You’d think the fortune teller would have tipped him off. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former chief of staff Andriy Yermak, who for years made key government appointments, drafted potential peace plans and held back-channel talks with both Washington and Moscow, was taken into pre-trial detention Thursday on money-laundering charges after a three-day hearing in Kyiv. The 54-year-old lawyer and former film producer stands accused of being involved in laundering more than $10 million in embezzled funds through the construction of lavish private mansions in the village of Kozyn on the capital’s southern outskirts. The court has set Yermak’s bail at $3.2 million, which he says he doesn’t have. He told reporters outside the court that his lawyer would work with his friends to scrape the funds together. During the hearing, prosecutors also alleged that Yermak had kept a secret phone that he used to regularly contact a Kyiv-based astrologer known as “Veronika Feng Shui” – identified as 51-year-old Veronika Anikiyevich – to advise him on government appointments. Yermak allegedly shared candidates’ birth dates with the astrologer, who would in turn tell Ukraine’s second-most powerful man whose appointment the stars most favoured.