The Ukraine corruption rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper without a shred of accountability for any of the perps – particularly the Americans who were hip-deep in the corruption from the beginning. The latest is this report from Fox News on 16 November regarding a “golden toilet” scandal:
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy is battling the deepest crisis of his presidency after a money-laundering probe named members of his inner circle, including an associate accused of living in “golden toilet” luxury….and associates allegedly linked to a plot to siphon around $100 million from Ukraine’s energy sector during the war with Russia.
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Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s financial system has come under scrutiny and now some Ukrainians are accused of taking kickbacks from projects meant to protect energy plants during wartime, prompting public outrage and undermining faith in government.
Well, the corruption goes back a lot further than 2022!
EARLY DAYS
Over 25 years, extrapolating conservative annual averages of $10-20 billion yields a rough cumulative total of $250-500 billion in direct losses associated with corruption in Ukraine, excluding indirect impacts like foregone growth and investment deterrence.
Actual corruption figures could be higher, given unrecovered privatization-era windfalls and wartime aid vulnerabilities, as noted here, but they remain imprecise due to limited enforcement and data opacity.
From 2012 to 2016 in particular, Ukraine’s corruption was rampant, especially under President Viktor Yanukovych’s kleptocratic regime, which fueled the 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution and his ouster. This was a classic “color revolution” that was supported to the hilt by the Obama-Biden regime.
The US emerged as a major player in post-revolution stabilization, providing over $3 billion in aid (military, economic, and humanitarian) while conditioning support on anti-corruption reforms to prevent fund misuse and align Ukraine with Western standards. This was exactly as intended, as that it funded the corruption, including almost certainly kickbacks to the Biden family and others. Hold that thought!
US efforts at the time for show included diplomatic pressure from Joe Biden and Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland, support for new institutions like the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU, established 2015 and responsible for uncovering the “golden toilet corruption” mentioned above), and collaboration with the IMF. In parallel, serious controversies arose, especially around Biden family business ties to Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, sparking allegations of conflicts of interest and selective enforcement of Ukrainian anti-corruption laws, with the US legacy media doing its damnedest to cover it all up through the present.
Remember Joe Biden being caught on camera threatening to withhold $1 billion in US foreign aid if a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into the Burisma corruption wasn’t fired? Refresh your memory here:
The corruption was blatant, and crimes were obvious, and yet – like the criminality of the fake Russian hoax that has been uncovered in 2025 alone – none of the perpetrators have ever been held to account. The criminality was obvious from the public record – and Joe Biden’s own lips. However, the money-laundering has never truly seen the light of day despite the fact that the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) almost certainly tracked it from day one of the first illegal transaction onward.
The closest that the Bidens came to accountability was during the 2019-2020 US Senate Homeland Security Committee and Senate Finance Committee’s investigation that probed Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings that leveraged the findings of an FBI-led joint task force that investigated Hunter Biden’s money-laundering in 2018. The report alleged that Hunter Biden leveraged his father’s position for a lucrative Burisma board seat ($50K/month, despite limited expertise), creating an “appearance of a conflict of interest,” which earned him $6.5 million for himself and Biden associates from Ukrainian sources through 2019. Yet, no criminal referrals to investigate the corruption were made by the two Senate committees to DoJ. And even Joe Biden got a pass despite that incriminating video. It smelled like a coverup.
Let us explore the topic further.
THE FinCEN
As I’ve previously written about here, this is the original purpose of the FinCEN from the agency’s history posted here as stated in 1970.
Our overall aim is to build a system to combat organized crime and white-collar crime and to deter and prevent the use of secret foreign bank accounts for tax fraud and their use to screen from view a wide variety of criminally related financial activities, and to conceal and cleanse criminal wealth. – Statement of Eugene T. Rossides, Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Enforcement and Operations at a Senate Hearing on Foreign Bank Secrecy June 9, 1970
The agency was not formally established until 1990 when the above mission functions that were dispersed in various Treasury Dept organizations were consolidated into the FinCEN. The mission was later modified by the 2001 Patriot Act to include requirements to track terrorist funding worldwide. Here is today’s FinCEN mission statement.
The mission of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is to safeguard the financial system from illicit use, combat money laundering and its related crimes including terrorism, and promote national security through the strategic use of financial authorities and the collection, analysis, and dissemination of financial intelligence.
The FinCEN derives its authority through enforcement of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which was originally passed “to prevent financial institutions from being used as tools by criminals to hide or launder their ill-gotten gains.”
The law requires banks and other financial institutions to provide documentation, such as currency transaction reports, to regulators. Such documentation can be required from banks whenever their clients deal with suspicious cash transactions involving sums of money in excess of $10,000. The Act grants authorities the ability to more easily reconstruct the nature of the transactions.
Two key tools are used by the FinCEN to track large and/or suspicious financial transactions: the Currency Transaction Report (CTR), and the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). CTRs are standard reports by banks and other financial institutions of all transactions over $10,000. SARs are filed when banks and other financial institutions suspect suspicious activity in a given account. The SAR initiates an investigation by the FinCEN, with a goal of identifying bank customers who are involved in money laundering, fraud or terrorist funding. Banking customers are not required to be informed that CTRs are filed (the CTR is common knowledge and common practice), but a SAR is filed if a customer is informed and then declines to complete the transaction.
Here is where it gets interesting:
[N]ot all transactions greater than $10,000 need to reported with a CTR. Recent legislation has identified certain groups known as “exempt persons.”
The three categories of “exempt persons” are:
· Any bank in the United States.
· Departments or agencies that fall under federal, state, or local governments, including any organization that exercises government authority.
· Any corporation whose stock is traded on the NYSE, Nasdaq and American Stock Exchange (excluding stocks listed on the Emerging Company Marketplace and under the Nasdaq Small-Cap Issues heading).
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN REGARDING UKRAINE MONEY-LAUNDERING?
That “exempt persons” euphemism means that a lot of financial transactions of greater than $10,000 made by customers like the Bidens and their business associates through the exempted groups are simply not reported. And what is the likelihood that SARs are ever initiated by banks doing business with and for US politicians? Probably only those transactions to and from foreign banks known for, or suspected of, money-laundering operations. Luxembourg is a red flag in that regard.
Hunter Biden has been linked to financial transactions with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese nationals. Are there other SARs that were examined by the FinCEN as part of that 2018 FBI-led joint task force that investigated Hunter Biden’s money-laundering? Almost certainly so. The probability is high that there were Latvian and Cyprus bank transactions that have since been buried, too.
Then there is this bank transaction record that includes Privat Bank (Ukraine/Burisma) for the month of April 2014. Morgan-Stanley is an investment bank focusing on “capital investments and wealth management” that handled Rosemont Seneca (Hunter Biden’s company). Payments from Privat were recorded monthly totally millions of dollars in 2014 alone. The sources of that money almost certainly were laundered US foreign aid to Ukraine via Burisma and the $3.5M received by Hunter Biden from Elena Baturina, the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, in 2014. It fits the pattern of Ukrainian corruption that has almost certainly continued to this very day.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
What other bank records are there that record Hunter Biden’s financial transactions with different foreign banks suspected of money-laundering? For example, what previously filed SARS on Chinese financial transactions with the Bidens does the FinCEN have in hand? There have to be many given what has been uncovered about the Biden family dealings with China. Unraveling the money-laundering operations that supported the Bidens’ overseas business empire has never really seen the light of day, and certainly no real accountability has ever been administered for the corrupt acts.
One thing is certain: the FinCEN has all of the data/evidence. In reality, the FinCEN collects ALL financial data – holdings, transfers, income, outflow, savings account data (virtually EVERYONE’s savings and expenditures) – everything! They were collecting worldwide long before NSA started vacuuming up phone and internet data. How is this information collected? Some collection is cooperative through treaties via CTRs and SARs while some is collected through NSA general collections, which are automatically gleaned for banking data. In hostile or non-cooperative countries, the monthly data is turned over via recruited assets and forwarded to the receiving US agencies.
This kind of collection is important and is one of the reasons HUMINT will never go out of style. The financial collections run alongside collections of phone/cell data (referred to as “tapes” due to the media when the programs started but now usually hard drives or via insertion of Trojan Horse “taps”).
Correlating the two collection streams should have been done and indictments made afterward. But it has all apparently been swept under the rug – if that 2018 joint task force even bothered to involve the FinCEN in their investigation.
Despite the 2025 revelations that the Hunter Biden laptop was genuine and not “Russian disinformation,” as those 51 lying Democrat former intelligence community apparatchiks claimed just before the 2020 election, the Biden family corruption in Ukraine has been conveniently forgotten. However, there is a statute of limitations on foreign money laundering that extends to 10 years in cases where the funds involved are proceeds of specified foreign offenses listed in § 1956(c)(7)(B) (e.g., bribery).
Furthermore, if proven to involve a structured enterprise (e.g., an association of US and/or Ukrainian entities, officials, or intermediaries) engaging in a pattern of predicate acts—such as money laundering (18 U.S.C. §§ 1956–1957), wire/mail fraud against the government (18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343), or bribery (18 U.S.C. § 201)—it could qualify for a RICO investigation under 18 U.S.C. § 1962. These offenses are explicitly listed as racketeering activities in § 1961(1), and long-term laundering of federal aid funds (diverted abroad and cycled back) would likely satisfy the “pattern” requirement of at least two related acts within a 10-year window, especially if tied to ongoing schemes defrauding US taxpayers or influencing policy/commerce.
It’s long past time for the FBI and DoJ to conduct a much-needed real RICO investigation into Biden family money-laundering and corruption, followed by prosecutions to the fullest extent of the law.
Deal with the golden toilet later. It’s misdirection.
The end.
This article originally appeared in Stu Cvrk’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission
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Mr. Cvrk, you speak (write) for many of us who are not in the ‘big club’ and are continually disappointed by the failure of the US Justice system to pursue what appear to be blatant crimes. Some guys who are friends with corrupt leaders get a golden toilet, other guys who are family members of corrupt leaders get a ‘golden ticket’ board seat on foreign corporations.
If only we had a justice department of some kind that would take prosecutorial action and really make an effort to investigate potential corruption, instead of a ‘just us’ department who appear to look the other way for those who are connected in the big club (apologies to Mr. Carlin).