Mommy’s partnership: Head of ARMA Duma dreams of foreign business while assets remain without managers

While most of the seized property in Ukraine remains without effective management, the head of the Asset Recovery and Management Agency, Olena Duma, reports on new memoranda. This time – with the Ukrainian representative office of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC Ukraine). According to Duma, the document should attract foreign business to asset management, but in practice, even domestic companies do not show interest in cooperation, writes UNN.

DetailsAccording to analysis by Transparency International Ukraine, ARMA announced 33 tenders for the selection of managers in 2024, but only seven management agreements were concluded. Therefore, the number of concluded management agreements remains steadily low: 7 in 2024, 11 in 2023, and 10 in 2022. At the same time, ARMA publicly cites “amazing” figures about 224 competitive selections of appraisers, 89 winning appraisers, and 33 announcements about open tenders with management features. However, as noted in TI, all these efforts resulted in seven management agreements.

Despite this, Olena Duma reports on strategic partnership and signing of memoranda.

“The document is intended to initiate systematic cooperation in attracting foreign business to the management of seized assets under the management of ARMA. This includes both assets in Ukraine and abroad, where the Agency has identified and seized assets worth more than 100 billion US dollars within the framework of criminal proceedings at the request of law enforcement agencies,” – emphasizes the head of ARMA.

In practice, ICC Ukraine is likely to become only an information platform for ARMA, but it is clear that it will not deliver results.

Therefore, the rhetoric of the head of ARMA rather causes skepticism, because real market participants, as experts have repeatedly pointed out, refuse to participate in the agency’s tenders due to insufficient information about assets and opaque rules.

Experts also previously noted that the system for selecting managers remains closed and opaque, and announcements of tenders often do not contain even basic information about the management object.

ARMA ignores auditors’ findings: instead of eliminating deficiencies in the Register of Seized Assets, there will be a new design03.01.25, 16:14 • 239003 views