Mechanisms of Presidential Corruption: How Trusted Allies Manage Cash and Influence Networks

An analytical overview of how presidential allies execute corruption, manage large cash reserves, and operate through a complex network of officials, offshore schemes, and loyal intermediaries.

To clarify: when people say “the president’s friends,” what they really mean is “the executors of the president’s criminal orders.” This was written by Kostiantyn Korsun on his Facebook page.

Because the system works roughly like this: a top politician does not want to get his hands dirty with openly criminal and shady actions, so he brings in his long-time acquaintances, who are definitely not NABU agents, and says something like: “Why don’t you handle my financial affairs, the ones I can’t deal with myself?”

Some agree, and then they are given unofficial but significant power — usually through verbal, undocumented instructions.

For example, the president calls in a deputy prime minister and quietly tells him: “Tomorrow a person from me will come to you, do what he asks, he will speak on my behalf.” And then looks at him meaningfully: “You understand, right?”

What exactly is being discussed — the messenger will explain during the meeting.

The president himself never says words like “this amount,” “kickback,” “my share,” and so on — he is afraid of wiretapping. Though that’s if the president is smart, and that’s why the “Mindich tapes” may contain some very amusing stories.

But these dangerous words are always spoken clearly by “the president’s friend” — when he arrives at the agreed meeting. There, he will either be handed a bag of dollars or euros, or someone will transfer a hundred bitcoins to a certain wallet right in front of him, or another official will be instructed to rewrite property or liquid assets in the name of “the president’s friend” — there are many variations. And in reality, everything is much more complicated and tangled, with various offshore schemes and a large network of front persons and cover operations.

That is why it is so difficult to prove the president’s direct involvement in corruption: he acts through an extensive network of trusted individuals, and only two or three key people — his “friends,” whose loyalty he has no doubts about — have direct contact with Him.

These “friends” mostly understand that there is no point in betraying the boss — you’ll end up in prison together. And no one wants to sit in prison when a couple of billion dollars are waiting in a villa in Spain.

But this seemingly impregnable system is also vulnerable. Because everything is built on the “human factor”: no procedures, protocols, or institutions.

And the “human factor” always brings risks inside a criminal organization.

Someone blurted something out while drunk. Someone took offense at someone else. Someone got involved with the wrong woman. Someone feels his share is unfairly small. Envy, hatred, lust, greed — all this and much more are also characteristic of the network of the president’s “friends.”

Anti-corruption agencies know all this and wait for the right moment. Sometimes they create or deliberately provoke those moments. At the same time they actively watch, monitor, listen, and observe. They intercept traffic. They find things during searches. Cryptocurrency exchange rates are unstable, access to crypto wallets is tied to devices (which can be lost, seized, or stolen), so good old cash is still very popular.

And a lot of cash requires a lot of physical space — while moving “black cash” into the banking system is long, expensive, and conspicuous: Uncle Sam sees almost all cashless banking operations.

That’s why these so-called “friends of the president” literally store tons of cash in their own apartments, in the homes of friends and relatives, and in apartment-safes guarded by security.

And if a gang of corrupt officials has been “under the microscope” of an effective anti-corruption body for long enough, it’s practically impossible to hide the addresses where the money is kept. That’s why cash is found during searches — there’s nowhere to hide large volumes of paper money.

There are still naive people who insist that “the president can’t and shouldn’t know what his friends do.”

But the truth is that these “friends” engage in corruption at the request of and under the direction of the president himself — with the involvement of other politicians and officials, under the cover of presidentially controlled security services and hand-picked “law enforcers.”

Coordinated and synchronized, exactly like a “criminal organization.”

War or no war, a billion won’t steal itself.