flee the country in 2015. You know, every billionaire seems to have a good flee the country option. You ever notice this? Literally all of them have had at one point be like, I got to roll out. This is my plan.

This is how I'm going to get out. Whether they get it or not is on their own Honda Accord. But they get it done when it comes to I need to leave the country at some point. Yeah. According to Harper's, he... I'll tell you what. They have not procrastinated on renewing their passports. That's right.

Exactly. Yeah. According to Harper's in March 2012... Sometimes they got multiple passports. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. According to Harper's in March 2015. Sometimes they got multiple passports. That's how prepared they are. Damn. According to Harper's in March 2015 he sent hundreds of armed quote lawyers. Oh wow.

Hell yeah. To seize physical control of Ukraine and NAFTA. That to me seems like he doesn't want to spend money on two people for one person jobs you know i mean i could send an armed guard and a lawyer but it'd really be nice if the lawyers had guns because in soviet ukraine law enforces you yeah we need all hands on deck for this all right right right but so and according to this harper's article the u.s actually ambassador came in and

part of how they got him out of there was they promised they would take him off the visa ban list so the u.s actually got him out but and like in 2015 he was in america watching basketball games when previously he'd been banned from a visa in the united states because he was clearly an organized crime figure but then you know his his privot bank was nationalized in 2016 the government had to put the ukrainian government which is of course broke and in debt to the imf they had to put five some billion us in capital injections because they had stolen five billion of this money uh in this kind of real estate scheme in cleveland we'll talk about in a second here wait he'd stolen the five billion from his bank? Yes, a private bank. And that's a public bank, right?

But so I wanted to just very quickly mention the Harper's article is like the best thing I've read on this. I really recommend Undelivered Goods by Alexander Cockburn. He very much goes over U.S. policy here. I'm just going to give a truncated version. He talks about Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was Obama's Assistant Secretary of State, but it's disturbing she was also National Security Advisor to Dick Cheney. So it's like this permanent blob where she's kind of flying over to Ukraine and doing all these deals with various ukrainian oligarchs to make sure that washington's policy and consensus is represented um and

you know he they talk about uh this other oligarch uh what a wonderful uh display of bipartisanship um but so uh i won't really talk too much about um uh this other ukrainian oligarch um named dimitri furtash except to say that the trump team is now alleging that dimitri furtash is currently in um vienna ironically enough fighting extradition to the united states on various crimes the trump team is now saying that he was rail, or some members of the Trump team are saying that he was railroaded by the Bidens in a fake prosecution. Oh, really?

And it's just interesting because according to Politico, he's a, quote, upper echelon associate of Russian organized crime, according to the Department of Justice in 2017. So it's just kind of interesting where every bipartisan member of government has their own little faction of Ukrainian oligarchs. And they're all trying to say, you know, these other people are in bed with the Ukrainian oligarchs, but it's just,

it's fucking oligarchs all the way down. If you want strength on your side, you got to have an oligarch on your team, you know, because if you don't have one, then they got them. So everyone's got their own type of thing. I'm not sure if that's how oligarchy works, Sean. I think it's very short of the way down. But so according to this Cockburn article... Otherwise, that's called democracy. Petro Poroshenko, the chocolate industry oligarch we mentioned who was just defeated in the election.

I think he was named in the Panama Papers. Yeah, he was. Because it's like all of the fucking Ukraine presidents have offshore accounts. So the U.S. wanted him in there. And we mentioned earlier. Along with a feminist icon, Emma Watson. Yes. Oh, really?

Yeah. What happens here is, you know know he's elected after this revolution the the chocolate guy kolomoisky or not kolomoisky pedroshenko washington gets their favorite candidate in and then he says yes i will do austerity give me imf money right so christine lagarde is the uh director the managing director at the time of the IMF. According to Harper's, she went to she hailed the government's, quote, unprecedented resolve in developing a, quote, bold economic program to secure macroeconomic and financial stability. Over the next five months, this is April, right after the revolution, right after the new elections that put the U.S. guy in there. Over the next five months, the international agency poured the equivalent of four point one five billion u.s dollars uh into the national bank of ukraine the country's central bank much of this money was urgently needed to prop up the ukraine uh local commercial banks in theory the

imf required appeared to require direct supervision of how the ukrainian banks use the aid in fact it appears the banks got to select their own auditors. As the largest bank, Kolomoisky's Privatbank, stood to garner the largest share of international aid. Published estimates put the share as high as 40%. Despite the torrent of cash, the bank's situation did not improve. Nine months into the program, the IMF announced, quote, As of the end of January 2015, the banking system's capital adequacy ratio stood at 13.8%, down from 15.9% at the end of June. Where had the money gone? And Alexander Cockburn goes through a very complicated but very compelling scheme of offshore Cyprus subsidies,

sending fake invoices and fake courts suing to get assets back just to make it look like money wasn't stolen but the long and short is at least 1.8 billion of this money was put directly into kolomoisky's pocket and shipped offshore and this is what the fucking imf and the united states knew was going to happen and they still imposed austerity on the people of ukraine they fucking imposed you know uh freezing the minimum wage end of gas subsidies that means higher gas prices and now there's fucking nazis anywhere everywhere and you know it is i love how like either do you think they they knew this something like this would really happen or were they naive to it i think they thought they could control him and i think

they thought they could keep russia occupied in ukraine because the idea was you know let's let's give putin something to do let's um make sure the government is stable so that he's fighting there um and i think it's just something where the fact that the imf by this point knew that austerity didn't work and still went forward with it is extremely confusing to me because the results are what we see today which is of course the far right is in a very prominent and powerful position they weren't in when when they started this program similar to tweet the far the ukrainian far right remember um there was a story back uh a couple years ago of the World Bank, another counterpart to the IMF. In their white paper series, somebody actually went to their white paper library and noticed that some of them had zero views. Really? Zero views total?

Some of them had zero views. How is that even possible? No one is reading these things. And I'm fairly certain that IMF might not have zero views, but it's very like, so they had like the opinion paper on, is austerity real? Or does austerity work? Right, right. And they said like, no, not really.

Like no one read that. Wait, pardon my ignorance. What's a white paper library? Is it just like the white pages? Or I'm confused. Oh, like policy papers. Oh, okay. Yeah, white paper.

Why's it got to be white? Well, there's more contrast with the ink. Okay, sure, Andy. But so, you know, he steals at least $1.8 billion in IMF money. The United States later gets him out of this, lets him go to the United States, partly in order to get him out of launching this takeover of the state company. They'd seem to not really care about what he did with the $1.8 billion, though he is currently being investigated by the FBI, so we'll see if anything comes from that but you know so he tries to take over the government you can't really threaten the

monopoly of violence so the government has to retaliate seize his bank um again they have to inject about five billion in capital saying that he stole they're suing him in the u.s for stealing about six billion or five or six billion this bank. He has to flee the country because he has Israeli and Cypriot and Ukrainian citizenship. So he goes to Israel and he's hiding out from 2016 to 2019. But now that Vladimir Zelensky just won the election and got elected president of the Ukraine, he is now, Igor Kolomoisky is now back in the Ukraine. So it is something where he said i don't want my bank back that's okay sure but you owe me two billion dollars

so they're not sure what if any settlement they'll come to with him but because you know um again uh zielinski the new president is alleged to have flown at least a dozen times to meet him in Tel Aviv, it's very possible that he will set up some sort of arrangement with him, and we'll see what happens with that. So do you think Vladimir is complicit in the crimes of Igor? Do you think that at any point will Vladimir be like, yo, Igor, shit's about to fucking get down, son?

Yeah, I mean, it is something where we can't really... Do you think he'll say specifically what i said that's what i need to hear here that's the question i'm asking there's a according to some article i read there's a scene in his tv show in ukraine it's actually pronounced uh according to some article i read um there's a scene in his TV show. Great podcasting on the show. According to some article I read at one point, some dick fucks had this. Some guy who did actual research that I'm now stealing without attribution. What the country.

But it was just from that Netflix show, Servant of the People. There's a scene where the oligarchs confront the fake president and tell him he'll be impeached and he tells them to go screw themselves and then does the right thing and it's really popular so the article ends by speculating about will he do that in real life i mean but that like you know a perfect example of how you know media sensationalism going to politics is exactly wrong with society because yeah sure that's how a happy ending works in television you got 30 minutes to wrap up an episode that's not how life works but um i i guess just like to kind of close things out here because i do want to talk just very briefly about biden and the u.s role more in general though i should note there's another very fascinating article i'll link to in the description uh from clevescene.com it's a cleveland uh newspaper uh in um fucking may 2019 uh there was a legal complaint

filed in delaware uh from this ukrainian bank it was 140 104 page document and it it goes through this other very complicated financial scheme about how he was able to steal five billion from privat bank right and. And just quoting here, what they did according to this legal complaint is they would take depositor money. Yeah, they siphoned money from public bonds and 20 million private Ukrainian citizens who had opened accounts with PrivatBank.

They would take the money, and then they would move it overseas. They would buy real estate in Cleveland. And it was kind of like a Ponzi fraud scheme where they would use money they made to pay back the money they'd stolen. Right, right. But, you know, so this bank has to be nationalized.

And, you know, this is ongoing in U.S. court. The bank has to be nationalized, and they have to pump like $5 billion of public money into it but it's just interesting where according to this article for a time he was the largest landlord in cleveland really and he's he still owns or his company still owns one cleveland center which they bought for 86.3 million dollars in may 2008 wow so and you know it goes through all these different property apparently he owned a steel factory factory in Cleveland that got closed down and all the employees

got fired and like all these different office buildings. I mean, that's just a pastime in Cleveland. Shutting down factories. By the way, another connection here is his son, Gregory Kolomyski, plays in the first division NCAA team for Cleveland State. So another Ohio connection right there there he needed to buy his son an office building yeah an 86 million dollar one he's the only fucking tenant my son needs place to study in u.s i need to buy everything but um according to the kiev bank the uh fbi is

looking into igor kolomoisky so we'll see if he's indicted or charged with anything. As we mentioned, you know, he's been shopping this dirt on the Bidens, possibly, to try and get out of it with the Trump administration. So we'll see if anything happens with that. But it should just be noted, according to RFERL.org, a Ukrainian court ruled in April 2019 that the nationalization of his Privat bank was illegal, which does boost the chances that he might actually regain control of the bank. So it is something,

this new president Zelensky, he has 73, he won 73% of the vote. People like want him to end the war in Ukraine. They're so sick of all of this endemic corruption that they're like, we'll give an outsider a chance, you know, just fucking do the right thing.

We're so sick of the class because no matter who we elect, even if we fucking throw the president out, the next guy is just as corrupt. They all have these offshore accounts. They're all funneling money, whether it's aid or IMF or taxpayer money or whatever else, they're all funneling money out of the country. Every single person on all the different sides of the political spectrum and they impose austerity and uh immiseration on us the population and the one

thing that is well i shouldn't say the one thing but one do a socialist revolution something that is scary is both kolomoisky and zolinski are jewish uh and not that that is scary now let's you know wait for my second sentence i know it's october john you know do not clip this and with that let's be grub stakers uh you know have a have a wonderful evening and uh you know enjoy life uh what is scary here is we mentioned the rise of neo-nazi groups and um know I guess most famous among them from for the Western audience might be the Azov battalion is a neo-nazi group that's fighting in eastern Ukraine against Russian separatists it is a straight-up white power neo-nazi group interestingly enough Kolomoisky even though

Kolomoisky is Jewish he's been funding these groups and giving them weapons also the state of israel the jewish state has been sending weapons to the azov battalion for some fucking reason so you know again neo-nazi group so i say it's scary that they kolomoisky and the president that everyone says is his puppet, Zelensky, Zelensky, it's scary that these two are Jewish because say they fuck up or say things get worse. Well, the Nazis have their perfect people to point the finger at. And part of their share has, their increasing share in popularity and power has been saying,

everybody is corrupt except for us. We will do the right thing we will not steal so if i mean when has legitimate or like the lack of a legitimate scapegoat stopped nazis right right right i'm just saying you know the propaganda rights itself sure sure and i hope zolinski does the right thing i hope he does not become come under the thumb of kolomoisky but in the event that he's just a puppet for this other oligarch i mean what the fuck comes else next except for nazis in ukraine more nazis in ukraine nazis squared if you will neo squared nazis but um i guess just before we close out here we should mention so like what's some kind

of direct action we can like take like more cancellation more call outs more clap emojis i think hashtags oh hashtag we should have we should form a resistance oh that protest at cleveland center one one cleveland center whatever Apparently all the properties are like falling apart because they just bought them for money laundering and then did no maintenance. Yeah, that's not true at all. 10% occupied. Yeah, just occupy one.

Mind you, many properties in Cleveland not owned by Ukrainian oligarchs are falling apart as well. That also applies to the tallest buildings in New York. He bought the steel mill for his son right right it's converted to condos just with the time we have left i don't want to get too deep into it but i do want to talk briefly about hunter biden and uh this whole scandal with trump and this bullshit because look hunter biden got a first of all you should know that hunter biden and john carey's fucking son-in-law christopher hines started some fake private equity firm in california

where they just went around to like china and apparently struck a deal with them to give them facial recognition technology which good job guys i'm sure that's being deployed well but they also got nice to know a guy named Hunter did that yeah but so it was also with Devin Archer Devon Archer is a he's a former senior advisor for the campaign of John Kerry in 2004 it's probably probably right yeah oh devon isn't it Devon still probably pronounced black is he Unless he's black. Is he black, Sean?

Did you look up his race? Well, look. Not to go all come town, but Devon Archer. Devon Archer. No, it's Devon. He goes and he gets a seat on the board, I believe in 2014, of a company called burisma holdings uh and then just like a month or so later hunter biden joe biden's son gets a job on the board hunter biden's paid about fifty thousand dollars a month for no discernible reason and i mean i can discern a reason expertise his last name is biden yes i can discern a reason which is that um as long as you have the vice joe biden is

running ukraine policy for the obama administration if you have the vice, Joe Biden is running a Ukraine policy for the Obama administration. If you have the vice president's son on the board of your company, prosecutors might think twice about, you know, looking into this shit. And also their economy is totally dependent on IMF loans, which are really de facto controlled by the United States.

So there's a lot of different reasons you might pay the vice president's son 50,000 a month. It's very clearly corrupt influence trading. Where the story kind of breaks down is that the prosecutor that Obama and the Europeans get fired was actually fired for, among other things, not looking into Baris Magroup, where he apparently gave it some letter saying everything's on the up and up here. And then the Europeans were like, you have to fire this prosecutor. He's corrupt. He's not doing any prosecuting.

Yeah, the letter he gave was K. But I guess the thing I wanted to mention about Burisma Holdings is in London court, in most press accounts, it said it's owned by this other oligarch and former government official named Mikola Zalewski. Apparently, according to a report I saw in Naked Capitalism, was quoting a Ukrainian journalist who dug this up in 2012, it's kind of a complicated shell transaction, but they make the argument that Igor Kolomoisky is actually the power behind the

throne that um the privat group according to one source the company was founded by zolewski but he later sold his shares to the privat group oh interesting and this hasn't been proved anywhere i saw it on another website as well johnhelmer.net makes this case if you're interested in reading it but i just wanted to put that out there there's a possibility the guy we're talking about today was paying off the biden's and that's why you know there's an fbi investigation into him that's why maybe why he's going around that is not the focus the focus is impeaching trump for his wrongdoings that hair right right biden is our best chance at defeating donald trump and so uh it is not prudent right now to attack joe biden because he's completely innocent and did not do any corruptions he just loves ice cream so leave britney alone guy defending Joe Biden. Leave Biden alone.

He just loves ice cream. But it is something where we don't know right now, but it's a possibility at least that Igor Kolomoisky was the actual guy paying Biden's son. And it should be noted, there's various reasons for doing it. The other oligarch, Zolovsky, according to The Intercept. For one thing, you can tell him to dance, and it's pretty funny watching him dance. According to The Intercept, regulators in London had seized about $20 million in cash from Burisma Holdings

amid claims that it had compiled its assets illegally. So the idea is, okay, so London court has seized $20 million of our assets. Let's get a fucking biden on the board right away maybe that'll kind of put take the pressure off the investigation so um i guess you know look you can look all this shit up yourself we'll see if this actually yeah assholes why are you listening to this shit you can look it up yourselves don't you know what the internet is you fuck my point was we'll see if all of this um sean's point was go fuck yourself we'll see if all of this boomerangs back on trump that he was trying you know pressuring uh the new president of ukraine in a phone call like hey give this biden kid another look you know have investigators

look into it we'll see if he ends up getting impeached for this and other shit. But I guess don't fucking listen when anybody tries to tell you this isn't about Hunter Biden's corruption. Because it is. Whether or not what Hunter Biden did was illegal, it was very clear quid pro quo

with this murdering mobster giving him 50 grand a month for- They didn't say quid pro quo with this murdering mobster giving him 50 grand a month for it. They didn't say quid pro quo on the phone. That's the other one. Did they say quid? Did Biden say quid pro quo on his phone call? I don't know. I forget who didn't say quid pro quo and who didn't.

I still think that the impeachment was launched ultimately to protect Biden. Really? Yeah. To like, oh, I see what you're saying. To make the impeachment more. Yeah, yeah. Smokescreen. Yep.

Smokescreen. That was a component. Interesting. Right. But it is something where, you know, we mentioned. You think it could be a smokescreen? You think Stephen's gone to something? It's possible, but I feel like it's bad for Biden to have this in the news

because, of course, the Fox News and the other line is always talking about Biden every time the impeachment comes up. Bad news coming out right now is kind of the best time because there's so much shit going on right now that if you did some fucked up shit precisely like this, I think you would go, let's get it out right now. Because if it comes out in like three years and you know my like let's you know optimistically say there's not a trump presidency and things are being more progressive and better for various reasons controversy like

this would fucking cripple a person so much more than if it comes out right now i think there could be a fire sale on just fucking horseshit like bullshit people been doing for the last couple of decades that might just start coming out for the next couple of months. I think you could arguably say that from now till about maybe February to at least March of next year, there'll be like six to 15 more scandals. Very similar to this. And they're just trying to get it out while there's so much controversy that people can't even keep up with it i think it's it's shameful that they're slandering biden our first irish apache president our first mentally disabled president fucking ableist slurs people talking about him forgetting things like that's not a protected class in this country it It's ableism against people with weak denture.

Yeah. Glue. When I tell the listeners to look shit up because I can't find it in my notes, it's actually ableist to get mad at me for that because forgetting things makes me a marginalized... Population. Yeah.

But look... He forgot the word population. Look, my closing thing here is just this final thoughts final thoughts the the thing here is of course hunter biden is on this fucking board with a senior advisor to president john kerry uh we've gone through you know victoria newland uh he's also on his private equity firm working with John Kerry's son-in-law. So both the Democrats and the Republicans clearly have an influence trading program where people leave the government. Either their kids become lobbyists

or they become lobbyists. They get no work jobs all over the fucking globe to peddle influence. You know what's really scary? What? They're Jews. Cut that. globe to peddle influence and you know what's really scary what they're jews cut that no little known fact hunter biden total jew but i guess look what makes me angry is seeing the american media say ukraine is a corrupt backwards country it's fucked up oh we can't

do anything there blah blah blah you the united states is a fucked up backwards country we are an oligarchy and we have exported racist we have we have exported our oligarchy into uh the remnants of post-soviet ukraine and russia outsourced yes you know you want to know something crazy the state that produced produced LeBron James has a Ukrainian son billionaire playing for a college basketball team. That's the level of bullshit that's going on here. I do not follow that connection at all. Okay, all right.

I made an Oakland Raiders reference earlier when I said Khalil Mack, and none of you know this as well. So I'm certainly talking to myself here. A little Easter eggs for... Yeah, for the listeners. For the listeners that pay attention because all of our listeners don't pay attention listeners that pay attention to oakland sports that's right i'm just imagining uh uh kola

moyski like fucking buying the cleveland cavaliers locker room with his laundered offshore money. He closes it. Damn, why is the attendance in the stadium down to 10%? They fucking evicted all the tenants. They stopped doing upkeep. Yeah, they used to have great concessions. Now all they sell is pierogies. The fucking back glass on the hoop

was broken like three years ago and nobody repaired it because some fucking uh cypriot shell company owns the thing it was actually broken by jordan yeah this is used to funnel like cypriot uh illicit real estate money to to uh buy sex slaves and for the democratic republic of the wrong right right yeah you know. It has to be some insane convoluted scheme like that. Yeah, exactly. We'll hear about it soon enough. But we'll see what happens

with, you know, Trump, Giuliani, Biden, all these people. But I hope this has been an informative overview of some of the recent history of Ukraine. And I hope we will all consider,

you know, when we dismiss countries as backwards and corrupt, we think about the very real corruption that exists in this country, and that is legal, and that is a bipartisan part of our political class.

And do you guys have any other thoughts here we didn't get to? Jesus is smart. Andy, you got anything? Yeah. What a country. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Poliwog. I'm Andy Palmer. Steve a country. And with that, this has been Grub Stakers. I'm Yogi Poliwog.

I'm Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffers. Sean P. McCarthy. I do just want to thank Hashtigre on Twitter. I think I pronounced that one right. Hashtag. It's Latigre. At H-A-S-H underscore T-I-G-R-E on Twitter.

They hit me up. Her name'sE on Twitter. They hit me up. Her name's Kathleen Hanna. They hit me up with a lot of my sources for this episode. I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to do this research without them,

so if I fucked it all up, go yell at them on Twitter. It was their fault. All right, thanks for listening. Thank you to Hash Tigre and check us out on Twitter. Or check us out on Twitter and Patreon The women who are taller than me

Are lesbians For whom 1969 was a very momentous year For me America is a first rate place Most of all I'm beloved of American movies Muscular cars And hip hop music

I also dig negros most of all Michael Jackson. He's a first-rate dancer, just like me. Many girls want to be carnal with me, because I'm such a premium dancer. Thank you.