Valeria Hontareva

On 19 June 2014 Hontareva replaced Stepan Kubiv as Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine.[12] Hontareva is the first female to lead the bank.[7]

For the time of Hontareva's work in the NBU, hryvnia depreciated almost three times.[13]

International financial institutions representatives state that the biggest reform achievement in Ukraine under Hontareva's rule has been the clean-up of the banking system with the grand finale of the nationalization of Privatbank.[14]

Hontareva had reduced the size of the central bank bureaucracy from 12,000 to 5,000. She has let the country's currency, the hryvnia, float, which stabilized the economy. And, above all, in an effort to clean up the ailing banking sector, she has named 87 banks insolvent with about 60 percent of the sector's assets.[15] According to the EBRD managing director (Eastern Europe and the Caucasus) Francis Malige, Hontareva is No. 1 changemaker in Ukraine.[16]

The National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has opened criminal proceedings in a case, which according to them involved Hontareva's Deputy Kateryna Rozhkova, regarding the 'Platinum Bank's' withdrawal from the market. Hontareva was accused of deliberately bringing the bank to bankruptcy, and of speculation on the growth of the dollar exchange rate. The rallies from the allegedly deceived depositors of the failed banks repeatedly gathered outside the National Bank of Ukraine.[17] Hontareva has a good reputation among professionals as the Ukrainian central bank for the first time started to act independently from the interests of oligarchs and politicians. She fulfilled modern monetary policy similar to the policy of the European Central Bank or the United States’ Federal Reserve System moving to targeting inflation instead of targeting exchange rates. On the contrary, the predecessors of Hontareva on firsthand wanted to maintain the stable national currency exchange rate.[18]

On 10 April 2017, Hontareva submitted her resignation. On 11 May 2017, while still not formally dismissed, she left the bank and Deputy Governor Yakiv Smoliy took over her duties.[19]

“My mission is complete. First, the country has moved to a flexible exchange rate and implemented a new monetary policy of inflation targeting. Secondly, the banking system has been cleansed of insolvent banks, and its future resilience strengthened. Thirdly, the National Bank has been completely transformed, all the processes have been reset and today our central bank is a strong modern organization,” Valeriia Hontareva concluded during her resignation announcement.[20]

During her nearly three years in office, the National Bank headed by Valeriia Hontareva has succeeded in stabilizing the macroeconomic situation, fundamentally transforming the banking sector landscape and building a modern central bank despite war and political instability, deep economic crisis, and empty government treasury.[20]

On 1 October 2018 Hontareva became a member of the Institute of Global Affairs, an initiative of the London School of Economics.[21]

28.03.2019 right before the 2nd round of the presidential election, a new agency UNIAN published fake news "In particular, Gontareva, together with ICU top manager Konstantin Stetsenko, is charged with 'assisting in a criminal organization and assisting in the illegal seizure of another's property – monetary funds of PJSC Agrarian Fund worth ₴2.069 billion through the conclusion by JSC Brokbusinessbank of fake contracts of sale and purchase of government domestic loan bonds with the Agrarian Fund under direct repurchase agreements with the National Bank of Ukraine".[22] The press secretary of the General Prosecutor's office Andrey Lysenko in a comment to Hromadske denied the information about the announcement of suspicions around President Petro Poroshenko, in particular the former head of the presidential administration [Boris Lozhkin], the former head of the NBU Valeria Hontareva and the deputy head of the Presidential Administration Alexei Filatov.[23]