Ukraine’s privatization has never been short of twisted plots worthy of a novel. But never has it looked more like a thriller, with self-confessed villains picking public fights and making shocking revelations about their murky past.On March 5, billionaire and Dnipropetrovsk Governor Igor Kolomoisky turned up at the hearing of the parliamentary committee on privatization, evidently to confess that he was one of the beneficiaries of the dirty privatization of the late 1990s-early 2000s that made many of Ukraine’s oligarchs rich.

He admitted, for example, that he paid $5 million per month during an unspecified period of time to fellow billionaire Victor Pinchuk and his father-in-law, ex-President Leonid Kuchma, in order to keep them out of Ukrnafta, an oil and gas extractor in which Kolomoisky has a 43 percent stake.