Ukraine is set to nationalize as many as five large companies deemed to be of strategic interest, including two that are partly owned by a former Ukrainian oligarch who is said to have a controlling interest in Burisma Holdings — the energy giant with links to the president’s son, Hunter Biden. 

Ukrainska Pravda (no relation to the Russian Pravda) reported Monday that Ukraine’s National Securities and Stock Market Commission took the decision on November 6 and made no specific mention of Burisma, but did shed new light on the extent of the oligarch’s involvement with the companies to be nationalized. His name is Ihor Kolomoisky.

Among those to be seized are the oil company Ukrnafta, of which 42 percent reportedly belongs to companies associated with Mr. Kolomoisky, and Ukrtatnafta, one of Ukraine’s biggest producers of oil products. According to Ukrainska Pravda, Mr. Kolomoisky and a business partner, Gennadiy Boholyubov, own about 60 percent of Ukrtatnafta’s shares. 

Although Mr. Kolomoisky is widely considered to be among Ukraine’s wealthiest  individuals, his name has also become synonymous with systemic corruption in the country that came to the fore in late 2019 when Speaker Pelosi and other congressional Democrats led the effort to impeach President Trump in part on the basis of his alleged request to President Zelensky to “look into” the then-former vice president, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter. 

According to a 2020 Senate Finance Committee finding, in May 2014 the president’s son “joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.”

That oligarch in question was Mykola Zlochevsky, who is currently listed as Burisma’s president, and the full extent of Mr Kolomoisky’s connection with the energy giant is somewhat opaque. Yet one area where the interests of Mr. Kolomoisky and Hunter Biden have overlapped is banking: Besides being connected through the Burisma energy giant, albeit in different capacities, Hunter Biden did business with Igor Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank — by many accounts Ukraine’s largest.

PrivatBank was nationalized in 2016 following accusations that Messrs. Kolomoisky and Boholyubov had defrauded it of billions of dollars. The bank is now suing Mr. Kolomoisky in a number of countries, including America, and in March 2021 Secretary Blinken sanctioned Mr. Kolomoisky and his family. More recently, in July, President Zelensky revoked Mr. Kolomoisky’s Ukrainian citizenship. Now persona non grata in Ukraine, too, Mr. Kolomoisky is not homeless: he currently holds both Cypriot and Israeli citizenship. 

An often overlooked fact about Burisma, Ukraine’s best-known energy company, is that though based at Kyiv it is headquartered at Limassol. That is a large  port city in Cyprus, which is a nice Mediterranean island but also one whose reputation for selling passports and money laundering has put it on the radar of European Union regulatory authorities.

Hunter Biden left Burisma’s board in April 2019. In his autobiography, “Beautiful Things,” Mr Biden said that the money he obtained while sitting on Burisma’s board “turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction.” NBC has previously reported that he once failed to disclose $400,000 in income from Burisma on his 2014 tax returns.

After NBC News analyzed a copy of Mr. Biden’s mislaid computer hard drive, it found that between 2013 and 2018 “Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery [i.e., Burisma] and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud.”

The Kyiv Independent noted that four of the five companies that will be nationalized are associated with “controversial” businessmen, among whom Ihor Kolomoisky is just one. The head of the fifth company, aircraft manufacturer Motor Sich, was arrested last month on the suspicion of collaborating with Russia. 

There are no indications that Burisma is also about to become state property, nor was it clear from initial Ukrainian news reports if Kyiv’s plan to nationalize the companies is a temporary measure taken to root out corruption and attempt to regulate industry more efficiently during wartime, or is intended to be permanent. On Tuesday the Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said that the companies will be returned to their owners once martial law is no longer in place, but on the other hand President Zelensky on Tuesday extended the existing state of martial law by another 90 days. The timing of the Ukrainska Pravda report, only a day before America votes in midterm elections, was noteworthy.

What the nationalization moves point to if nothing else is a culture of murky business ties and corruption across multiple sectors of Ukrainian industry that even months after the Russian invasion does not appear to have much diminished. Mr. Kolomoisky will henceforth have virtually no say in the energy companies he helped run. With respect to the financial dealings of the president’s son, who still faces a federal investigation over possible tax violations, more details may yet come to light. 

Last week the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, told CNN, “We’re going to lay out what we have thus far on Hunter Biden, and the crimes we believe he has committed.”