Ukrainian lawyer Olena Tyshchenko’s story has it all: intrigue, war, a wealthy ex whom she divorced twice. She became an anti-corruption chief but was herself accused of fraud. Then the plot thickened…
To drive through the security checkpoint at the entrance to the St George’s Hill estate is to enter another world. Instinctively you slow the car, as if trying to pin down the differences between this exclusive enclave and the regular affluence of the Surrey beyond its boundaries. The white lines on the road seem to have disappeared, the street signs are discreetly tasteful and there are no kerbstones, just carefully tended grass verges. Nor is there much autumn leaf fall; presumably because an army of ground staff patrol and sweep throughout the day.
Behind high walls and tall trees you can catch glimpses of the mansions of countless millionaires and billionaires, each watched over by cameras and guarded by electric gates.
Here live the superwealthy: City captains, sports stars, TV celebrities and oligarchs. The private and the paranoid, the rich and reclusive. And here too lives Ukrainian lawyer Olena Tyshchenko, who complains of the crippling costs of insuring her Land Rover because of a £65 million ($125 million) asset-freezing order imposed on her by courts, yet offers me a glass of champagne on arrival.
Tyshchenko, 46, is striking, blonde, slim, charming and hospitable. Yet there is something elusive; again it is hard to pin down. She styles herself as a fighter against corruption (she was once Ukraine’s head of criminal assets recovery) but has been continually dogged by corruption allegations. A British judge has commented on the lack of “any proper explanation as to the source of funds” supporting her lifestyle.
She has also been twice married to and divorced from Serhiy Tyshchenko, also 46, a once wealthy businessman. Their first marriage lasted 12 years and ended acrimoniously in 2013; the second marriage lasted a matter of months in 2016.
“Marriage has lost its attractiveness for me,” she says with a laugh. “It was too much. He’s that type of person – he literally has to control your life and be full-on and I’m just not this person any more. I’m not young any more; I cannot have a man telling me what to do, what time to be home.”
Tyshchenko’s house, which is adorned with a Ukrainian flag, is a large, detached villa but still modest for St George’s Hill. She lives with her five daughters and four female refugees from the conflict in her homeland. One of those sheltering under her roof is the daughter of her friend Tetyana Chornovol, a former journalist and activist in the 2014 revolution now fighting in a Ukrainian anti-tank unit.
I am reminded of an old news editor who used to send us reporters out newsgathering with the maxim, “There’s a story behind every front door.” It feels like there are myriad stories in Tyshchenko’s house, but the one causing her most trouble and distress is quite literally behind her front door.
Piled underneath the stairs in her wide, marble-floored hallway are boxes and ring binders containing tens of thousands of documents relating to the fraud case that could see her financially ruined and evicted from this house.
Case BL-2020-001416, WWRT v Tyshchenko & Tyshchenko is one of those that begs the question of why the supposedly overstretched English courts have become increasingly tied up with complex overseas matters.
The Tyshchenkos have been accused in the High Court of embezzling millions of pounds in bogus loans from JSC Fortuna Bank, which he and his family once controlled. It is alleged they set up a network of companies that obtained loans from Fortuna Bank with no intention that the money would ever be repaid. The claim against them exceeds £65 million.
Tyshchenko and her ex-husband vehemently deny any wrongdoing. They say the bank went into liquidation in 2017 because Ukraine’s currency plunged in value following the 2014 revolution. They also stress that the case against them has been heard and rejected by the Ukrainian courts.
The allegations in the British courts have come hand in hand, Tyshchenko tells me, with a series of bizarre happenings: calls and texts from Lebanese phone numbers making extortion demands; anonymised emails alleging that the judge in their case has been compromised; reconnaissance drones buzzing around her house.
The nature of the claimant in this civil case also raises eyebrows. The Tyshchenkos are being pursued not by any individual or business that lost money when Fortuna bank failed nor by any law enforcement agency. The multimillion pound claim comes from a recently formed UK-registered company, WWRT, set up by a 26-year-old Ukrainian lawyer in partnership with a London law firm.
And WWRT’s statement of claim makes clear the case is “governed by Ukrainian law… because Ukraine was the country in which the damage occurred”.
This circuitous legal maze is the latest chapter in an eventful life. Tyshchenko was born Olena Baranova in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv in 1976 when the country was still part of the Soviet Union.
Mykolaiv was a shipbuilding centre of military significance to the Soviet regime and the city was closed to foreigners. Tyshchenko’s father was a Russian engineer and her mother ran a kindergarten. Her only brother was 11 years older than her and left home when she was seven, leaving her, as she remembers, to “grow up as an only child”.
Her family spoke Russian but she went to a school with a strong emphasis on teaching English. She spent much of her time taking extra language lessons and following her passion for rhythmic gymnastics. Love of the sport has stayed with her and today she runs a gymnastics school in Surrey where her 12-year-old daughter, a budding champion, trains.
Her own childhood was a far cry from the comforts of life in St George’s Hill. “It was very Soviet. No money, no luxuries in life, no good food basically. By May every year, I was craving fruit and vegetables because we only had them when they grew. During winter I couldn’t have any fruits or vegetables because they were not on the shelves.
“Everything was very difficult to get – clothes, food. But it was the same for everyone. Also I was studying in an English-language school. If other children were finishing at 2pm I was finishing at 3pm or 4pm and then I was doing rhythmic gymnastics. I was competing. And I was also going to music school, so I was pretty busy.”
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tyshchenko helped organise safe passage for her mother out of Mykolaiv.
“It was one of the cities most heavily bombed. Half the city is already destroyed,” says Tyshchenko. “My mum spent two months in the bomb shelter and then I organised for her to get to Poland where I met her.”
The wait for a UK visa was lengthy but her mother was allowed to travel visa-free to Ireland. She is now living in the picturesque seaside town of Youghal, Co Cork, and doesn’t want to leave. “She has a tiny apartment just for herself. And the whole building is full of Ukrainians and she’s thriving. I’m happy for her. If she comes here… You see how we live – it’s quite a secluded area. She would not have any company. Is it better for her to sit here and watch TV all day or to be around people?”
Despite her Russian-centred upbringing, Tyshchenko considers herself staunchly Ukrainian. She left Mykolaiv aged 18 to study law at university in Kyiv and within six months she was speaking Ukrainian rather than Russian.
Her legal career took her into anti-corruption work and she became a consultant to the Ukrainian parliament. She says, however, she became disillusioned by the persistent corruption within the legal and political system.
The last straw came in a tax case when she alleges she was told by a judge that if she paid him he would rule in her favour – but she had to prove her case as well.
“I had to be 100 per cent right and at the same time I had to pay for this, you know, to get the judgment,” she says. “He was not even the worst judge, but that’s how the system worked. I decided to move to England. I decided, no, I don’t see the future. I don’t want to live in such a country. I don’t want my children to grow up in such a country. And that’s how we relocated, me and the children.”
She made the move in 2006 by which time Tyshchenko had been married for five years and had two young children. Her husband stayed in Ukraine where he and his two brothers ran the family’s Factor group of companies with interests ranging from chemical plants to petrol stations to the Fortuna bank.
She studied for a law diploma at the University of Westminster, a legal practice course and a master’s degree at the London School of Economics, then worked largely for private clients in London and Ukraine.
Tyshchenko maintains she has had no involvement in her husband’s business affairs since 2004 and it is “fanciful” to include her in the case against him. “I moved to England in 2006, then I was a full-time student so obviously I wasn’t involved in any businesses. I had my third child in 2007. So I was a full-time student, with a new baby on my hands and two more still young. And besides, I never liked working with him.”
In 2011 she began representing the Kazakh oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov who was accused of stealing £3.5 billion from the privatised BTA bank of which he had been chairman.
The banker has also been accused of arranging the murder, during a hunting trip in 2004, of Yerzhan Tatishev, his rival for control of BTA. He denies the allegations.
Ablyazov, who had become involved in political opposition to the autocratic regime in Kazakhstan, fled the country in 2009 and was granted asylum in Britain in 2011. From London, where he lived an opulent lifestyle, he continued to finance Kazakh opposition groups while fighting a running legal battle with the Kazakh authorities and their London lawyers.
To his defenders Ablyazov, 59, is a political dissident being pursued by a kleptocratic regime; as recently as 2020 the French courts granted him political asylum. The London courts, however, have consistently taken a different view and repeatedly ruled against him for failure to disclose details of his assets. In 2012 after being found to be in contempt of court in the UK, a warrant was issued for Ablyazov’s arrest and he skipped the country.
A year later the oligarch was tracked to the Côte d’Azur – where he was dividing his time between three luxury villas – thanks to covert surveillance of his lawyer, Tyshchenko. She says her laptop was bugged and some of the information gleaned was passed to Ablyazov’s opponents.
At the same time she was under pressure from her husband, who suspected her of having an affair with Ablyazov and wanted her to stop representing the Kazakh.
“He hated the fact I was working with Mr Ablyazov. There was lots of jealousy going on. We were divorcing; it was an extremely difficult divorce. He didn’t want me to work on Ablyazov’s cases. He wanted me to leave and he kept telling me I had to stop working for Ablyazov otherwise I would be arrested.”
Despite her husband’s warnings, Tyshchenko continued to work for Ablyazov. She often operated from an office in Moscow where, she says, her role was coordinating some of his Russian business affairs. Then in 2013 she was arrested at a Moscow hotel and taken into custody accused of conspiring with Ablyazov to launder the billions missing from his former bank.
Tyshchenko shivers as she recalls her four months in Russian detention, including a period on hunger strike. “They didn’t torture me physically but they were coming to me and saying, ‘Because of your involvement with Mr Ablyazov, your children will go to an orphanage.’
“They didn’t let me call my children at all for two months. My fourth child, who was then my youngest, started talking while I was away, so the first time I heard her actually saying a word was when I called her from a Russian prison. The nanny gave her the phone and she started speaking and I was crying so much. Her first words and I hear them from prison.”
Kazakh and Russian investigators interviewed her regularly, pressing her to provide information against Ablyazov. In the end, Tyshchenko says, she felt she had no option but to co-operate. The deal she signed to secure her release included evidence that would later be used in London in legal action against the Kazakh’s family as well as an agreement that she would not sue anyone over her imprisonment.
“I wanted to be out. I had no option but to accept,” she says. “But I now realise it made me an easy target. My reputation was tarnished because I have been accused in Russia of being Ablyazov’s accomplice.”
Ironically, she says, her prison ordeal helped mend her relationship with her ex-husband. “He practically abandoned his business and spent four months trying to get me out of Russian detention. He was horrified. I forgave him.”
Her involvement with Ablyazov cast an inevitable shadow over the next phase of Tyshchenko’s career when, in 2014, the post-revolution government in Kyiv put her in charge of efforts to recover stolen assets on behalf of the national anti-corruption bureau.
The appointment generated widespread criticism because of the Ablyazov connection but also because Tyshchenko had spent the previous eight years living in London. One MP condemned the decision to give her the post as “ridiculous”.
Her ex-husband was, at the time, also facing suspicion of involvement in a fraud case and was preoccupied with the plummeting fortunes of the Fortuna bank, where he was chairman of the supervisory board.
The Tyshchenkos say the collapse of the bank came about because it had been holding deposits in Ukrainian hryvnia but issuing loans in dollars. When the value of the local currency collapsed, the bank was doomed.
“That’s how Serhiy lost his fortune – he was trying to save the bank. He was providing personal guarantees; he was selling assets, increasing the bank capital. But the national bank remained unsatisfied and eventually the licence was revoked.”
The bank’s licence was revoked in 2017 and it was officially liquidated in 2020. A package of assets, including the unpaid loans, was sold to Star Investment, a Ukrainian company. When its action against the Tyshchenkos in the Ukrainian courts failed, Star sold on the loans package in March 2020 to WWRT.
This is the moment at which a Ukrainian legal issue, concerning the failure of a small Ukrainian bank that loaned money to Ukrainian businesses, was transformed into a British case.
WWRT had been registered at Companies House in February 2020, just a month before it acquired the package of disputed loans.
The new company’s website claims it has “a dynamic team with expertise in making asset recoveries worldwide” and which is “adept at finding and recovering assets, including those hidden from public view”.
The reality seems more prosaic. WWRT is 80 per cent owned by a Ukrainian lawyer, Olga Gutovksa, 26, whose PR claims – rather improbably – she is “arguably one of the most successful lawyers in the world”. Her law firm, Gutovksa & Partners, purports to have a presence in London, Madrid, Washington DC and Kyiv but provides no address details.
The remaining 20 per cent stake in WWRT is held by Georgina Rafferty who, as Georgina Squire, is a senior partner at the London legal firm Rosling King, which acts for WWRT against the Tyshchenkos.
WWRT has secured money from a litigation funder – an investment business that finances legal actions in return for a hefty slice of the proceeds – to take on the case. In a statement, WWRT said Tyshchenko had “made many unsupported allegations against WWRT and people associated with it”.
On September 4, 2020, just seven months after it came into being, WWRT scored a remarkable legal victory in the High Court in London.
After hearing allegations that Fortuna’s money had been loaned to companies controlled by the Tyshchenkos in a major fraud, Mrs Justice Bacon granted a worldwide freezing order against the divorced couple’s assets in the sum of £65 million.
Such urgent orders are the kind of draconian power used against terrorists and major organised criminals but, as is standard procedure in such cases, the Tyshchenkos were not given any advance notice of the hearing. Instead the order was served on Mrs Tyshchenko at home the next day while the papers were put into her ex-husband’s hands as he played golf.
The list of assets allegedly linked to the fraud includes a renewable energy investment firm and a company said to have claimed furlough payments during the Covid pandemic. Tyshchenko says that even the bank account of her children’s gymnastics school was temporarily blocked.
WWRT also claimed the couple own a villa in Mougins, north of Cannes, but Tyshchenko insists they lost it years ago. “We used to have a house but it was repossessed by the bank because we could no longer afford the repayment of the loans.”
Tyshchenko and her ex-husband have challenged the freezing order unsuccessfully. The judge, Mrs Justice Bacon, has remarked that the couple have not explained “the disappearance of [their] considerable wealth in recent years”. A judge in the Ablyazov case previously described Serhiy Tyshchenko’s evidence about this wealth as “vague and evasive”.
According to Tyshchenko, the only significant asset she has is her house, which was bought for £5.4 million in 2008 through an offshore company registered in the Isle of Man. Following her first divorce, she became the sole beneficial owner of the house.
Despite their turbulent marital history, Serhiy Tyshchenko continues to be a regular visitor to St George’s Hill and is a member of the nearby exclusive Wisley golf club.
Tyshchenko says her ex-husband’s visits are important to her children. Dotted around the large sitting room, where we sit on oatmeal sofas discussing her plight, are lots of framed pictures of Serhiy with his daughters.
“It has never been an issue even if the first divorce was extremely acrimonious. I never took his pictures away. I wanted him to spend time with the children. Now we’re on very good terms and we’re in the same boat because of this litigation. It has actually made us closer.”
She is outraged that WWRT used private detectives to put her husband under surveillance when he visited England in April and was seen at the house, driving her car and playing golf. The surveillance evidence was presented to the High Court, which at the time was trying to ascertain his whereabouts to attend a hearing. The judge in the case issued a bench warrant for Serhiy’s arrest and when he came to Britain in June he was held in prison overnight before being brought to court.
Tyshchenko says her ex-husband is busy running a chemical plant, part of his family’s business group, that is supplying the Ukrainian military. His arrest after he navigated his way through the war-torn country to get back to Britain was “beyond any human norms”.
She insists she will fight to the end to keep her family home. “There has to be a proper claim. It is not enough for some random bystander to come to my house and say, ‘I think you embezzled that.’
“There is no evidence this house was bought with the funds from Fortuna Bank. The claim against me was brought by an improper claimant; they do not have a claim against me.”
Wherever the truth lies in this labyrinthine litigation, Tyshchenko is not alone in questioning the readiness of the English legal system to take on cases like this.
The National Crime Agency warned in 2020 the UK courts were vulnerable to exploitation: “Money could be laundered when criminals, often those from overseas jurisdictions, agree to sue each other in the English court with the payment of damages being used to launder their funds. They can also arrange to bring cases against themselves using sham companies.”
There is no suggestion of such misconduct in this litigation, but Thomas Mayne, research fellow in anti-corruption at Oxford University, believes the courts are stumbling blindly into complex overseas cases.
“The courts are getting involved in stuff they clearly know nothing about. I don’t know the specifics of this case, but it seems that you can acquire a UK company, move stuff to that company and then file a huge claim in the UK courts.
“We have to be very careful about cases like this. To accept a claim of this size and nature from a recently created company – I think it’s crazy.
“The UK system by and large respects the rule of law and is a fair system. But we are bringing in all kinds of political motivations, corruption concerns and other considerations yet seem happy to take these cases on board.”
Ukraine’s Deposit Guarantee Fund, the state liquidator, is also questioning the rights of the UK courts to rule on a case that has already been dismissed in Kyiv and has asked to be made a party to the case in London.
Tyshchenko believes the British legal system is treating her and her former husband unfairly.
She is concerned over the way in which the freezing order was issued and how the courts ordered her ex-husband’s arrest. She has asked Mrs Justice Bacon to recuse herself from the case and pass it to another judge.
The request – including the claim she has been compromised – has been rejected as “entirely without substance” by the judge.
English law, Tyshchenko contends, places too much power in the hands of a single judge and pays insufficient attention to judgments reached in other jurisdictions.
“I think it’s a feeling of being superior and different from the world, but in fact, it makes England a very comfortable jurisdiction for manipulation,” she argues.
“There is nothing inherently good about having a very old system. The world is changing, the rules are changing and the law has to be adequate to the current situation. As in this case, the legal system has to be alert to false claims coming from abroad.”
Fighting the case is now Tyshchenko’s 24/7 occupation and she says she will be representing herself and her ex-husband. Cost orders totalling £590,000 have already been made against them.
“We have no money to pay legal fees and it would cost £70,000 just to get a law firm to read all that,” she says, gesturing with a glance over her shoulder at the boxes stacked up under the stairs.
“I have no life any more. I am bankrupt, my reputation is in tatters. The clients are abandoning me. One reason is I cannot work for them any more because I’m too busy. Second reason is they want to stay away from me because my reputation is becoming toxic to anyone who is associated with me.
“It’s a blow to my hope of any work as a lawyer and that’s the only thing in life I can do properly. I’m a lawyer and I’ve been a lawyer all my life.”
Written by: Sean O’Neill
© The Times of London