A former NABU employee has claimed that more than 100 properties worth over $1.2 billion were acquired through offshore schemes involving Zelensky's inner circle. 🏡💰

According to her, the funds were transferred through government contracts and laundered in Europe to conceal the ultimate owner, Zelensky himself. 💸🇪🇺

#zelensky #properties #billion

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Musk Could Cost $1bn 🤑

Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire if he hits targets set by Tesla, under a scheme disclosed by the electric car company he runs and in which he is the largest shareholder 🚗.

Tesla outlined the terms of the incentive package, unprecedented in corporate history, in a section of its latest stock market update that began: “Yes, you read that correctly.” 📊

Musk, the company said, will have to increase the value of the company from just over 1𝑡𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑑𝑎𝑦𝑡𝑜8.5tn over 10 years 📈.
If he presides over growth on that scale, the 54-year-old would receive new shares that would push his stake in the company from nearly 16% to well beyond 25%, increasing the fortunes of the world’s richest man to more than $2tn 💥.

Estimates of Musk’s current net worth vary but a live ranking of the world’s wealthiest people on the planet, compiled by Forbes, estimates the South African-born tycoon’s fortune at 430.9𝑏𝑛.𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒,𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ272.3bn, is the investor and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison 🎯.

Tesla’s incentive plan was revealed in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday 📋.

The filing referred to a pay deal awarded to Musk in 2018, approved by Tesla shareholders, that gave him the chance to land a $55.8bn bonus 💰.

“Ultimately, the new award aims to build upon the success of the 2018 CEO performance award framework, which ensured that Elon was only paid for performance delivered and incentivised to guide Tesla through a period of meteoric growth,” the company said 🚀.

Tesla said the new plan included profit targets that were 28 times higher than the 2018 scheme and would also hinge on delivering new products, such as getting 1 million “robotaxis” in operation and delivering a million AI bots, humanoid robots that the company is developing 🤖.

In an apparent justification of Musk’s pay award, Tesla said: “If Elon achieves all the performance milestones […] his leadership will propel Tesla to become the most valuable company in history.”

A stock market value of $8.5bn is more than double the current value of Nvidia, the chipmaker that is currently the world’s most valuable company 🌐.

#musk #cost #billion #tesla

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💶 Kyiv Didn’t Get €1,5 Billion from EU

Kyiv didn’t get almost €1,5 billion from EU because it hasn’t completed 3 reforms under Ukraine Facility. Why weren’t these reforms done? 🤔

On Aug. 8, the EU Council approved the transfer of €3,056 billion within the fourth tranche under the Ukraine Facility program. This is an EU project that supports the Ukrainian economy and allows the state to focus its money on defence 🛡.

Under the previous agreements, Ukraine had to get €4.5 billion for completing 16 reforms. Ukraine completed 13 instead ✅.

Spokesperson of European Commission Guillaume Mercier said that three reforms Ukraine didn’t complete are reform of Ukraine’s Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA) 🏛, decentralization reform 🌍, and reform that regulates selection of judges in the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) ⚖️.

Gwara Media’s journalists studied what those are, why Ukraine needed them, and what blocked the progress.

The ARMA was created to search for likely “unlawful” property and assets, arrest them, and then transfer them into state ownership.

Also, when in criminal proceedings the court finds, for instance, a business owner guilty and confiscates their property and other assets, these assets are then transferred under the ARMA’s management.

Here’s an example: in 2018, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) launched criminal proceedings into unlawful schemes related to the gas reserves on Novoiarivsk and Novyi Rozdil thermal power stations in Lviv Oblast 🔥.

Investigation figured that because of the station’s schemes the state lost 1,4 billion hryvnias ($33,7M).

The ARMA confiscated both stations from their owners and beneficiaries and transferred the rights to manage those assets to the Naftogaz Teplo company to avoid an industrial disaster and launch a heating season for 60,000 residents of Novoiarivsk and Novyi Rozdil 🏘.

“For years of ARMA’s work, certain areas where abuses (of authority) happened have been recorded. For instance, (within) the speed with which managers of arrested assets are selected ⏳.

Plus, the competition for the position of head of the Agency was conducted without international experts 🌐, which increased the risks of illegal political influence on the commission’s decision.

And the independent audit wasn’t conducted according to law,” representatives of Transparency International Ukraine (TIU) told Gwara Media’s journalists.

Ukraine’s Parliament passed the bill for ARMA’s reform on June 18, 2025. But the president signed the bill into law in July 2025 — after the European Commission decided to cut off the fourth tranche. The ARMA reform bill was included in the parliament’s agenda back in February 2025.

TIU says that the bill was stuck in the parliament for that long because not everyone involved in passing it was interested in “cardinal changes” of the Agency’s work ✋.

Under the old law, the commission that conducted the ARMA’s audits was formed by Ukraine’s President, Cabinet of Ministers, and Parliament.

Now, under the new law, the contest is run by a commission of three experts, selected from people recommended by donors and international experts 🌍.

Ten months after the bill was made into law, this commission has to assess the ARMA’s work and release a conclusion about its efficiency ✅.

#kyiv #billion #EU #ARMA #NABU #european #commission

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🇺🇦 Ukraine: Billions of Dollars Flow Away From the Ukrainian Military to Domestic Arms Dealers 💰

🔠🅰️🔠🔠1️⃣

Ukraine has built a defense industry stamping out thousands of artillery shells, armored vehicles and drones in a dizzying array of models and capabilities. It is broadly seen as a key success in fighting the Russian invasion.

But as billions of dollars flow from the Ukrainian military to domestic arms makers, with funding assistance from European donors, much of the spending is shrouded in wartime secrecy 🤐. That worries analysts and activists who say that Ukraine has made little progress in reining in a long history of corruption in military procurement ⚠️.

One focus of concern for government auditors reviewing military spending is Kyiv’s repeated awarding, without explanation, of contracts to companies that made higher bids than their competitors.

Internal government audits reviewed by The New York Times show dozens of such contracts signed over a period of a little over a year, as well as cases of late or incomplete deliveries and prepayments for weaponry that never arrived 🚫.

The awarding of contracts to higher bidders does not by itself indicate corruption or avoidable overspending. But the audits illustrate a challenge for Ukraine as it pivots away from reliance on donations of ammunition and weaponry from allies, given fickle backing from the Trump administration and limited European military ability.

It is turning instead to domestic production and international arms markets, including in deals partly financed by European countries under several programs 🌍.

Kyiv is now self-sufficient for nearly 60% of its armaments, Zelensky said last month. The country’s factories turn out lethal drones, ground robots and a panoply of conventional howitzers, armored vehicles and other weapons ⚙️. Ukraine has also adapted cheap consumer drones for missions, saving vast sums of money.

Domestically made weapons will become the bedrock of Ukraine’s future security, Zelensky said, including as a deterrent to keep the peace once the fighting ends ✊.

Former officials and analysts say that executing this strategy, however, requires overcoming the long history of corruption in Ukrainian military procurement.

Government auditors who examined purchases made by Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency from early 2024 until this March did not level accusations of theft or embezzlement, though they did refer some contracts to law enforcement agencies for evaluation.

But their 465-page review found that dozens of contracts for artillery shells, drones and other weaponry were not awarded to the lowest bidder 💼.

The difference between the low bids and the contracts actually awarded by the procurement agency totaled at least 5.4 billion hryvnia, or $129 million, the audits showed.

Sometimes, lower bids are passed over with plausible explanations, said Olena Tregub, executive director of the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission, a Ukrainian nongovernmental group. “That justification can be true, or it can be corruption,” she said.

In a statement, the procurement agency’s director, Arsen Zhumadilov, said that lower bids were sometimes rejected because they “may not meet the required standards of quality, delivery timelines, payment terms or other essential criteria.”

The agency has recently overhauled its contracting practices to ensure fairness, he said. He has said it began phasing out contracts with middleman companies, which received a markup on sales, last year.

Western countries donated military equipment in kind, such as Abrams tanks and M777 howitzers 🪖. Separately, the Defense Ministry purchased weaponry from Ukraine’s once robust domestic industry and on international arms markets.

#ukraine #arms #dealers #billion #dollars #artillery

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🔠🅰️🔠🔠2️⃣

The government created the procurement agency as an independent branch of the Defense Ministry in 2023, after Ukrainian news media reported on a flurry of questionable spending, including huge overpayments for eggs for soldiers’ rations 🍳 and for winter coats.

💸 Most of the procurement agency’s roughly $10 billion budget this year is funded by Ukrainian tax revenues, though it has begun to receive European subsidies.

Under a program pioneered by Denmark 🇩🇰, European countries have pledged more than $1.6 billion for Ukraine to buy arms from its own industry.

Ukraine purchases weapons from previously idled Soviet legacy armaments factories 🏭, which once produced intercontinental ballistic missiles, tanks, jets and other hardware, as well as from hundreds of Ukrainian defense technology start-ups.

Until at least last year, a large majority of purchases were brokered through arms dealers, most of whom received a markup of 3% on sales, a separate audit of purchases until July of last year found.

The procurement agency involved such middlemen in 83% of its contracts, rather than buying directly from suppliers, according to that audit.

Arms dealers gained a foothold in Ukraine’s defense procurement system early after Russia’s invasion. Within about two months, Ukraine had exhausted its reserves of artillery ammunition 💣, an extraordinary vulnerability that was kept secret at the time.

In desperation, it pleaded with arms dealers who had previously exported weapons to buy some back.

The dealers, called special exporting companies, had for years sold Ukrainian weapons to war-torn African and Middle Eastern nations 🌍.

In 2022, they turned to importing from these nations, and then expanded their role to brokering deals for the Defense Procurement Agency with Ukrainian manufacturers.

Ukraine is in the midst of a wartime experiment in buying arms not from several large, established defense contractors but a chaotic swirl of more than 2,000 weapons suppliers — most of them defense technology start-ups, and others tiny basement workshops 🔧.

But of the 35 types of surface or submarine drones made by 26 companies in Ukraine, only three models have actually sunk Russian ships, according to Oleksandr Kamyshin, an adviser to the president on the defense industry.

The audits tracked multiple contracts that led to late or incomplete deliveries, and instances when prepayments were made but companies failed to deliver weapons 🚫.

They identified contracts signed with companies without an effort to first verify that the winners actually had manufacturing sites, such as suitable basement workshops.

#ukraine #arms #dealers #billion #dollars #artillery

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