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Personal wealth declarations filed by politicians and government officials in Ukraine have indicated that many have made significant investments in cryptocurrency. However, some of them were unable to prove ownership or justify their digital holdings, local media reported.
Lawmaker loses more than 40 BTC with stolen vehicle in Ukraine
Dmitry Gurin, member of the Ukrainian parliament from President Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, has reportedly lost a significant amount of cryptocurrency to car thieves, according to an audit of his 2020 statement cited by the portal “Slovo i Dilo”. The MP claims the digital money was stored in a hardware wallet which went missing along with his car which was stolen earlier this year.
Data filed by lawmakers revealed that his wife, Maria Saltykova, owned 42 BTC last year with an estimated value of 22.5 million hryvnia (around $ 840,000 at current hryvnia rates or more than 2 million dollars at BTC prices at the time of writing), Forklog reported. Ukraine’s National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) said Gurin had not submitted any documents confirming the accuracy of this information.
The parliamentarian, who for the past decade ran his own advertising business, provided a verbal explanation, stating that the vehicle was stolen on April 21, along with the crypto wallet that kept the coins. He added that the case was being investigated by the police department in the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine.
Gurin is no exception in the Ukrainian political elite. Earlier in September, news broke that the head of the State Regulatory Service (SRS), Oleksiy Kucher, had failed to prove ownership of an even larger crypto cache. According to his statement filed in December, when he left the post of governor of Kharkiv oblast, Kucher had 77 BTC worth around 13.1 million hryvnia at the time of purchase (nearly $ 490,000 at the current hryvnia rate).
Had the coins been sold at the time of writing, they would have grossed over $ 3.7 million. Income tax returns show that the official and his family members have earned less than one million hryvnia (approximately $ 37,000) in salary in the past two decades since 2001. NAPC believes this indicates that Kucher has filed a claim. false information regarding his possession of the cryptocurrency. In a press release dated September 6, the agency said:
Bitcoin has a public address that confirms that it is owned by a certain person. The SRS official was unable to provide a public cryptocurrency address.
In their 2020 asset statements, 652 Ukrainian officials admitted to holding a total of 46,351 BTC (worth over $ 2.2 billion now) among other cryptocurrencies such as ETH, LTC, BCH and XMR, the Opendatabot platform, which monitors public registers. , found. This spring, the National Corruption Prevention Agency promised to verify these figures.
Do you expect more Ukrainian officials to fail to prove ownership of the declared cryptocurrency assets? Tell us in the comments section below.
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