National Bank of Ukraine governor Andriy Pyshnyi told parliament that a criminal case dubbed Forrest Gump, involving the laundering of 150 million hryvnias through Sense Bank, demonstrates the effectiveness of the central bank's financial monitoring system.
Pyshnyi said the suspects themselves acknowledged that regulatory measures forced them to seek workarounds, which he argued showed the system was properly designed. He added that an inspection would establish the facts and that the central bank would cooperate with law enforcement.
System bypass
Audio recordings published by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau on August 19 indicated that the suspects bypassed the monitoring system at Sense Bank through the alleged direct intervention of the bank's board chairman and technical manipulation.
Under central bank rules, large payments require manual approval by bank staff, which would normally block suspicious transactions.
To circumvent this, the board chairman allegedly proposed creating temporary windows during which the payment filtering system was officially taken offline for servicing.
The suspects were informed of the specific times the system would be down, allowing them to process the payments without manual checks.
Cash deliveries
According to the allegations, the money was delivered in bags of cash under guard to a conversion center. It was then transferred as non-cash funds into the accounts of dummy companies.
Sense Bank then allegedly facilitated the release of these funds to pay bail.
Call for resignation
Following Pyshnyi's address, the head of the parliamentary finance committee, Danylo Hetmantsev, called for the central bank governor to be fired.
Hetmantsev, who is mentioned in the anti-corruption bureau's recordings but is not a suspect in the case, said Pyshnyi had ignored violations at Sense Bank for a year and a half.
Hetmantsev said a central bank inspection had uncovered 3.3 billion hryvnias in laundered funds at Sense Bank, but that no action was taken against the board or supervisory board as a result.
He concluded that demanding Pyshnyi's resignation was the only option.
Next steps
On August 19, following the publication of the recordings, the Cabinet of Ministers decided to suspend the head of Sense Bank's supervisory board, ruling him unfit for the position.
The position of the Sense Bank board chairman remains open, but he also faces dismissal.
