Recently the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Spokesperson announced that the U.S. had sent a team of experts from the FBI, the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to assist Kiev in recovering stolen assets located abroad. On April 29 the U.S. and Great Britain will host a multilateral meeting on this issue with the participation of Ukrainian officials. It is expected that the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR), based in Basel, will participate in the meeting.
Ukraine is on the brink of a massive default and social flare-ups, and even famine. Ukraine needs money to keep the national economy from collapsing altogether. Of course, Washington cares little about what happens to the Ukrainian economy; it is worried about Ukraine's ability to pay its debts to Western creditors. Currently Ukraine's foreign debt is estimated at $145 billion. Now no one in the West wishes to give Ukraine new loans. The amounts named in the media figuring in the billions of dollars and euros are nothing but the «verbal interventions» of Ukrainian politicians and Western officials.
There are clear signs that Ukraine's banking sector will soon collapse. The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) is discussing the option of rescuing commercial banks the way they did in Cyprus, that is, by confiscating depositors' accounts or forcibly turning depositors into the banks' «investors» («shareholders»). The Kiev regime plans to mobilize several billion dollars this way; such blatant robbery could save several banks, but it cannot save the country from a massive default.
This would require tens of billions of dollars. When you get down to it, in order to pay its debts to foreign creditors, Ukraine has only two sources of its own. The first is privatizing state property, including the country's natural resources. The second is Ukraine's foreign assets. Thus the FBI and the U.S. Departments of Justice and the Treasury have decided to help Kiev use the second source.
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