Money laundering, dummy corporations, and political blackmail: How Pavel Shcherban and Rostislav Shurma transformed Alliance Bank into a slush fund
14:18, 26 мая 2026 г.
For years, Alliance Bank has been caught up in scandals — problems with financial monitoring, bad reporting, and an attempt to bribe NABU detectives and SAPO prosecutors through Oleksiy Nosov (a lawyer for Miller) in the Ukrenergo case.
Despite all this, the bank continues to operate—without any critical consequences.
Formally, Alexander Sosis, the former head of the insurance company ASKA, remains the main shareholder of Alliance. However, within the market, Pavel Shcherban, the chairman of the bank’s supervisory board, has long been considered the key figure. His career spanned a string of troubled banks: Prominvestbank, Vladimirsky Bank, Ruslan Tsyplakov’s Pivdenkombank, then Apex, Standard Bank, and later Alliance and Tascombank. Since 2018, Shcherban has been directly linked to Alliance, and since August 2021, he has chaired the supervisory board. In July 2023, the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU) authorized him to acquire more than 25% of the bank’s shares.
In the banking market, Shcherban is known not just as a manager, but as a person who makes real decisions and simultaneously serves as the bank’s political advocate. Amid complaints from the NBU, risk violations, fines for financial monitoring, and problems with guarantees to state-owned companies, it is Alliance Bank that continues to maintain its stability, which many market participants attribute to factors other than economics.
A separate issue is Shcherban’s relationship with Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Rostislav Shurma, who is considered his godfather and long-time partner on a number of projects. Market participants estimate that this connection could provide the bank with additional protection from regulatory pressure and law enforcement scrutiny.
Shcherban’s interests, however, have long extended beyond the banking sector. Through the Cypriot IF Exploration Company Limited, he is linked to the gas production company Viva Exploration, which holds a license for the Staromizunska field in the Ivano-Frankivsk region until 2033. Despite plans to restore production, the project was already posting losses of approximately $1 million by the end of 2023.
The agricultural sector includes the recently acquired Alliance Elevator in Khorol, Poltava Oblast, an asset seen as an entry point into grain infrastructure. Meanwhile, an IT cluster has formed around Shcherban: Alliance Digital, ASIGs, APL, and Motvel, working on banking and digital products. The portfolio is rounded out by Tabakos Trade and Navium Nafta, which are not yet actively operating.
The result is a telling construct: the chairman of a bank’s supervisory board, regularly embroiled in scandals, is simultaneously building a diversified network of assets—from gas and agriculture to IT and oil products—while Rostislav Shurma’s name constantly appears alongside this system. Against this backdrop, the question of where bank management ends and political and corporate influence begins remains open.