Zelenskyy Regime Calls for BlackRock to Do Business in Shell Shocked Ukraine

For the Man in Green, death, destruction, and misery are fantastic business opportunities.

By Kurt Nimmo
Global Research, January 26, 2023
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Is Larry Fink, CEO of the investment colossus BlackRock, worried about an Iskander missile taking out his office in midtown Manhattan (or Washington, Palo Alto, Boston, Atlanta, etc.)? No, of course not. But maybe he should.

On January 24, the former television comedian and current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told banksters and corporate titans that death, destruction, and misery are fantastic business opportunities. His pitch was delivered via video to the National Association of State Chambers in Boca Raton, Florida.

The Man in Green said,

“We have already managed to attract attention and have cooperation with such giants of the international, financial and investment world as BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, [and] such American brands as Starlink or Westinghouse have already become part of our Ukrainian way… Everyone can become a big business by working with Ukraine, in all sectors, from weapons and defense to construction, from communication to agriculture, from transport to IT, from banks to medicine. And I believe that freedom must always win. And I invite you to work with us right now.”

Indeed, Ukraine is a near-perfect environment for modern corporate-crony business and financial operations. It is the most corrupt nation in Europe. It is up there with Colombia and Brazil. According to Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in 2021.

BlackRock is no stranger to criminal behavior. In 2018, police raided its offices in Germany. “The raid is part of the country’s biggest post-war fraud investigation, known as the cum-ex scandal,” Deutsche Welle reported.

In 2015, BlackRock was charged by the SEC “with breaching its fiduciary duty by failing to disclose a conflict of interest created by the outside business activity of a top-performing portfolio manager.”

In 2020, Mexico accused the company of taking “direct and indirect control of five energy infrastructure projects, including two pipelines considered to be of national security, and six oil exploration blocks.” In other words, standard neoliberal “stakeholder” behavior.

“Passively Funding Crimes Against Humanity: How Your Savings May Be Financing Internment Camps and Forced Labor in China” is a report released by Hong Kong Watch. The report lists corporations involved in making “a return” on the persecution of Muslim Uyghurs in China. BlackRock, HSBC, UBS, Invesco, Deutsche Bank, and others invested pension funds in the “construction of repressive infrastructure” in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Moreover, BlackRock is heavily invested in the death merchant industry. William Hartung writes:

The company’s “U.S. aerospace and defense” fund has billions of dollars invested in major weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman… Much of this funding goes to pay for weapons we don’t need at prices we can’t afford, from Lockheed Martin’s defective F-35 combat aircraft to General Dynamics’ next-generation ballistic missile firing submarine.

Code Pink, the progressive antiwar group, has accused BlackRock and other corporations of raking in billions on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

Even though BlackRock says that it will focus on environmental sustainability, it continues to invest in companies that slash and burn the planet’s lungs. BlackRock is cashing in on the destruction of the Amazon by investing millions in oil, mining, and agribusinesses that not only destroy the rainforests but displace indigenous communities. Additionally, BlackRock decided to invest its money in the Brazilian meatpacking company JBS, another company that contributes to deforestation. The destruction of the Amazon Rainforest is at an all-time high.

Larry Fink rubs elbows with the Saudi Crown Prince, a medieval monarch who had the journalist Jamal Khashoggi carved up. Saudi Arabia stands accused of serious human rights abuses in its war on the people of Yemen. “The situation in Yemen has been labeled as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the poorest country in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has been accused of war crimes for rape, torture, and aerial attacks,” notes Code Pink.

Vanity Fair was spot on when it posted an article titled, “Larry Fink’s Not Gonna Let a Little Murder Spoil His Fun in Saudi Arabia.”

Zelenskyy’s recent announcement of an “anti-corruption” crusade is nothing if not a PR effort designed to clean up Ukraine’s image as a corrupt state run by oligarchs and on-the-take government officials. The Man in Green vowed during his presidential campaign to clamp down on corruption, never mind his connection to the top-dog oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky.

However, political expediency and optics have severed the relationship between the two, revealing the level of backstabbing and treachery in Ukraine’s post-coup government. Kolomoisky is no longer of any use. He is now radioactive and faces possible prosecution by the USG.

Zelenskyy’s much-ballyhooed effort to clean house and refurbish Ukraine’s abysmal record on corruption has resulted in criminal elements stealing even more money from the impoverished people of Ukraine.

Finally, in order to put all of this into perspective, consider Zelenskyy and the Panama and Pandora papers. “The leaked documents suggest he had—or has—a previously undisclosed stake in an offshore company, which he appears to have secretly transferred to a friend weeks before winning the presidential vote,” The Guardian reported in late 2021.

The files reveal Zelenskiy participated in a sprawling network of offshore companies, co-owned with his longtime friends and TV business partners. They include Serhiy Shefir, who produced Zelensky’s hit shows, and Shefir’s older brother, Borys, who wrote the scripts. Another member of the consortium is Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend. Bakanov was general director of Zelenskiy’s production studio, Kvartal 95.

Ukraine is a near-perfect business opportunity for transnational corporations and banks, especially the crony-capitalist powerhouse of BlackRock. In Ukraine, BlackRock does not need to worry about going to court and paying out large sums of money for its “prohibited transactions relating to the management, operation and administration” of 401(k) retirement plans, a scam that “selected and retained high-cost and poor-performing investment options, with excessive layers of hidden fees that are not included in the fund expense ratios” of the 401(k) plan.

In short, pensioners were ripped off in basically the same way the average Ukrainian is ripped off by oligarchs and the state.

Of course, BlackRock’s lucrative wunderbar rebuilding of Ukraine will no doubt come to naught as the Russian Federation is in the process of chipping away at Ukraine’s civil and industrial infrastructure, which began as a response to the Zelenskyy regime’s suicide bombing of the Kerch bridge linking Crimea and Russia.

Larry Fink may not be dissuaded, however. If a profit can be realized out of the twisted remains of the corrupt, dictatorial, and genocidal Zelenskyy regime, Fink will undoubtedly go for it, so long as governments, pushing wheelbarrows of fiat dollars, promise to pay for reconstruction in what will be a rump state, a shadow of its former nazified self.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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