Life is like box of chocolates... But whether they will pull notice of suspicion for Budanov and bail for Mudra from it
Over the past two weeks, most of the figures in the "Forrest Gump" case have been served with notices of suspicion. Bail has been set at UAH 30 million for Maksym Mykytas and UAH 20 million each for Iryna Mudra and Valentyn Yelizarov. Proceedings in the case of Oleksii Stupak, head of Sense Bank, have been adjourned due to his deteriorating health. Bail has not yet been posted for any of them. And for now, two questions remain.
The first is who will post the money. The second is whether any further action will be taken against the "mysterious" or perhaps no longer so mysterious high-ranking official from the President’s Office who was so carelessly mentioned in NABU’s first video. It even revealed his first name, Kyrylo, as well as the fact that the transfer of money to those involved in the scheme was facilitated by the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine.
This week, Hromadske even published an investigation presenting purported episodes from the case involving the head of the President’s Office without redactions. Curiously, however, none of this appears in the court materials.
Having listened to most of the court hearings, the Censor.NET author can say that prosecutors directly mention only Mindich as the person who transferred the money. The name of the high-ranking President’s Office official, however, has not appeared in any of the prosecutors’ statements.
The consolidated version of events is roughly as follows.
According to the prosecutors, the events that took place between 9 June 2026 and 29 June 2026 can be divided into two stages. The first stage, from 9 June 2026 to 22 June 2026, was directly related to identifying accomplices and devising mechanisms for laundering the funds.
From 22 June to 29 June 2026, the suspects jointly took steps to launder a total of UAH 150 million that had been provided in cash to post bail for one of the participants.
"Essentially, all these events (Operation Forrest Gump), began on 9 June 2026, when Ms Mudra received a proposal to become involved in arranging the laundering of proceeds of crime directly from a member of a criminal organisation who transferred the funds while wanted and staying in the State of Israel," the prosecutor said in the Stupak case.
The prosecutor says that the money was handed over in cash to an unidentified person so that it could subsequently be converted into non-cash funds through financial transactions and, including through sham transactions, deposited first into the accounts of legal entities controlled by those involved and then posted as bail.
But far more interesting quotations were presented in Yelizarov’s case. There, the prosecutor says that "Mindich, through an unidentified person from the President’s Office, approached Mudra with a request to arrange cash funds to post bail."
On 9 June, Mudra not only became involved in the scheme to post bail for Halushchenko but also told Mykytas about it, and he agreed to organise everything. He enlisted Dnipro City Council member Vasyl Astion, Mykyta Tarkovskyi and Valentyn Yelizarov to help implement the scheme.
In a conversation with Yelizarov, Mykytas laid out a plan to convert the cash into non-cash funds through Astion (referred to as Vasia in the conversations). This would require three days and three companies, which Mykytas asked him to find. Or, better still, four, as requested by the client.
"Keep looking, keep looking," he instructed Yelizarov.
In a conversation with Astion, meanwhile, Mykytas asked whether he had UAH 100 million in non-cash funds, from which a substantial commission could be earned. "They brought 200 million for Herman; it needs to be paid. We are now figuring out how to pay it," he told Astion.
The following day, 10 June, the controversial businessman and Mudra discussed which bank they needed to open accounts with for the money to go through. Mudra told Mykytas it would be Sense Bank. During the conversation, the phrase "No Veselyis" was heard. As is known, Vasyl Veselyi is a former adviser to the chair of the bank’s supervisory board who was described as the bank’s "overseer" during the Yermak era.
In a conversation with Mykytas, Mudra also mentioned a high-ranking President’s Office official who told her to take control of the bank after a conversation with Mindich.
Meanwhile, in a conversation between Mykytas and Yelizarov, it was said that Mudra had "taken complete control of this bank."
Mykytas and Mudra also discussed the companies through which the money would be channelled.
Mykytas: Yes, all right, we have four companies ready. So I already know how to bring the money in.
Mudra: Look, I think he has companies. He did not have the cash here. ... Mindich brought it in; he arranged security.
The prosecutor did not clarify who "he" referred to during the hearing in Mudra’s case.
"On 10 June 2026, Ms Mudra met with Oleksii Vitaliiovych Stupak, Chairman of the Management Board of Sense Bank JSC, and Mykola Hladyshenko, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Sense Bank JSC, and directly informed Maksym Viktorovych Mykytas of this, noting that Sense Bank, specifically the bank’s infrastructure, would be used for laundering. And that she directly controlled the bank. That the bankers had admitted ‘who their boss was and asked for the management board to be formed,’" the prosecutor said.
Elated by the news, Mykytas even proposed appointing his aide Yelizarov to the management board.
On 10 June, Mykytas asked Yelizarov to start looking for UAH 50 million. However, he noted that no one was in a hurry, saying: "Let the client (Herman Halushchenko — ed.) stay inside a little longer."
On 13 June, Mudra asked Sense Bank head Stupak to assist in opening accounts for the legal entities she needed.
Mykytas, meanwhile, said that the best option would be to use his Hiran Consult and a company owned by Tarkovskyi’s mother-in-law. Mudra replied that this would be better arranged directly with Stupak. The task of liaising with him was then handed over to Mykytas’s aide Yelizarov.
At this meeting, Yelizarov was to resolve with the chairman of the management board the issue of opening the accounts and depositing non-cash funds into them.
On 15 June, Stupak met with Yelizarov, who asked him to explain what needed to be done to process the cash.
"Look, I came out and spoke to him. Well, he already knew everything he needed to do. I explained to him that there would be cash that had been brought in. We have three companies there. I said, ‘Just set us a task, and we will take it from there,’" the prosecutor quoted Yelizarov as telling Mykytas.
"He just says, ‘Then tell me who it is for, Mykytas.’ I told him, ‘I will call you by the end of the day,’" Yelizarov added.
According to Yelizarov’s account, Sense initially asked for "financial companies" (to make it easier to process the funds). "I said, ‘No, we do not have any financial companies. Tell us what needs to be done for your financial monitoring unit to clear the transaction and for you to be comfortable, and we will make it happen,’" Mykytas’s aide reported to him.
During his submission, the prosecutor stressed that Stupak had known from the outset that the money was of illegal origin.
On 16 June, Stupak met with Yelizarov again, this time at a supermarket in Khodosivka. It was there that Mykytas’s associate was briefed on the specifics of the bank’s financial monitoring procedures: if such funds were processed, a bank employee would be punished because the transaction required manual approval.
Mykytas and Yelizarov discussed whether the transaction could be structured as a purchase of goods and services, but they were very reluctant to pay VAT. During the same conversation, Yelizarov said that on Friday he would be told on which day a window would be available to process the funds.
On 17 June, they received the contact details of Liudmyla Snihur from the bank’s financial monitoring unit. She initially refused but later agreed to provide a window for processing the illegal funds.
"Then he immediately, half an hour later, gave us the head of financial monitoring, and that was it — we will work everything through with her," Mykytas told Mudra.
According to the prosecutor, after learning that they needed to launder not UAH 50 million but three times that amount, Stupak said he would speak to Mudra by phone to have it all approved.
Besides Stupak, Yelizarov was also in active contact during those days with Hladyshenko, chairman of the bank’s supervisory board, and Ms Snihur (head of the bank’s financial monitoring unit). They knew that the company had no assets, contracts or anything else. Yet they "gave their blessing."
"She refused because, as I understood it, no one had spoken to her at that point. ... Essentially, she understands that they will come for her, but now we will do the opposite and agree a window with her," Yelizarov explained to Mykytas.
"We will release the money tomorrow. Tomorrow the girl will press the button when needed," Mykytas told Mudra, explaining how the first UAH 50 million would be processed.
Bail for former minister Halushchenko was posted through four companies: Tetras Optima LLC — UAH 54 million; Hiran Konstrakt LLC — UAH 87 million; Skait Retail LLC — UAH 5 million; and Pelet Service LLC — UAH 4 million.
At the time the bail was posted, no links between the companies and Mykytas could be identified; these emerged during the investigation.
The NABU operation to expose the scheme for posting Halushchenko’s bail is called Operation Forrest Gump. The quotation from the film’s protagonist most frequently cited in connection with it is: "Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get."
And it may well be that even NABU did not expect which chocolate it would have to unwrap.
Because to understand what is inside the package, one must understand what investigators were looking for and how they uncovered the scheme.
When the searches at Mudra’s premises first became known, and NABU released its first video, MP Honcharenko posted a screenshot of part of a Bureau document showing that information had been recorded not only at the location but also on a person. The initial suspicion, therefore, was that Mykytas himself had recorded Mudra. He is already neck-deep in NABU notices of suspicion and could, in principle, have acted as an agent in exchange for certain concessions. Mykytas had nothing left to lose reputationally anyway.
Mudra herself noted in court that most of the recordings had been made by someone close to her. Ihor Kolomoiskyi, who has already managed to comment on the story in court, believes the same version.
However, while Censor.NET’s sources initially also believed that Mykytas had made the recordings, another theory has now emerged: that he may instead have been the one being recorded. "NABU had already studied his lifestyle thoroughly. Somewhere at a gym, 20 minutes would have been enough to install special software on his phone," a source suggested.
In that case, while monitoring Mykytas, NABU may have uncovered a remarkably unexpected filling inside the chocolate. One so unexpected that it is still unclear what to do with it.
First, it may have uncovered the very issue of bail for Halushchenko, since the other corporate raiding schemes had been carried out earlier. The excerpts shown in the video concerning Mykytas’s takeovers of companies date back to at least December 2025.
But this remains merely speculation, including among former representatives of the agency. NABU itself is not disclosing how the investigation has unfolded.
It should be noted that NABU edited the first video very artfully. It contains nothing about the relationship between Mudra and Mykytas, although the term of endearment "honey" slips through at one point. It also very skilfully includes a quotation stating that the head of the SAPO is in contact with the President’s Office.
The name Kyrylo was likewise very carefully left in when Mudra spoke about the high-ranking official.
The video also contains quotations from Mudra in which this high-ranking President’s Office official instructs her to handle matters concerning Sense Bank.
Ukrainska Pravda wrote that it had previously learned from sources that Budanov had been involved in the matter of posting bail for Halushchenko. Hromadske went so far as to publish an investigation citing statements about Budanov’s role in the case.
"They say there are recordings in which Budanov thanks Mykytas. Apparently, the latter heard Mudra over speakerphone at some point. NABU is hardly likely to have planted a bug inside the President’s Office," a source told the publication.
It will now be interesting to see how the situation develops. The "high-ranking official" has already surfaced in the recordings, but it remains unknown what further action NABU will take.
They are said to have already expressed their deep concern over the situation and are waiting to see what happens next, as this is yet another scandal involving the authorities.
In principle, there has already been an episode involving conversations between Umerov and Mindich that did not lead to a notice of suspicion. Admittedly, in that case, the procurement of Mindich’s body armour never took place because a deputy minister sent the vests for repeat ballistic testing.
Likewise, nothing happened to Syniuk, the former deputy head of the SAPO, who surfaced in the Midas case, but the matter went no further. Syniuk, after all, knew many interesting things about the SAPO.
However, investigators may not have gathered sufficient evidence against Budanov. After all, he was not the one transferring the money or giving instructions. In that case, everything may depend on Mudra’s future testimony, and the matter may remain purely reputational.
For now, the discussion centres on how long it will take to raise bail for Iryna Mudra. According to Censor.NET, the law firm representing her is negotiating with businesspeople. The offer to the market was initially 25% on top of the amount and has now risen to 50%. But because the bail amount is not particularly large, no one is rushing to make extra money this way. Therefore, according to rumours, Iryna Romanivna will still be in the pre-trial detention centre on Monday.
Tetiana Nikolaienko, Censor.NET
