On May 9, 2025, Vasyl Veselyi, connected to the Presidential Office, listed six desired members of Sense Bank's supervisory board in a phone call with Oleksandr Tsukerman. Forty days later, the Cabinet of Ministers appointed these exact people. Among them is Mykola Hladyshenko, who became board chair in October 2025. Now the NBU is investigating both him and bank CEO Oleksii Stupak.

What exactly the NBU is investigating

The regulator opened two separate proceedings of different types. Regarding Stupak — an administrative proceeding to assess compliance with qualification requirements. Regarding Hladyshenko — monitoring of compliance with independence criteria required of bank supervisory board members. The difference is fundamental: the first may result in the CEO's removal, the second raises the question of whether the board chair can be considered an independent director at all if his name appeared in conversations between subjects of a criminal investigation.

The NBU made its decision the day after a meeting of the Verkhovna Rada's Temporary Investigative Commission on Economic Security — and directly stated it had considered "detected information about signs of a hidden parallel management structure" during the time of former sanctioned owners.

The recordings that started the process

Ukrainska Pravda published transcripts of conversations where Veselyi and Tsukerman discussed not only the board's composition but also the distribution of "quotas."

"There should be 5 or 6 of our people in this whole crowd of nine"

Vasyl Veselyi — in conversation with Tsukerman, according to Ukrainska Pravda

The conversations also mention the pseudonyms "Surgeon" (identified by NABU as Andrii Yermak) and "Sigismund" (identified by NABU as former Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko). Hladyshenko himself denied knowing Mindich and any connection to the schemes.

A bank with problems even before the scandal

Sense Bank came to the state following nationalization with significant baggage: the NBU recorded double bookkeeping, active lending to related parties dating back to 2012, and submitted materials to law enforcement in March 2025. Over the past four years, the regulator conducted five inspections of the bank and fined it twice — in 2023 for 47.7 million hryvnias, in 2025 for 4.1 million hryvnias.

A separate topic at the TSK meeting was the bank's monopoly on the gambling market: according to MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak, 80-90% of online casino transactions in Ukraine pass through Sense Bank. The NBU confirmed that one of three financial monitoring inspections was entirely related to the gambling business.

A procedure without guaranteed results

Deputy Finance Minister Yuri Draganchuk insisted at the TSK meeting that the supervisory board selection was conducted in accordance with legislation and went through several stages. NBU First Deputy Governor Dmytro Oliynyk acknowledged a lack of risk management competencies in the current board composition — but this is a separate complaint unrelated to the recordings.

The NBU's administrative proceeding is not an automatic dismissal: the regulator must prove non-compliance with qualification requirements or independence criteria under current legislation. In other words, even the match between Veselyi's list and the actual board composition is not in itself a legal basis — specific norms that the managers violated are needed.

If the NBU confirms non-compliance and Hladyshenko loses independent director status, the question will arise of the legitimacy of decisions the supervisory board has already made in its current composition.