This civil forfeiture action is the fourth such action filed in connection with the same alleged criminal activity. In August 2020, the U.S. filed two lawsuits in the Southern District of Florida alleging that commercial real estate in Dallas and Louisville, Kentucky was purchased with funds illegally obtained from PrivatBank in Ukraine as part of a multi-billion dollar fraudulent loan scheme. In December 2020, he filed a third lawsuit in the same county, alleging that Cleveland, Ohio real estate was purchased in a similar manner.
Four lawsuits allege that Igor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of Ukraine’s largest banks, defrauded the bank of billions of dollars. The two allegedly received fraudulent loans from around 2008 to 2016, when the scheme was exposed and the bank was nationalized by the National Bank of Ukraine. The lawsuits allege that they laundered some of the proceeds of crime using a variety of front company bank accounts, mostly in the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank, before transferring the funds to the United States.
According to the lawsuits, Mordechai Korf and Uriel Laber, who were close associates of Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov and operated from offices in Miami, set up a network of legal entities, usually under some variant of the name Optima, to further launder the misappropriated funds. They purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate and businesses across the country, including commercial buildings in Dallas (Stemmons Towers) and an office building known as 55 Public. Real estate in Cleveland, an office building in Louisville known as PNC Plaza, and an office building in Dallas known as the former headquarters of CompuCom.
The latest lawsuit alleges that several Optima structures used profits from the CompuCom Campus, which was originally purchased with embezzled funds from PrivatBank, to service the Stemmons Tower. Optima Stemmons then sold Stemmons Towers in 2019, under which more than $6 million is still owed to the purpose-built company owned by Optima Ventures.
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