KYIV -- Russian tax documents indicate that the majority owners of two companies in Ukraine's instant-loan sector hold Russian citizenship, Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, has found -- a violation of Ukrainian banking regulations that deem such citizenship a security risk.
Andriy Manucharov owns 90 percent of Prosto Pozyka, a company whose name means Just A Loan. His wife, Natalia Manucharova, owns 90 percent of Time Credit, according to corporate data monitor YouControl.
According to Russian tax service records that match his name and date of birth, Manucharov acquired a Russian passport on April 10, 2014 -- roughly a month and a half after Russian troops occupied Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, where he has a real-estate management firm.
Schemes found further evidence of Russian citizenship after coming across Russian import records that list a $2.7 million, 27-meter yacht, Serenity AM, imported by an Andriy Manucharov into Crimea in September 2023.
Manucharov founded Prosto Pozyka in Kyiv in March 2014, as Russia was cementing control over Crimea. A Ukrainian minority partner, Yevhen Slyusar, owns 10 percent of Prosto Pozyka and Time Credit, in which Manucharova holds a 90 percent stake.
Russian tax documents that match her date of birth show that Manucharova obtained Russian citizenship in April 2015, roughly three years before Time Credit's creation.
Manucharova could not be reached for comment. In a phone conversation, Manucharov rejected Schemes' question about his Russian citizenship as "nonsense."
"Don't fantasize," he said, adding in a second conversation: "You probably need to take some medication."
The two companies face potential scrutiny from the State Security Service following the publication of the Schemes report on July 19.
In a statement sent to Schemes on July 24, a deputy chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), Dmytro Oliynyk, said the bank would ask the State Security Service and other intelligence organs to "obtain additional information" about whether the companies' owners have Russian citizenship.
If the central bank confirms Schemes' findings, it may suspend the companies' licenses under Article 48 of Ukraine's financial services law. A May 2022 NBU regulation stipulates that citizens "of the state that carries out armed aggression against Ukraine" -- meaning Russia -- are prohibited until the end of martial law from owning a financial institution that is not a bank or having any say in its operations.
Oliynyk added that the central bank, which renewed the companies' licenses this spring, had no prior information that either of the Manucharovs was a Russian citizen. However, legal and corporate documents obtained from a source with access to these files show that, despite the NBU ban on Russian ownership of such firms, the couple retained control of the instant-loan companies, with Manucharov contributing 4.5 million hryvnyas ($109,000) to the firm's share capital in September 2023. Schemes shared these documents with the NBU.
Neither Prosto Pozyka nor Time Credit is a major player in Ukraine's burgeoning instant-loan market. Their branches, which offer short-term loans of 2,000 to 50,000 hryvnyas ($48 to $1,212), total fewer than 45 nationwide. Prosto Pozyka's top annual interest rate, according to its website, is nearly 1.6 million percent.
But some experts fear that, with Ukrainians increasingly using such loans to make ends meet -- 67 percent of 2,084 respondents in one 2023 survey -- debts for such firms' high-interest, few-questions-asked loans could pose a national-security risk.
Customers struggling to pay maximum daily interest rates of 1 percent could accept illicit payments, including from Russia for acts of sabotage, to cover what they owe, experts said.
"It's this category that will be vulnerable because their problem, on average, is having very little money," said Taras Kotov, a former chairman of the Public Control Council of the Economic Security Bureau, an agency charged with addressing threats to the Ukrainian economy. "But if you look at the FSB's (Russian Federal Security Service's) operational budget, this money [that loan customers owe] is next to nothing."
Citing testimony, Kyiv prosecutor Dmytro Vlasov said he believes instant-loan debt prompted one 48-year-old woman and her teenage son to accept payment from the Russian security services to commit arson this June against two cars owned by Ukrainian military personnel. Kotov, who was one of the victims, concurs.
No such attacks have been linked to debts owed to either Prosto Pozyka or Time Credit, which have never been targets of a criminal investigation.
Between 2003 and 2004, Manucharov, who has claimed he served as the commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine at the Crimean port of Sevastopol, ran Ukrmorport, a now-disbanded state agency that oversaw 19 Ukrainian seaports. He resigned amid reports of financial irregularities.
Manucharov cut short his conversation with Schemes and could not be asked about the yacht that was imported into Russian-occupied Crimea, where the couple's son, Ivan Manucharov, heads the Russian-imposed legislature's Information Policy, Technology, and Communication Committee as a deputy from Russia's ruling United Russia party.
Manucharov also does not appear to have publicly addressed his reported role, after founding Prosto Pozyka, as an adviser to the director of Rosmorport, a Russian Transportation Ministry company that manages Russia's seaports. The Russian news outlet Materik.ru identified him as a Rosmorport adviser in a 2015 article about a tennis tournament in Georgia's Russian-occupied Abkhazia region in which Manucharov had played.
The state-owned Russian military-industrial conglomerate Rostec and Russia's military export agency Rosoboroneksport, both internationally sanctioned entities, sponsored the tournament.
Materik.ru pictured Manucharov, a founder of the Ukrainian Tennis Club, standing at the tournament to the left of Russian lawmaker Konstantin Zatulin, who has since been internationally sanctioned for his support of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Rosmorport website shows no information about an Andriy Manucharov.
In 2016, an article in Flag Rodiny (Flag of the Motherland), the Russian Black Sea Fleet's official publication, identified Manucharov as a reserve Russian military captain -- a status possibly linked to his Soviet-era service. Manucharov was participating in a tennis tournament in Russian-occupied Crimea to celebrate the Black Sea fleet's 233rd anniversary.
He no longer resides in Ukraine. According to a source with access to Ukrainian border information, Manucharov flew from Kyiv to Istanbul in December 2021, just ahead of Russia's full-scale invasion, and has not returned to Ukraine.
On August 1, the site MarineTraffic, which tracks international shipping, reported that the yacht Serenity AM was off the coast of the popular Turkish Mediterranean resort island of Adakoy.
