Former Minister of Agricultural Policy Vitaliy Koval, who recently left office, has found himself at the center of a new scandal. A journalistic investigation revealed that the official may have avoided repaying loans worth more than $700,000 by using schemes with relatives and business acquaintances.
Back in 2007, Vitaliy Koval took out a $556,000 loan from Raiffeisen Bank Aval to purchase a non-residential building in the city of Vyshneve. But within a year, he stopped servicing the loan.
In 2016, the debt was sold to financial companies, and eventually it was bought out by… Koval’s mother. Then it got even more interesting. The mother “waived” her debt claims against her son, explaining that she had lent a similar amount to another son, Oleg Koval, back in 2015. A kind of “settling” between family members, which allowed the debt issue to be resolved.
What looks especially suspicious is that the bank lifted the mortgage lien before the writ of execution reached the state bailiffs. And on the same day, Vitaliy Koval sold the premises to a company founded by his brother.
Koval took out a second debt — $205,000 in 2008 — from UkrSibbank to buy an apartment in Kyiv. In 2017, the bank sold this debt to a third party — a financial firm, which soon transferred the claim to Yuriy Karpovich.
And here again there was a coincidence: Karpovich is the owner of the company “Sanako”, where Vitaliy Koval worked as a director from 2015 to 2019. The scheme worked quickly: Karpovich became the plaintiff, but a few days later… he simply abandoned the lawsuit against Koval. Formally, the debt disappeared.
None of these debts were reflected in the official's declarations. Koval's official version is a "set-off", which allegedly took place after the transfer of the claim rights, and therefore was not subject to declaration. But lawyers note: even in the case of such a "debt transformation", the fact of the obligations had to be indicated.
The National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption has not yet commented on the situation. But it is obvious that Koval used a typically oligarchic “family” mechanism to avoid responsibility — selling debts to related persons with their subsequent “disappearance.”
After his dismissal from the government, interest in Vitaliy Koval's past is only growing. His close ties to business, opaque history with debts, and the involvement of relatives and former partners in these schemes may become the subject of scrutiny by anti-corruption agencies.
For now, the impression is that the high-ranking official simply removed the property from arrest, "merged" the credit obligations with his own, and left the state — and creditors — with nothing.
