The Supervisory Board of Sense Bank completed an internal investigation following the scandal involving so-called "recordings" and officially stated: no violations were found. At the same time, the bank announced plans to conduct an independent external audit.
Sense Bank is one of Ukraine's largest state banks that came under state control following the nationalization of assets linked to Mikhail Fridman. It holds funds of hundreds of thousands of clients and budget revenues.
The problem with internal investigations in state structures is not ill intent, but the architecture of the verification process: the body conducting the investigation is accountable to the same structure being investigated. A conclusion of "no violations" in such a format does not resolve questions — it multiplies them.
The scandal involving the "recordings" concerned recordings that allegedly documented internal conversations of the bank's leadership. The details of the recordings' content and their authenticity have not been publicly verified — this is a separate issue that remained outside the supervisory board's attention.
The external audit is announced as the next step. However, neither the timeline for its conduct, nor the name of the audit company, nor the list of questions it will examine have been publicly announced. An audit without clear parameters is technically an audit — but practically remains a promise.
For clients and taxpayers who are indirectly co-owners of the state bank, the key question is not whether violations will be found — but whether they will have access to the conclusions of the external review and whether they can challenge its methodology if the result again turns out to be "clean."
