The head of the Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA), Olena Duma, is trying to shift the responsibility for the failure to sell the yacht of former traitor MP Viktor Medvedchuk to the Prosecutor General's Office and expects that a court in Croatia will give her a few more years to sell the property, UNN reports.
"Currently, after the arrest was canceled by the Croatian court due to the failure to provide an indictment, ARMA is awaiting a court decision on the transfer of the vessel with its legalization in the Republic of Croatia," Duma wrote on her Twitter account.
The Duma does not even neglect to boast that ARMA has developed a procedure for the sale of seized assets abroad. Namely, the fact that the head of the agency, in order to fulfill her own ambitions, spent almost six months developing these changes and made it virtually impossible to sell the yacht Royal Romance.
A Croatian court arrested Medvedchuk's yacht for Ukraine for a maximum period of 2 years. During this time, including due to the actions of Olena Duma, the yacht was not sold. Now the head of the ARMA calmly states that the court in Croatia should give her a few more years to eventually sell the asset.
Of course, we can blame anyone and hope that our European partners will again make concessions to Ukraine, but we wonder if they will have enough patience this time. Especially if we take into account the fact that experts suggestthat the Duma could have acted in Medvedchuk's favor in the situation with the delayed sale of the yacht.
Context
The ARMA has recently been in the spotlight for losing the Royal Romance yacht, which belonged to former MP Viktor Medvedchuk, a suspect in high treason. Despite the yacht's arrest by a Croatian court and its transfer to Ukraine for sale, ARMA has not been able to sell the asset in two years.
After researching the topic, we found out that the main delay with the sale of the yacht of the traitorous ex-MP arose because the head of ARMA, Olena Duma, had been preparing amendments to the legislation on the sale of foreign assets for almost six months. At the same time, as of the time of her appointment to ARMA, the Prosecutor General's Office, together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had already prepared a draft of the changes, but Duma categorically rejected it.
In this regard, the ARMA only launched a tender on March 20, 2024, to select a seller to sell the yacht, and a month later it finally selected the winner. It is worth noting that the selection of the winner took place a month before the expiration of the maximum period of seizure of this asset, which made its sale virtually impossible.
Political analyst Viktor Bobirenko believesthat the delay in the sale of Medvedchuk's yacht by ARMA head Olena Duma cannot be ordinary negligence, such actions could be motivated by financial reward.