KIEV, April 18 - The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO) suspects the management of PrivatBank (Dnipro) of deliberately unprofitable lending to related entities during the period of refinancing the financial institution by the National Bank of Ukraine, the Nashi Hroshi newspaper has reported.

According to the publication, this is confirmed by the ruling of the Pechersky District Court of Kiev dated April 5, 2017.

According to the investigation into the relevant criminal case, loans, in particular, were issued to Okeanmash LLC, Tylon LLC, LT Group LLC, Agency Novy Svit LLC, Freeline LLC, Zernopostavka-M LLC, Kandella LLC, OPF LLC, Elara LLC, Municipal Maintenance of Houses LLC (all based in Dnipro).

The court ruling does not specify the timing of signing the loan agreements. It is stated that most of the loans were provided at 9% per annum with the average resource cost being 17%.

The guarantor for the loans was PrivatOffice LLC (Dnipro), which owned 415 real estate objects. At the same time, none of these facilities was a collateral for the loans.

According to investigators, PrivatBank officials, knowing about the ban on conducting active operations with related persons, continued to issue loans at economically unfavorable conditions and thus used up funds in especially large amounts. This led to a debt to the bank amounting to more than UAH 372.78 million. (om/ez)