Kolomoisky advises Ukraine to default on its debt
In an interview with the Financial Times, Ukrainian businessman Ihor Kolomoisky stated that the new president of the country, Vladimir Zelensky, should default and write off the state’s foreign debt. Hromadske Radio reported on the matter.
“In my opinion, we should treat our creditors the way Greece does,” he said. “Ukraine should follow its example,” added Kolomoisky.
He believes that Ukraine should not be afraid of defaulting on its debt. “How many times has Argentina defaulted on its debt?” RBC news agency quoted him saying in the interview. Kolomoisky added that as a result, Buenos Aires restructured its debt and now “everything is in order”.
According to the businessman, Zelensky’s victory in the presidential election makes clear that the country’s citizens want a break from the reforms advanced by the IMF. “If Zelensky listens to the West and does not make his own decisions, he will end up like Poroshenko. He will have the same level of support: 5, 10 or 15% instead of 73%,” Kolomoisky said.
When discussing the legal procedures to nationalize PrivatBank, Kolomoisky said that he did not need the actual bank, only to be compensated for it. He stressed that he wants the court to assess how fairly the bank was nationalized.
In April, the fifth president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, argued that returning PrivatBank to Ihor Kolomoisky would result in tens of millions of Ukrainians losing their money and the country having to default on its debt.
In 2018, in an interview with Dmitry Gordon, Kolomoisky had already said that “there is nothing terrible” about defaulting on debt. In his opinion, Ukraine would have been better off declaring a technical default that restructuring its debt in 2014.