4 April, 09:11
On April 3, 2026, a court in Rennes ordered the extradition of Russian banker Vladimir Antonov to Lithuania. Investigators in Vilnius had been hunting him for over a decade. But behind this extradition story lies another one — Ukrainian.
It is the story of how a Lithuanian collapse in 2011 became a launching pad for several careers, each heading in very different directions.
A Verdict Ten Years in the Making
In November 2024, the Vilnius District Court delivered its judgment in the Snoras bank collapse case. Former co-owners Vladimir Antonov and Raimondas Baranauskas were found guilty of asset misappropriation, fraudulent bankruptcy, money laundering, and document forgery. Each received a sentence of ten years and six months. According to the court's findings, the two men misappropriated assets worth 509.18 million euros, caused 466.67 million euros in damages to the bank and its creditors, and embezzled a further 14.5 million euros. The court ordered them to pay 375.18 million euros in compensation to depositors.
By the time of the verdict, Antonov had been a fugitive for years. After British courts approved his extradition to Lithuania in 2015, he slipped away to Russia. In 2018, Lithuanian prosecutors formally notified the Russian Prosecutor General's Office — Moscow refused. In December 2024, Antonov was detained in France. According to Radio Free Europe, he had been passing himself off as a Ukrainian refugee. He has been held in Rennes prison ever since. On April 3, 2026, the French court approved his transfer to Lithuania.
November 2011: The Moment Someone Seized
The key to the Ukrainian chapter of this story is November 2011 — the month the Lithuanian government moved to nationalize Snoras. Antonov, by his own account, was in Kyiv at the time, in the middle of negotiations to acquire another European bank. The news hit him like a thunderbolt.
In an August 2012 interview with Ekonomichna Pravda, Antonov described in detail what happened next. According to him, his business partners in the Ukrainian asset — Reinis Tumovs and Andriy Stryzhak — immediately launched procedures to transfer ownership of Konversbank, framing it as a necessary move to shield the institution from the toxicity of his name. Meanwhile, Vadym Stolar, he said, had already obtained information that Antonov was being sought by authorities, and pressed him to leave the country — handing over a power of attorney to transfer ownership to eleven individuals.
"Stolar and three other individuals form a group that effectively stole from Konversbank the money belonging to me, my family, and the bank itself — and the bank along with it," Antonov told Ekonomichna Pravda.
According to Ukrainian media reports from that period, the operation resulted in 55 million euros being moved out of Konversbank, with the institution itself reregistered under new shareholders. Antonov repeated these accusations in multiple interviews but, according to available records, never filed a lawsuit.
Administrative Cover as Infrastructure
Publications in Ukrainian media — including Ekonomichna Pravda and investigative dossier outlets of that era — document how the scheme was built on political and institutional protection. Andriy Stryzhak Jr. was the son of a sitting Constitutional Court judge. Vadym Stolar was a sitting member of parliament from the ruling Party of Regions. Reinis Tumovs and Vadym Kotovych served as the operational managers of the bank.
According to several Ukrainian publications, the regulatory cover came at a price: reportedly $5–6 million in cash. These claims are journalistic in nature and have not been officially confirmed.
The Bank Failed. The Career Did Not.
After the ownership transfer, Konversbank was rebranded as CityCommerce Bank, with Reinis Tumovs installed as president. The institution lasted a few more years before being declared insolvent in 2014, when the National Bank of Ukraine appointed a temporary administrator.
Vadym Stolar, meanwhile, was moving upward. His political career had begun at the age of 24, when he was elected to the Kyiv Regional Council on the ticket of Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party — before switching, conveniently, to the Party of Regions. According to Ekonomichna Pravda and Forbes Ukraine, he held shares in CityCommerce Bank and co-owned the Kyiv skyscraper 101 Tower. In 2019, he was elected to parliament for the ninth convocation on the ticket of the Opposition Platform — For Life, a party whose interests were, to put it diplomatically, not entirely Ukrainian in character.
According to Chesno movement data and Ukrainian media, Stolar missed 83% of parliamentary votes from early 2022 onward. His asset declaration for 2022 listed no real estate. During the full-scale war, TSN reported that the MP had relocated to the French Riviera, where he rented a private estate. The same declaration lists the rental of an apartment of nearly 600 square meters in Monaco — at market rates, roughly 130,000 euros per month.
Tumovs: The Next Round
Reinis Tumovs did not disappear from the Ukrainian legal landscape after CityCommerce Bank. He became entangled in it.
According to Ukraine's National Police and the records of criminal case No. 12014000000000409 opened in 2014, between 2013 and 2014 the bank's management — with Tumovs as president — extended loans to shell companies secured by collateral that had been overvalued by dozens of times. The funds were then laundered through affiliated structures. The Deposit Guarantee Fund filed a civil claim of 532 million hryvnias in damages in 2016. Tumovs was formally notified of suspicion of theft and money laundering — charges carrying seven to fifteen years with asset confiscation.
Before the investigation reached its conclusion, Tumovs left Ukraine for Latvia. In 2016 he registered two companies there: WELLCOME.GROUP BALTIC and QF.TRADING.GROUP BALTIC FARMS — the latter shut down less than a month after incorporation. In October 2018, Latvian police detained him at Ukraine's request. He was remanded in custody for one year.
Alongside the arrest, a Ukrainian court froze his assets: six land plots totalling nearly 19 hectares, as well as 37 registered firearms — rifles, carbines, pistols, a hunting shotgun — around 100 hunting knives, a bow, and a crossbow, all seized during a 2015 search of his Kyiv apartment.
In a 2018 investigation, Ukrainian outlet CRiME reported a broader dimension: according to its journalists, structures connected to the Soyuz bank were used to channel funds toward pro-Russian formations during 2013–2014, with the actual beneficiaries of the schemes remaining beyond the reach of prosecution. Tumovs, in the publication's framing, was the front man — the name on the door while the real architects stayed in the shadows.
SkyMall: Same System, Different People
Tumovs is sometimes linked to yet another high-profile affair — the SkyMall shopping center in Kyiv. That connection doesn't hold up. But the story itself is so representative of Ukrainian raiding during that era that it deserves a place in the same frame.
The SkyMall conflict dragged on for nearly a decade. It pitted Estonian businessman Hillar Teder and Dragon Capital against Andriy Adamovsky's company — two parties who began as co-investors in one of Kyiv's largest retail developments and ended up in courtrooms on multiple continents.
In 2009, the Estonian side took out loans from Swedbank and the Estonian state to finance SkyMall's construction. Those funds, the Estonians later claimed, were effectively stolen in Ukraine through corruption in the commercial court system. By 2014, the situation had escalated to the point where Estonia's Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas wrote personally to President Poroshenko, asking him to intervene on behalf of the country's largest investor in Ukraine, who was facing what Rõivas described as a raider attack.
The ending was instructive. In May 2021, the state-owned Ukreximbank extended a $60 million loan to two dubious companies using SkyMall as collateral. The beneficial owner of both companies turned out to be a man registered in Donetsk — a taxpayer in occupied territory. Neither the troubled asset, nor the pending international arbitration, nor the identity of the borrower gave Ukreximbank's management pause. Earlier that spring, SkyMall had been seized as part of a criminal investigation. Within a month, the seizure was lifted under unexplained circumstances. The Estonian investor's claim against the Ukrainian state: $750 million.
A Parallel That Is Hard to Ignore
Antonov and Stolar found themselves on opposite sides of the same event — November 2011. One lost his bank and eventually ended up in a prison cell in Rennes, awaiting transfer to Vilnius. The other, according to Ukrainian journalists, had already relocated to France by the time the war began — not to a cell, but to an estate on the Riviera.
The Konversbank affair was never heard in a Ukrainian court. Antonov gave interviews. Tumovs was arrested in Latvia. Stolar remains a sitting member of the Verkhovna Rada, his mandate intact.
French justice did its job. Ukrainian justice is still pending.
This article draws on reporting by Ekonomichna Pravda, CRiME, Ukrainska Pravda, RBC-Ukraine, Ukraine's National Police, Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, TSN, and open registries.