Feds seek to seize $6 million linked to Ukrainian oligarch under investigation in

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Federal attorneys Thursday continued their legal assault on a Ukrainian oligarch who is suspected of laundering tens of millions of dollars through U.S. real estate, including properties in Cleveland.

Prosecutors sought to seize more than $6 million linked to office towers in Dallas that are tied to Igor Kolomoisky, a billionaire industrialist. The filing in U.S. District Court in Miami is the Justice Department’s fourth attempt to obtain assets tied to Kolomoisky and his associates through forfeiture proceedings. It claims the funds are linked to international money laundering.

FBI agents in Cleveland are investigating Kolomoisky and associates linked to the PrivatBank, a Ukrainian bank that Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholiubov opened in 1992. In August 2020, agents searched the offices of Optima Management Group in One Cleveland Center at East 9th Street and St. Clair Avenue, as well as company offices in Miami.

Optima is the name of a series of businesses run by Kolomoisky’s associates in America, according to federal authorities. Attorneys representing the companies could not be reached late Thursday afternoon. Michael Sullivan, a Boston lawyer who has represented Kolomoisky in the past, also could not be reached.

Federal documents filed in Miami allege that Kolomoisky and Boholiubov swindled PrivatBank out of $5 billion from about 2008 to 2016. They sought out loans, repaid the loans with more loans and then poured the money into U.S. real estate holdings.

As a result of the massive fraud, the Justice Department said, PrivatBank was nationalized in 2016.

In the past two years, the Justice Department has sought to seize tens of millions of dollars in property from businesses tied to Kolomoisky and his associates, including 55 Public Square in Cleveland.

The office tower sold for $17 million last year. The sale’s net proceeds went into an account maintained by the federal government, and a judge could order the money forfeited later.

Optima was once one of the largest landlords in downtown Cleveland, but its interests in the city have dwindled in recent years. It still owns One Cleveland Center on East 9th Street and has interest in the Westin Cleveland Downtown.

The government also sought to seize other office towers in Dallas and Louisville, Kentucky. Those properties are worth more than $70 million.

On Thursday, prosecutors sought through civil forfeiture to seize more than $6 million in proceeds from the sale of Stemmons Towers in Dallas in 2019. An Optima business purchased the towers in 2008, the filing shows.

Prosecutors claimed that the properties were maintained and improved using the proceeds from the fraud at PrivatBank.

Defense attorneys said in documents filed last year in Miami that authorities in Ukraine have not brought charges from the case. They stressed that no criminal court in Ukraine has determined that any misconduct occurred.

“The United States bizarrely has anointed itself the arbiter and interpreter of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, whose own prosecuting authorities have charged no one with a crime, whose own courts have convicted no one of a crime and whose judges have already held that the loans were entirely proper and valid,” wrote Howard Srebnick, a defense attorney in the case.