Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office has signed an agreement with the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) of Basel Institute on Governance and hopes that the assets illegally withdrawn from the country by former high-ranking officials will be recovered effectively;.

An Interfax-Ukraine correspondent has reported that the agreement was signed on Monday by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Vitaliy Yarema and Managing Director of Basel Institute on Governance Gretta Fenner.

"Along with challenges we have in the east we have to quickly work on the recovery of assets stolen by the previous authorities headed by Yanukovych… We know that large sums of funds… are working on terrorists, and people who are hiding today finance groups staying in the east," Yarema said.

He said that a terrorists' threat concerns not only Ukraine, but it is of an international character. The example of this is the crash of the Malaysia Airlines plane in Donetsk region.

Yarema said that Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office is searching for 22 officials of the previous authorities who taken large funds aboard.

"We hope for your support and that cooperation will give positive results on asset recovery," he said, addressing the representatives of the ICAR.

In turn, Fenner expressed confidence that the work will be success.

"I hope to understand your top-priorities. We should understand at what stage the investigation is, and then we'll understand what help we could give you," she said.

Fenner said that the organization she heads is neither commercial nor governmental, and it is not linked to any power and financed by Switzreland, Britain and Lichtenstein. The financial donors do not receive information on work carried out by the ICAR.

"The agreement foresees all possible risks of our cooperation and relations. I personally see three stages of cooperation. The first one is to find where the funds are now, the second one – to assess the way how the funds got there and give a legal status to them and the third one is to find legal grounds and international agreements to recover them," Yarema said.

Yarema also said that the Prosecutor General's Office could organize a meeting of specialists of the ICAR with representatives of the banking sectors, in particular, the Service of Financial Monitoring, which monitors transactions with foreign partners.

Fenner told reporters that one of the problem is the absence of a clear track that this is the money of Yanukovych when they left the country.

She said that criminals have become smarter, they do not use their names, but corporate structures to hide the real owner of the funds.

She said that the funds could be placed in those financial institutions in the world with which it would be difficult to work on assets recovery for Ukraine.

Yarema said that in four years when Yanukovych was in power, enormous sums totaling billions of U.S. dollars have been withdrawn. According to assessments of various experts, this could be $20 billion and $100 billion.

"The ICAR tightly cooperates with international organizations such as Transparency International, IMF and EBRD. We hope that this cooperation will give us a chance of quickly settling the issues of asset recovery," he said.