The US Federal District Court gave the go-ahead for the sale of a building in Texas owned by a company linked to Ihor Kolomoisky. The building was frozen due to an investigation into money laundering by the Ukrainian oligarch in the United States. The court took this step so that the company would be able to pay off the accumulated debts in the amount of $425,000, Radio Liberty reports.
The eight-story office building on Forest Lane in North Dallas was owned by a large local technology company Electronic Data Systems in the 1970s. The company was founded by former US presidential candidate Ross Perot. In the 1990s, it passed into the ownership of CompuCom Systems, in 2010—was taken over by Optima co-owned by Kolomoisky. The central part of the complex with an office building and a data center is surrounded by green areas and ground parking lots. Its total area is 20 acres (80.9 sq.m). The Ministry of Justice believes that the money used to buy the premises was obtained by the oligarch through misappropriation and fraud.
The court documents indicate that the buyer will be the American real estate company Centurion American. The deal will amount to $23.3 billion. The sale process, according to plans, should be completed on September 27.
Context. The authorities’ attempts to get the Forest Lane complex back into their ownership are emerging from a lawsuit filed in May 2019 in Delaware by Ukrainian Privatbank. The document accuses the two former owners of the financial institution, Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Boholyubov, of organizing a well-thought-out scheme, according to which almost $800 billion was withdrawn from the bank in the period from 2006 to 2016. The lawsuit states that these persons tried to invest the withdrawn money as soon as possible outside Ukraine in order to launder it and make it impossible to trace.
The lawsuit alleges that Kolomoisky and Boholyubov enlisted the support of Mordechai Korf and Uriel Labery, the US citizens living in Miami, who created a network of 19 limited liability companies across the country (united by the name Optima). "Aides" of the Ukrainian oligarchs also appear as defendants in the case.
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