President Volodymyr Zelensky said that “Sense Bank” should be privatized this year.
"We need to liberalize the banking sector and expand entrepreneurial opportunities. As for ʼSense Bankʼ, the need to privatize this bank has already been identified, and there should be no delays in the privatization process: the bank should be privatized this year," he stressed.
This statement came shortly after the Ukrainian Press Agency published a previously unknown portion of the “Mindich recordings”. The recordings show that the composition of the supervisory board of the state-owned “Sense Bank”, appointed on June 18, 2025, was discussed more than a month earlier by those involved in the Midas case.
The tapes supposedly recorded a conversation between Oleksandr Zukerman and Vasyl Vesely, who became an advisor to the head of “Sense Bank” after its nationalization from Russian owners in 2023. Previously, the interlocutors of the Presidentʼs Office in business circles called Vesely a "supervisor" from the Presidentʼs Office for Sense Bank, where no decision was made without him.
In a telephone conversation on May 9, 2025, Vesely reported a list of desired members of the bankʼs supervisory board: "Pyotr Novak, Jerzy Shugayev, Eva de Falk, Oleksandr Shchur, Mykola Gladyshenko, and Oleh Mistiuk." And on June 18, the government appointed these people to the supervisory board of Sense Bank.
- Previously known as “Alfa-Bank Ukraine” and owned by sanctioned Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, and Andriy Kosogov, “Sense Bank” changed its name in December 2022 and became state-owned in the summer of 2023.
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