Robert Parry, Consortium News: How Ukraine’s Finance Chief Got Rich
Before becoming Ukraine’s Finance Minister last December, Natalie Jaresko collected $1.77 million in bonuses from a U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund where her annual compensation was supposed to be limited to $150,000, according to financial documents filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service this year.
The near 12-fold discrepancy between the compensation ceiling and Jaresko’s bonuses, paid in 2013, was justified in the IRS filing from the Jaresko-led Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF) by drawing a distinction between getting paid directly from the $150 million U.S. government grant that created the fund and the money from the fund’s “investment sales proceeds,” which were treated as fair game for extracting bonuses far beyond the prescribed compensation level.
Using this supposed loophole, Jaresko and some of her associates enriched themselves by claiming money generated from U.S. taxpayers’ dollars while avoiding any personal financial risks. She and other WNISEF officers collected the bonuses from what they deemed “profitable” exits from some investments even if the overall fund was losing money and shrinking, as it apparently was in recent years.
WNU Editor: Commentator Jay gave me a heads-up on the above link .... and while my family members in Ukraine have been filling me in with all of the corruption that is happening in Ukraine, I was surprised by this revelation. But should I be surprised .... no. The collapse of the economy has brought out the worst in Ukraine. No one has money in Ukraine .... but foreigners and the Ukrainian oligarchs. Because everyone is now in survival mode, homes and businesses are now being sold at a fraction of their costs .... causing bitterness and anger on a massive scale. And while one should question if Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko is the right person for the job .... I do know that her policies of more debt coupled with zero if any support for small to medium businesses in Ukraine will worsen the situation .... as we are now witnessing.