The deputy head of the Office of the President, Rostislav Shurma, may be the "secret patron" of the small "Alliance" bank, which has recently been regularly involved in corruption scandals.
Thanks to his close relationship with Pavel Shcherban, the head of the bank's supervisory board, Shurma can fend off NBU "attacks" on Alliance, as well as provide protection for the bank in front of law enforcement agencies, journalists .
Bank "Alliance" became widely known thanks to the scandal involving a bribe, which on behalf of the bank had to be given to the detectives of NABU and prosecutors of the SAP by the lawyer of the law firm Miller, Oleksiy Nosov, in the case of assignment of damages to "Ukrenergo". Despite the fact that Oleksandr Sosis, the former chairman of the board of ASKA insurance company Rinat Akhmetova, is formally the main shareholder, in reality everything is decided by the chairman of the supervisory board, 40-year-old Pavlo Pavlovich Shcherban.
According to data from open sources , Shcherban has been working in the banking sector for about 18 years. He worked at "Prominvestbank", "Volodymyrskyi" bank, "Pivdenkombank" and Ruslan Tsyplakov, a friend of Viktor Yanukovych, Jr. in auto racing. He also worked in the scheme banks "Apex" and "Standard", as well as in Taskombank. Since the middle of 2018, Shcherban was the deputy chairman and acting chairman of the board, and from August 2021 - heads the supervisory board of "Alliance" bank. In July 2023, the Antimonopoly Committee allowed him to purchase more than 25% of the institution's shares.
The journalists claim that Shcherban is the best man of Rostislav Shurma, whom they probably met about ten years ago during the structuring of a series of scheme deals. This is non-fulfillment of conditions under guarantees, chronic disregard regulations , especially in terms of the level of risk per client, corruption scandals and fines for violation of financial monitoring rules - all these factors together should have called the bank into temporary administration a long time ago," the article says. However, the bank allegedly physically protects Shurm.
The authors note that Shurma has business interests in other Shcherban companies. "First of all, we are talking about the gas production company Viva Exploration, which Shcherban formally owns together with geologist Serhii Dumenko through the Cypriot firm IF Exploration Company Limited. According to relevant mass media, the company owns a license for geological study, including research and industrial development with further extraction of oil, natural gas and condensate on the Staromizunskaya Square in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, valid until 2033," the material says.
The second interesting asset at Shcherbany's disposal, which the deputy head of the President's Office may be behind, is a recently purchased elevator in the town of Khorol in Poltava Oblast (Alliance Elevator LLC). "Despite the relatively small size and the need for reconstruction, Shcherban and Shurma see this business as a start for greater integration into the agricultural sector, as the demand for storing grain and other agricultural products only grows every year," the journalists believe.
Also, a whole cluster of companies in which Shcherban invested are related to the IT business.
"Shcherban is obviously going to create a multidisciplinary IT team that will be able to serve different areas. Firms mainly specialize in banking products, but they also provide services to trade networks," the text says. Shurma's interest in digitalization of many processes in the economy is known, the authors add. But his constant desire to "sit down" the Deputy Prime Minister for Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov is also known. "And that's why Shcherban's group is a good start for creating your own digital army," the text says.
"All this versatility in business interests does not fit into the functions of the chairman of the supervisory board of the bank, which has been storming for more than a month. So here, either the "Alliance" is not a priority for Shcherbany (which does not look like the truth), or investments in all these motley businesses are a pure venture (portfolio investments, when the investor does not influence decision-making, but receives passive income proportional to his share income), which may not even be Shcherban himself," the media outlets summarize.
