OSINT-experts of international volunteer group InformNapalm have been highly focused on collection and analysis of information about the role or the Russian military in inciting and fueling armed conflicts across the world. From Georgia and Ukraine, to Syria and other countries. But apart from the military methods the Russian Federation uses corruption as one of the most effective mechanisms of influence on the post-Soviet space. Corruption is a plaguing modern societies not only in the former soviet countries also in the EU. Moscow benefits form corruption in Europe lobbying its interests with the money that “does not smell” and masking its activities with the offshore schemes. Here we will try to use an example of Ukraine to show how journalists and civil societies can use the power of the database of Panama Papers for collection and analysis of the information which, when exposed to public, can facilitate the reforms and accelerate irreversible sanitation and liberation form the metastases of corruption in Ukraine and abroad.

On 9 May the entire database was published. Now everybody can examine the World’s shadow economy. However the data still require additional processing. It contains a number of owners of the offshore companies without any link to the actual country of origin. The order of indicated names, surnames and titles are given in various formats: “name-surname”, “surname-name”, “title-name-surname” and so on.

This is probably due to the fact that the offshore companies opening at different times may have required different documents for registration. After all, mere errors in spelling of eastern-European names can not be excluded. There are still questions to The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) concerning the procedure of retrieval and digitizing of the documents.

So, let us start. At the page of ICIJ, there is an option of the search by country. The search on “Ukraine” returns the following database:

The search results of “Ukrainian” records in the Panama Papers:

469 entries of offshore (Offshore Entities)

643 persons (Officers*)

20 intermediaries (Intermediaries)

558 addresses (Addresses)

* Here it should be noted that in some countries “Officers” – are people, and in others those are either people or companies. For the sake of simplicity, we will search for people based on the search results for “Officers”.

Could these be all the “Ukrainians” in this database of 320,000 offshore companies? Let us have a closer look.

If you look at the “Ukrainians” in the database, it is obvious that the spelling of names is very disparate. There are records in all capital letters, some are capitalized regularly. Name order formats are also different: name-surname, surname-name, surname-name-patronymic, name-patronymic-surname, etc. Also the database of “persons” may return names of firms or totally foreign combinations of phrases and surnames. Perhaps actual “Ukrainians” were lost in other countries during digitizing of the database. Let us search.

Method 1: Borys, Volodymyr, Ihor and other friends

Ukrainian citizens register their offshore companies with their travel passports. In the passports, Ukrainian names are written in their latinized transliteration of Ukrainian version of the name. A person could have been born in Russia, moved to Ukraine recently and all the life could have considered himself “Vadim”, but in a Ukrainian travel passport he would be spelled as “Vadym”. Therefore for the identification of “Ukrainians” in the offshore database one should simply look for all the Ukrainian spellings of names: Vadym, Ihor, Borys, Volodymyr, Oleh, Kateryna, Myroslav, Petro, Danylo, Mykola, Hennadiy, Hryhoriy, Oleksandr etc.

Searching the database with the whole list of names spelled in the Ukrainian way may return quite a bunch of interesting records. For example, this is the search result on ” Borys“.

Mr Borys Lozhkin, the Head of the Presidential Administration can be found with the search for «Borys».

Mr Lozhkin had already been found in the 2010 database “Offshore Leaks”. By the way, the results of the site’s search engine show clearly that linking to countries has been done only within Panama Papers.

E.g. certain Mr. Borys Taver has not been linked to any country. However, the Ukrainian spelling of this name could reveal the citizenship or at least the country of the origin of this gentleman.

A search for Oleksandr lands us 59 candidates for “Ukrainians”:

Most of these entries are linked to Ukraine, but there are clearly Ukrainian names tied to Switzerland, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

How can such apparent “Ukrainians” be tied to other countries? Most likely those are Ukrainians that reside permanently or are registered as tax residents of these countries. However, this does not change their relationship with the mainland Ukraine.

There could also be Ukrainians who received foreign citizenship. And their “Ukrainian” spelling of the name or surname migrated to the passport of their new home country.

Method 2: Serhii, Serhij, Sergij, Sergiy

Another important feature of the search for “Ukrainians” by the name is multiple versions of the spelling of names or surnames. The database contains records since the ‘90s, which means that offshore companies were registered with the identity documents issued back then. And here the spelling depended on the literacy or fancy of the passport officer. Ideally, all translations of names should have been subject to the same standards, but in the ‘90s there was no guarantee that a particular passport office, for example, in a frontier town like Krasnodon or Sevastopol would not spell in its own way.

Thus, if you want to find all the “Ukrainian Serges” you will have to try all possible spelling of the name: “Serhii” (2 entries in the database), “Serhij” (found nothing), “Sergij” (9 persons) Sergiy (38 persons). Here again we find “Ukrainians” from Switzerland, Russia and Cyprus:

The rsearch for “ Oleksiy “ Oleksiy “ returns a total of 11 records:

And it is good to knkow that MR. OLEKSIY MYKOLAYOVYCH AZAROV is assigned to Austria. A search for Oleksii (8 records) lands us an Austrian again MR. OLEKSII MYKOLAYOVYCH AZAROV. Interestingly, these name records are considered separate and have different ID’s, though it is certainly the same person. It would be a good idea to harmonize the data and merge related records for each user.

Again, here we should not forget to go through all the possible spellings: Olexiy (2 records), Aleksiy (1 record).

We have shown so far sample searches on only two names, but the same analysis can be performed on any of the names.

Method 3: Boris, Vladimir, Igor and other friends

In addition to Ukrainian spelling, one should always keep in mind the erratic spelling style of that proverbial “Sevastopol passport office” of the early ‘90s. That is why a search of Ukrainians should be carried out also by the Russian-based spelling of names and surnames. A search for Boris lands us 160 names, among which we find another “Ukrainian” – BORIS KOLISNYCHENKO.

In this case, a simple manual search of all lists with the surname could be of help, and could lead us to a relative in the desired “Ukrainian” jurisdiction or will land us a company with a suspicious number of “Ukrainians” among the founders.

We should also not forget to search by first or last names, which are more common in Ukraine like Taras, Stepan, Zorian, Ostap, Nazar etc.

It could land us some pretty funny results, e.g. a company called Ostap Bender Corp “ was registered somewhere in Switzerland in the ‘90s

Method 4: Search by surname

Now it seems everything is clear about first names. Now let us look into surnames. Ukrainian surnames and their spellings are also easy to track because of their “Ukrainian” transcription:

Гуменюк — Humenyuk/Humeniuk — Gumenyuk

Кириленко — Kyrylenko — Kirilenko

Search by any surname should be done in view of possible misspellings. For example among “Russians” in the Panama Papers database (6000 Officers and more than 11,000 offshore companies) there are many Ukrainian surnames. And separately, we note that Gennady Truhanov, the mayor of Odessa, is indeed among Russians in the database.

To make sure, you can search in the database for the names of all Ukrainian deputies and officials, it might happen that someone turns out “Russian” there. And do not forget to look at the Ukrainian spelling of names and surnames.

Method 5: Search for other countries

As you can see, “Ukrainians” (as well as “Russians”, “Belarusians” or “Chinese”) often emerge in the databases of other countries.

Where can we look for Ukrainian corrupt officials except Russia?

The answer is quite simple. Let us recall where Ukrainians are going for permanent residence, where it was easier to get a passport rapidly, where a part of the Jewish community of Ukraine went, etc.

If you open “Offshore” list for Germany (504 entries), then instead of a purebred German we can meet records in the name of «Monsieur D. Rybolovlev» (not to be confused with the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev from Monaco), «ARKADY LESHCHYNSKYY», «LITVINSKYY MIKHAILO», «SERHIY NEMIROVSKYY» and others.

Similar results can be found in all countries of the world, where a strong Ukrainian diaspora was formed in the ‘90s (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Greece), as well as the countries where it was easiest to start their own business and to obtain permanent residence in the EU (Lithuania , Latvia, Bulgaria).

You can download the entire list and then run a search by syllables typical for Ukrainian names:енко-enko, шко-shko, шин-shyn, тюк-tyuk, вич-vych, чук-chuk etc.

Candidates for “Ukies” can also be detected due to the patronymic, or rather its reduction to a single letter. This is a fairly common form of reduction of the Ukrainian names in the West. For a long time little was known about the founder of WhatsApp, but the old forums listed the former employee of Yahoo under a name of «Jan B. Koum». Finally it was revealed that he was born in Fastiv, Jan Borysovych Koum (Ян Борисович Кум), lived in Kyiv and moved to the US from Ukraine, where he became a billionaire and his company WhatsApp was purchased by Microsoft.

“Ukies” can be found in any list from Switzerland or Italy, to exotic United Arab Emirates or Luxembourg.

It is also worth noting that the fact of the presence of a person on the list is still not all. Further information can be tracked on the social networks Facebook, VK, Odnoklassniki, LinkedIn, XING, Instagram etc. Often, it turns out that these entries are just a result of our business people or programmers, architects working or doing business abroad through offshore companies.

On the other hand, this list also contains Ukrainian politicians, their relatives, friends, acquaintances or just figureheads. And it seems to us, the whole set of information should be a field for further investigations of Ukrainian journalists and law enforcers.

This publication was prepared by Anton Pavlushko, an OSINT analyst for InformNapalm.

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