Financial safety

She fixed Ukraine’s economy -- and was run out of her job by death threats


It hasn’t been hard for her to make enemies. She had reduced the size of the central bank bureaucracy from 12,000 to 5,000. She has let the country’s currency, the hryvnia, float, which stabilized the economy but also shrank people’s incomes. And, above all, in an effort to clean up the ailing banking sector, she has nationalized 87 banks with about 60 percent of the sector’s assets.
‘Zombie banks’

“These banks were not banks. We call them zombie banks without any assets, with only liabilities,” she said. “About 20 of them were just money-laundering machines. They do not do any business at all. It was only money laundering.”

Gontareva moved the assets to Ukraine’s equivalent of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The biggest of the nationalized banks was PrivatBank, once controlled by leading oligarchs Igor Kolomoysky and partner Gennadiy Bogolyubov. It was the bank previously thought of as being too big to fail.