Kyiv Post webinar at 4 p.m. today tackles Ukraine’s ‘mountain of bad debt’

It’s supposed to work this way: A customer borrows money from a bank and repays it over time, with interest. It also works that way in Ukraine for at least some people – the regular folks.

But the corrosive effect of corruption has meant that, as Swedish economist Anders Aslund quipped, “the best way to rob a bank in Ukraine was to own a bank.” This was, after all, a nation that did not require the disclosure of the true beneficiary owners of a bank to even the National Bank of Ukraine, which was charged with regulating the sector, before major reforms in 2014.