Ukraine Officials Fail to Account for Millions of Declared Crypto Assets –

Personal wealth declarations filed by politicians and government officials in Ukraine have shown that many have made significant investments in cryptocurrency. However, some of them were unable to prove or account for their digital holdings, local media reported.

Lawmaker loses over 40 BTC With a stolen vehicle in Ukraine

Dmitry Gurin, member of the Ukrainian parliament President Zelensky ’s Servant of the People allegedly lost a significant amount of cryptocurrency to car thieves, according to an audit of its 2020 statement cited by the Slovo i Dilo portal. The MP claims the digital money was stored on a hardware wallet that disappeared with his car, which was stolen earlier this year.

Data filed The lawmaker revealed that his wife, Maria Saltykova, 42 had BTC last year worth an estimated 22.5 million hryvnias (around $840,000 at the current rate, or over $2 million). BTC Prices at the time of writing), Forklog reported. Ukraine's National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) said Gurin did not provide any documents confirming the accuracy of this information.

The parliamentarian, who has run his own advertising company for the past decade, made a verbal statement that the vehicle was killed on March 21. He added that the case was being investigated by police in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Gurin is no exception in the Ukrainian political elite. At the beginning of September it became known that the head of the State Regulatory Service ( SRS ), Oleksiy Kucher, had failed to prove ownership of an even larger crypto stash. According to his declaration filed in December, Kucher was 77 when he left the office of governor of Kharkiv Oblast BTC worth about 13.1 million hryvnia at the time of purchase (almost $490,000 at the current hryvnia rate).

If the coins had been sold at the time of writing, they would have returned more than $3.7 million. Tax returns show that the official and his family members have earned less than 1 million hryvnia (about $37,000) in wages over the past two decades since 2001. NAPC believes this suggests that Kucher made false statements about his ownership of the cryptocurrency. In one Press release of September 6, the agency stated:

Bitcoin has a public address that confirms that it belongs to a specific person. The head of the SRS was unable to provide a public cryptocurrency address.

In their 2020 asset declarations, 652 officials in Ukraine admitted owning a total of 46,351 BTC (now worth more than $2.2 billion) among other cryptocurrencies like ETH, LTC, BCH, and XMR, the Opendatabot platform that monitors public registries revealed. This spring, the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption promised to review these figures.

Do you expect more Ukrainian officials to fail to prove ownership of declared cryptocurrency assets? Tell us in the comments section below.

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