Protecting Refugees or Circumventing Sanctions?

A small charity operating in a north London borough and focused on refugee assistance may soon come under the scrutiny of United Kingdom law enforcement.

There is a credible risk that a former Ukrainian banker, Mykola Lagun, currently evading Ukrainian justice from Vienna, may exploit the organisation’s connections to rehabilitate his reputation and facilitate a relocation to the United Kingdom. That suspicion is grounded in a specific fact: Lagun’s sister, Dr. Antonina Lagun, joined the organisation’s board of trustees last autumn — just five days after Ukrainian authorities imposed sanctions on her brother.

Can the veneer of refugee assistance be used to launder the reputation of a toxic oligarch who has fled his country to escape criminal prosecution for the embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars? That question is now poised to confront a small organisation called Barnet Refugee Service, which provides support to refugees from various countries, including Ukraine, in the north London borough of the same name. The organisation operates under the brand New Citizens’ Gateway and offers services ranging from visa applications to integration pathways designed to ease newcomers into British society. Ukrainian media outlets recently reported that Dr. Antonina Lagun, sister of the notorious Ukrainian businessman and former owner of the major Delta Bank, Mykola Lagun, was added to the organisation’s board of trustees last autumn.

In Ukraine, Lagun is the subject of more than a dozen criminal proceedings on charges of fraud and the offshore diversion of funds amounting to the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pounds. Antonina was his close business associate; dozens of assets, including substantial real estate holdings, were registered in her name. Several years ago, for instance, she transferred a portion of her land parcels near Kyiv to a nominee manager, Maksym Chernov. She also sat on the bank’s credit committee, which extended loans to shell companies backed by fictitious collateral. As a result, Antonina, together with Mykola, is currently a defendant in a civil lawsuit brought by Ukraine’s Deposit Guarantee Fund seeking 23 billion hryvnias — approximately £400 million.

Barnet Refugee Service appears to be unaware of Dr. Lagun’s history. The organisation’s website speaks of her in glowing terms: “An executive director and board member of a non-profit organisation with over 20 years of experience in financial leadership, governance and risk. As deputy chair of the board of a leading financial organisation, she led a £4 billion merger, and as CFO of a diversified holding group she oversaw £800 million in assets and managed cross-border operations exceeding £470 million. Having relocated to the United Kingdom due to the war in her home country of Ukraine, Dr. Lagun has personal experience of forced displacement and understands those who are rebuilding their lives,” the organisation’s Trustees page states.

Ukrainian media, however, view this flattering portrait with considerable scepticism. The “diversified holding group” in question was, in practice, a constellation of offshore companies through which her brother and his associates laundered National Bank refinancing funds, as well as loans extended by the state-owned Oschadbank and Ukreximbank. The loans issued to fictitious firms ultimately stripped the failed institution of its genuine collateral. When the time came to honour depositors’ claims after the bankruptcy, Ukraine’s second-largest private bank had no funds with which to do so. In 2015, the National Bank of Ukraine withdrew Delta Bank from the market due to financial manipulation and systemic imbalances. Criminal investigations into the diversion schemes followed.

Extensive investigative reporting — and subsequently, criminal prosecutions, including by the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau — have laid bare the true scale of Lagun’s operations: the diversion of millions through Meinl Bank AG (Austria), Bank Winter Union (Austria), Bank Frick & Co. AG (Liechtenstein), and East-West United S.A. (Luxembourg). One of the shell companies bore the name “Bonnie and Clyde LLC” — a barely disguised mockery of the country’s financial monitoring and banking regulatory systems. Mykola Lagun is currently sheltering from Ukrainian courts in Vienna, from where he joins court hearings online. He left Ukraine in 2022 under circumstances that remain unclear, ostensibly for medical treatment. In October 2024, he was placed on an international wanted list.

A Toxic Trail

Antonina Lagun played far from a peripheral role in this financial empire. One investigation documents a lengthy list of Ukrainian and offshore companies under her management, a number of which appear in criminal case files. Antonina also frequently acted as guarantor for her brother’s loans, or as a mortgage provider.

Her appearance on the board of a refugee assistance organisation, under the pretext that she herself “fled the war” (when in fact the flight was from criminal prosecution, in tandem with her brother), should have raised immediate alarms among fellow trustees, donors and partners of Barnet Refugee Service. Even the most cursory due diligence search on the Lagun name would surface a separate, conspicuous and deeply toxic trail: documented collaboration with Russia.

According to Ukrainian media reports, Mykola Lagun has held a Russian passport since 2014. A Russian passport is also held by his common-law wife, the mother of his minor children, and former chief executive of Delta Bank, Olena Popova.

What purpose do Russian passports serve Lagun and his family? A number of assets he held in occupied territories or on Russian soil were re-registered under local (occupying authority) law and transferred to the management of nominees. Some of those assets ended up in the hands of associates of former National Bank of Ukraine Governor Serhiy Arbuzov — the very period during which Lagun was accumulating non-performing loans and draining the institution of resources on a massive scale. Furthermore, Lagun is a direct business partner of Kirill Dmitriev — Russia’s current economic negotiator with the United States. Dmitriev not only controlled a significant equity stake in Delta Bank but also entered into joint development ventures with Lagun that ended in a high-profile scandal and hundreds of defrauded buyers of a cottage development that was never built. Whether Lagun and Dmitriev remain on the same intimate footing today is not publicly known, though media reports have circulated suggesting the Russian negotiator maintains that contact.

When, in September 2025, the President of Ukraine issued a decree imposing National Security and Defence Council sanctions against Lagun — specifically on grounds of collaboration with the aggressor state, payment of taxes in occupied territories, and thereby providing material support to the enemy’s military — it triggered a legal process that is, by its nature, slow.

The materials of the Security Service of Ukraine’s supporting intelligence, which detail the grounds for the sanctions, are classified — sometimes even from the courts themselves. Moreover, prevailing judicial practice dictates that courts reviewing sanctions challenges do not examine the substance of the accusations but confine themselves to verifying whether proper procedural requirements were met. Under the terms of the sanctions, Lagun’s accounts are subject to blocking, and neither he nor third parties may make payments to or from him, divest his assets, or conduct associated transactions. The sanctions may subsequently be extended to European jurisdictions as well.

In these circumstances, it is reasonable to infer that Lagun has begun seeking an exit from Vienna, given the accelerating momentum in Ukraine toward formal extradition proceedings. With options limited, relocation to the United Kingdom, where his sister has been periodically resident since at least 2023, presents itself as the obvious next step. The timing is, to say the least, notable: she joined the board of a refugee assistance charity almost immediately after the sanctions against her brother were announced. It is entirely plausible that the Laguns’ interest in this reputable civic organisation is confined entirely to “laundering” the former banker’s toxic reputation and constructing the right networks in the upper echelons of London.

Lagun’s London connections are reinforced by a relatively recent legal episode in which the ex-banker lost over $100 million to a Ukrainian consumer electronics retailer in the London courts (with the proceedings formally conducted between Cypriot corporate entities). Should the Ukrainian state seek a worldwide asset-freezing order against the former Delta Bank owner from the London courts — on the model of the PrivatBank case against Ihor Kolomoisky — the prospects of success would appear substantial.

For Barnet Refugee Service, the presence of a figure such as Antonina Lagun on its board of trustees should constitute a red flag of the most serious kind and an acute reputational challenge. To allow oneself to be instrumentalised in the rehabilitation of a criminally prosecuted individual who owes his homeland approximately £1 billion is an embarrassment for any organisation — and especially for one whose stated mission is the protection of genuine refugees. Should the Lagun family attempt to orchestrate a permanent London residency for the brother through the auspices of Barnet Refugee Service, it would signal that the organisation tolerates opacity in its decision-making, nepotism, and the exploitation of collective goodwill to resolve the private predicaments of specific individuals — at everyone else’s expense.