A Brussels-based human rights group accused of defending oligarchs charged with stealing billions of euro and working with the Kremlin against Ukraine was invited to speak at a prestigious public hearing in Washington DC by a leading Democratic congressman, writes James Hipwell.
Lyudmila Kozlovska, originally from Ukraine but now president of human rights group Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF), spoke on Capitol Hill in June at a hearing of the bipartisan Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on trends in transnational repression.
Her organization is linked to Qatargate’s disgraced former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri and is accused of whitewashing the reputations of oligarchs suspected of stealing billions from banks in Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Panzeri, who worked with the ODF and was chair of the European Parliament’s human rights sub-committee, was charged with corruption, money laundering and participation in a criminal organisation in 2022 but cut a deal with Belgian prosecutors to share information about the cash-for-influence scandal known as Qatargate.
The authorities in Kiev also investigated and sanctioned Kozlovska’s brother – who funded the ODF – over military contracts through which a company he controlled continued to supply equipment to the Russian Navy after the Kremlin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Polish secret service sources have also claimed the ODF worked for the Russian secret services, but this has been denied by the NGO.
However, a report by the Institute for European Integrity, a think tank which monitors the non-governmental sector, described ODF as a “high-risk” NGO because of its links to several controversial oligarchs and accused it of working to “whitewash the reputations of…fugitives and kleptocrats” under the banner of human rights advocacy.
ODF has advocated on behalf of Veaceslav Platon, 52, an oligarch and former Moldovan MP, who was arrested in London earlier this year over suspicions he masterminded a multi-billion-dollar scheme which moved vast sums of criminal cash through Moldova’s banking system.
Beneficiaries of the funds – believed to be at least €18 billion but reportedly as high as €75 billion – have allegedly invested the laundered money in businesses and high-end property in London and other locations around the world.
Platon – said to be one of the wealthiest people in Moldova with business interests in sugar and banking, as well as investments in atomic energy in Ukraine – was an MP in his home country from 2009-10.
He was arrested in Kiev in 2016 and extradited to Moldova where he was jailed for 18 years in 2017 for money laundering and fraud involving $1 billion, labelled locally as the “theft of the century”.
He was controversially released and then acquitted in June 2021 following a retrial, moving to the UK the following month where he claimed political asylum. Months later, Moldovan prosecutors charged him with the fraud and forgery charges he currently faces.
The ODF has also frequently spoken out in defence of Mukhtar Ablyazov, a former banker and member of the Kazakhstan government, who is accused of stealing billions from his former employer and fled Kazakhstan for Britain in 2009.
ODF claims Ablyazov, 62, is a political dissident, but the London courts have consistently taken a different view and repeatedly ruled against him for failure to disclose details of his assets. In 2012, after being found 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 – and he now lives in Paris. In June 2024 a New York court awarded over $32 million in favour of Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank in a case which demonstrated that Ablyazov abused his position as its former chairman by issuing fictitious loans worth billions of dollars, leading to its collapse in 2009.
Previously, in December 2022 a New York jury found him guilty of a $218 million fraud against BTA. Meanwhile, in England, properties belonging to him – including a magnificent house worth €23 million on ‘Billionaire’s Row’ in Hampstead, London, and a 40-hectare estate on the edge of Windsor Great Park – have been put up for sale by the courts.
For years there have been rumours that Ablyazov funds the ODF. The IEI report also makes this claim and, indeed, Ablyazov’s close associate Bota Jardemalie, who was a board member at BTA and fled Kazakhstan with the fugitive in 2009, is close to Kozlovska and regularly appears at ODF events.
The ODF denies that it is funded by Ablyazov, but the IEI has uncovered a complex web of companies through which the organisation is funded. Many of the companies are controlled by Kozlovska’s brother Petro Kozlovsky and sister Elena Miroshnikova, both now resident in Boca Raton, Florida.
They control a string of companies based in Crimea, where the Kozlovsky family originates and which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. Mayak, a key company in the network, has made its fortune supplying materials to the Russian Navy. The IEI report describes the Russian Navy as the company’s “main consumer” and has unearthed evidence of corruption and links to the Russian government.
At the hearing on Capitol Hill Kozlovska complained that her extended family members have been penalised by financial institutions following the funding they provided her organisation. She said: “Our financial data was weaponised against…our partners and our family members transnationally. This is what we call transnational financial repression.”
The hearing was chaired by Democratic House Representative Jim McGovern, a former chairman and ranking member of the House Rules Committee, one of the most powerful committees in Congress.
He said: “[Lyudmila Kozlovska] and her organisation have been the target of transnational repression through the international financial system and the weaponisation of laws designed to deal with money laundering, financing of terrorism, cyber security, and mutual legal assistance.”
