Is it true that Zelensky bought the French bank Milleis?

At the beginning of March 2025, media and Telegram channels reported that an offshore company associated with the President of Ukraine acquired one of the largest French banks. We have verified the authenticity of this information.

Viral publications citing French media reported that in early February 2025, one of the largest private investment banks in France, Milleis Banques, was sold to Maltex Multicapital Corp from the British Virgin Islands, which was mentioned in the Pandora Archive as close to Vladimir Zelensky. The transaction amount was €1.1 billion, and the mediator was allegedly Rothschild & Co, where French President Emmanuel Macron worked from 2008 to 2012.

As confirmation, the media and Telegram channels cite an almost three-minute report from French television, which sets out the above facts. The publications also included screenshots of this news, allegedly taken on Western media websites.

It was reported that Zelensky acquired a bank in France Life, "Moskovsky Komsomolets", Ura.ru, "Moscow 24", "Sight", Regnum, Pravda.ru And News.ru, as well as Telegram channels "Sanya in Florida"(511,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Observer"(179,000), "Putin on Telegram"(140,000), Voblya (136,000), "Sheikh Tamir» (118,000), etc.

In 2021, from the so-called “Pandora Archives" - leaks of millions of documents from offshore service providers - it became known that Vladimir Zelensky had a stake in the company Maltex Multicapital Corp., registered in the British Virgin Islands. After his victory in the Ukrainian presidential elections in 2019, he transferred this share to his long-time business partner Sergei Shefir. The President of Ukraine and his wife owned a quarter of this company, which OCCRP journalists call key in the network of offshore companies associated with him. Representatives of Zelensky did not comment on this information.

“Verified” did not find any reports in authoritative French or Ukrainian media about a transaction involving the offshore Maltex and a French bank Milleis. Its CEO Nicolas Hubert gave an interview to the newspaper at the end of February Le Figaro and did not mention the sale of a financial organization, although the deal, according to viral posts, had already been finalized by that time. In addition, according to French laws the sale of the bank had to be registered in Official Bulletin of Civil and Commercial Transactions (BODACC), but this information is not there. Mentions of a change of ownership may also appear in Bulletin of Binding Legal Notices (BALO), however, “Verified” did not find any such records in this registry.

In some sources, the viral news is accompanied by screenshots of notes in English-language media. However, some of them contain publications that are not related to the proposed purchase of the French bank. So, in screenshots from the British website Daily Mail and American New York Post Zelensky, citing unnamed sources in the White House, is advised to “go to France.” Another screenshot shows an article about the Milleis deal. Its design is similar to the publication in the British publication The Independent, however, there is no such news on the newspaper’s website.

However, the main evidence for the media and Telegram channels was a report filmed, judging by the logo, by the TV12 channel near one of Parisian departmentsth Milleis jar. But in France there is no such TV channel with such a logo.

Facial recognition service PimEyes identified the reporter as a man named Guillaume Le Hoan.

In his resume on LinkedIn does not indicate work on any TV channel, although the owner of the profile also reports his journalistic education. There is a interview with the participation of Le Hoan from January 18, 2025, but there he acts as an interviewee - talks about the importance of corn in French agriculture. At the same time, a short-haired man would not have had time to grow such luxuriant hair in a month and a half.

The journalist from the viral video is a public figure, and dozens of his portraits should be available on the Internet for a service like PimEyes to recognize. It can be assumed that when creating the fake report, a neural network was used, which, among other things, used photographs of Le Hoan or a person similar to him.

There are other oddities in the video. So, at the 17th second of the report, in the interruption between its two parts, a fragment of the audio track from the screensaver is used BBC (not a single reputable media outlet would borrow it directly). The explanation of the proposed deal, which takes up most of the video, takes place against a background that is publicly available on YouTube.

Fact checkers from the project Lead Stories analyzed the audio track from the report using services InVID And DeepFake-o-meter. Both showed that the recording was very likely generated by a neural network.

Alexandra Tevoedjre, Milleis External Communications Manager, responded to Verified's request for comment: “Milleis Banque Privée has become aware of false information being circulated on some social networks. We officially reject these accusations. Since 2017, Milleis Banque Privée has been owned by the company AnaCap. We reserve the right to take any action we deem necessary."

The earliest Russian-language publication containing a fake report and which was discovered by “Verified” appeared on March 6 at 13:52 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Voice of Mordor" A fake screenshot of the deal was also posted there. "Voice of Mordor" repeatedly featured in analyzes “Verified” as the primary source of misinformation. At the same time, the report already on the night of March 5-6 went viral in the English-language segment of the social network X - one such tweet collected 6.5 million views.

This is not the first time that reports of expensive purchases by Zelensky, his immediate family and the companies he owns after the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine have appeared on pro-Kremlin resources. “Verified” has already examined similar messages about transactions with Charles III's mansion in Great Britain, villas in the USA, Egypt And in the Caribbean, Sting winery in Italy, hotel in Courchevel etc. If you believe the same sources, the Ukrainian president has a special weakness for the legacy of the Third Reich - he allegedly acquired Goebbels estate, and also mountain house And Hitler's car. All these news turned out to be fakes, and the style of their creators in many cases was the same: “revelatory” photo, audio or video materials were “legalized” under the guise of investigations by foreign journalists. It later turned out that this evidence was falsified.

Thus, the news that Zelensky’s offshore spent more than €1 billion on the purchase of a French bank has all the signs of disinformation. The report used as evidence bears the logo of a non-existent French TV channel and is highly likely to have been (at least partially) created using neural networks. A screenshot of another publication was falsified, and the fact of the transaction itself was denied by representatives of the allegedly sold bank.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

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