Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has triggered a scandal by taking Oleksandr Hranovsky, a controversial lawmaker accused of corruption, on an official visit to Cyprus, and giving a job to a major Hranovsky ally.
Hranovsky, an ally of President Petro Poroshenko, and Ihor Kononenko, the president’s grey cardinal in parliament, have been accused of illegally interfering in the work of prosecutors and judges. In May, Hranovsky was filmed meeting with judges and prosecutors by investigative journalists. Hranovsky denies the accusations.
Lutsenko has faced intensifying pressure to fire prosecutors suspected of fabricating criminal cases on behalf of Hranovsky – especially when claims were made in August that some of them tortured employees of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. The prosecutors deny the accusations.
Deleted photo
Lutsenko’s spokeswoman Larysa Sargan on Sept. 5 posted a photo on Facebook of Lutsenko and Hranovsky meeting Costas Clerides, the prosecutor general of Cyprus.
But as soon as Radio Liberty journalist Mikhail Tkach noticed the photo, Sargan deleted it, prompting critics to compare the move to Soviet censors airbrushing the regime’s enemies out of photographs. Tkach saved a screenshot of the photo and posted it.
Sargan told the Kyiv Post she had removed the photo because Hranovsky was not an official member of the Ukrainian delegation to Cyprus.
Hranovsky wrote on Facebook that he had helped to organize the meeting between Lutsenko and Clerides.
“Without exaggeration, I’m personally acquainted with almost all participants of the legal services market in Cyprus,” he said. “This was the first meeting between the prosecutor generals of Ukraine and Cyprus, and I worked hard to organize it.”
Hranovsky has plenty of reasons to be concerned with Cypriot law enforcement.
Cypriot courts are currently considering a corporate conflict between Hranovsky and his partner Andriy Adamovsky on the one hand, and Estonian businessman Hillar Teder’s Arricano firm on the other.
Hranovsky and Adamovsky have been accused of illegally seizing Kyiv’s Sky Mall shopping center from Teder. In May, a London court ruled in favor of Teder, ordering the mall to be transferred to Arricano. Hranovsky and Adamovsky deny illegally seizing the mall.
Arricano has also asked the Cypriot authorities to open a $147 million money laundering and fraud case against Hranovsky.
Meanwhile, the Prosecutor General’s Office has said that Lutsenko’s visit to Cyprus was aimed at recovering assets belonging to former Ukrainian officials and fighting money laundering.
Lutsenko, the ex-head of the president’s faction in parliament, did not mention, however, that Poroshenko’s Prime Asset Capital could have illegally transferred 3.9 million euros to Cyprus in March, according to the Organized Crime and Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner. Poroshenko denies doing anything illegal.
Hranovsky’s prosecutor
Lutsenko exacerbated the scandal on Sept. 5 by appointing Oleh Valendyuk, reportedly an ally of Hranovsky, as first deputy chief of the prosecutor’s office of Crimea – a Kyiv-based body focused on criminal cases concerning violations committed by Russian occupiers in the annexed Ukrainian peninsula.
Sargan said she could not comment on Valendyuk’s appointment.
Tetiana Kozachenko, the head of the Justice Ministry’s lustration department, believes Lutsenko had no right to appoint Valendyuk, who is subject to dismissal under the lustration law on firing top officials who served under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
Valendyuk has no right to hold government jobs because he was a deputy head of the prosecutorial department for representation in court and the enforcement of court rulings in 2008-2014, according to the Justice Ministry.
In 2014, a court order prevented Valendyuk from being fired because he was not only a deputy head of the department, but also the head of a sub-unit within it – a highly controversial ruling that has been described by some lawyers as legal nonsense.
Valendyuk has been lambasted for being in charge of criminal cases against EuroMaidan protesters. On the eve of the murder of dozens of demonstrators in central Kyiv on Feb. 20, 2014, Yanukovych’s prosecutor general, Viktor Pshonka, gave him a bonus for “an active role” in cracking down on protesters, according to documents obtained by the Kyiv Post.
Lutsenko has been accused of deceiving the public by first seemingly complying with the lustration law and ousting Valendyuk as Kyiv’s acting prosecutor in July, and then clandestinely giving him another job.
Lutsenko performed a similar trick when he asked Roman Hovda, a controversial ally of ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to step down as a deputy prosecutor general in May, but then secretly appointed him chief prosecutor of Kyiv in July.
Lutsenko also violated the lustration law by appointing Petro Shkutyak as head of a working group that checks prosecutors’ declarations, Kozachenko says. Moreover, Lutsenko has failed to fire Maxim Melnychenko, head of the General Inspection Service who is subject to lustration.
Another alleged ally of Hranovsky, judge Mykola Chaus, who was was caught by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau with a $150,000 bribe on Aug. 9, has fled to Russian-annexed Crimea, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky said on Sept. 6.
The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, authorized the issuing of an arrest warrant for Chaus on the same day.
The Kyiv Post has also uncovered another possible violation of the law by Hranovsky.
He became a member of the Verkhovna Rada from the Poroshenko Bloc in 2014, and Ukrainian law bans lawmakers from running a business. But Hranovsky was registered as an entrepreneur until Feb. 2, 2016, according to the Justice Ministry’s register of entrepreneurs.
Hranovsky did not reply to a request for comment.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
