More Russian useful idiocy I responded to in my previous article, "Ukraine is Corrupt, Don't Defend It" (https://medium.com/illumination-curated/ukraine-is-corrupt-dont-defend-it-258bd7c1b885). If you wish to acquire some basic financial and corporate governance literacy, read my How Not To Be Dumb Money series, or, like most traders, remain dumb money.

Opening the Offshore Pandora’s Box

Finally, offshore company doesn’t necessarily equal criminal tax evasion. Hedge funds domicile in the Caymans because they always have non-US investors who don’t want to file US tax returns.

Digital nomads get Estonian e-residence to form Estonian companies without ever setting foot in Estonia because their income comes from clients in many different countries.

Zelensky’s Servant of the People series is on Netflix and generates revenue in over 100 countries. Generating global revenue does not equal “taking money out of the country”. Here’s how Zelensky got deservedly rich:

“Kvartal 95 is a comedy club named in the honor of a square in Kryvyi Rih city in Ukraine, where Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his friends come from. Zelenskyy, a comedy actor before becoming president of Ukraine, was the leader of the team. The show initially participated in the Club of the Funny and Clever, a competition spanning many post-Soviet countries where teams vied for the title of the funniest and cleverest by performing Russian-language skits and stand-up humour. But as the show did not allow the actors to earn in other programs, the team left the Club and set up the entertainment company Studio Kvartal 95. Zelenskyy and brothers, Serhii Shefir and Borys Shefir, were the first to contribute to the business. The team moved from Kryvyi Rih to Kyiv and began to develop rapidly….Soon after its launch, Kvartal 95 was bought by 1+1 TV channel owned by Ihor Kolomoiskyi which gave the company good terms of cooperation and higher prices. Kolomoiskyi started to support Zelenskyy and Kvartal as comedians and now keeps backing them as politicians.”

In 2012 Zelensky and his partners clearly did what any smart startup founders do when offered a liquidity event by a corporate buyer looking to buy innovation unavailable in-house: they partially cashed out while keeping part of the future upside.

Like most actors, they were sloppy and didn’t ask where the buyers’ money came from. They unthinkingly following lawyers’ and accountants’ instructions without really participating in the deal structure process. Did they know they were laundering Privatbank money through his offshore companies? Maybe, maybe not. Zelensky more likely thought he was just taking care of friends and family through his newfound wealth, just as any financially semi-literate Hollywood celebrity or professional athlete would.

There’s a reason American multinationals locate their EU subsidiaries in Ireland or Luxembourg, just as there’s a reason why overseas subsidiaries of Asian companies domicile in Singapore. Capital goes where it’s treated well and where there’s a well-functioning legal system with minimal bureaucracy and fair dispute resolution. This is why it makes sense to bank in Singapore instead of Shanghai. The Zelensky “taking the money out of the country” canard is a red herring.

And now to the shutdown of opposition media red herring from this Russian useful idiot, from the Kyiv Independent:

"What Ukrainian media looks like

Compared to many other post-Soviet countries, speech and the press are both relatively free in Ukraine. However, free does not mean independent. While Ukraine’s media landscape is competitive and a significant number of independent outlets exists, many publications and especially TV channels are owned by oligarchs. These media tend to push the narratives of their owners. Most Ukrainians get their news from TV.

The past few years have seen a “professionalization” of Ukraine’s journalist corps and media business models, said Andrii Ianitsky, an economic journalist who teaches his craft at the Kyiv School of Economics. Besides oligarch owners, the media is also pressured by politicians and powerful figures. “For now it’s not systematic and for now, it’s more the exception than the rule,” Ianitsky said.”

Much of the clampdown on press freedom that Dunn points to was aimed at Russian disinformation propaganda after Putin’s war started in 2014. Lincoln did the same in the American Civil War, suspending habeas corpus. That this was published shows how free Ukrainian media are for a country at war for the last 8 years, certainly freer than Lincoln’s Union in 1863 (But somehow Ukraine’s battle against Russian enserfment does not count for moral purists would never have denied to the war against slavery):

Lights out on pro-Kremlin media

The year 2021 started off with a bang for Ukraine’s media landscape. In February, the National Security and Defense Council at Zelensky’s initiative yanked three pro-Kremlin TV channels off the air: NewsOne, Channel 112 and ZIK, which belonged to pro-Kremlin lawmaker Taras Kozak, widely believed to be a proxy for opposition party leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ally, Viktor Medvedchuk.

The sanctions were applied according to a 2014 law that allows Ukrainian citizens to be sanctioned if they threaten Ukraine’s national interests. The channels aired Kremlin propaganda even as Russia and its proxies occupied the Donbas and Crimea, having killed close to 14,000 people since 2014. Many Ukrainians were in favor of the channels’ summary shutdown, believing that their content caused explicit harm and getting rid of them in the standard way, through Ukraine’s corrupt courts, would be too long and difficult a process.”

(https://kyivindependent.com/national/how-zelensky-administration-moves-to-dismantle-press-freedom-in-ukraine)

Dunn would presumbly have condemned FDR for ordering a shutdown of pro-Germany, Italy and Japan media in the USA in 1942 and Lincoln for doing the same to pro-Confederate newspapers in 1861.

Freedom House scored Ukraine 1 point above Mexico. Orban’s Hungary, an EU member and Nato Article 5 beneficiary, scored 69/100, while Nato member Turkiye scored 32/100. Russia ranked 19/100. Presumably, our author’s purity test would cancel Nato member Turkiye’s Article 5 defense umbrella based on its Freedom House score barely half that of Ukraine.

Backsliding democracy USA scored 83/100 vs 100/100 for all the Nordic countries and 88/100 Latvia. Glass houses and stones are located and thrown in multiple directions once this moral purity game becomes the policy-driver Dunn and his fellow moral equivalencers wish it to be."

You'll need to try harder than pasting a couple of context-free links I debunked more than six months ago.