The Prosecutor General’s Office said on March 26 that it had submitted to court the case alleging that Kharkiv Mayor Gennady Kernes was involved in kidnapping.
This may be the first case against former President Viktor Yanukovych’s top allies that will be heard by a court. The Prosecutor General’s Office has often been criticized for slow progress on investigations related to Yanukovych associates. The mayor told the Kyiv Post that he believed the case to be “completely fabricated.”
Kernes and two of his security guards are suspected of kidnaping two EuroMaidan Revolution activists, torturing them and threatening to kill them in January 2014.
According to the activists’ testimony, Kernes ordered their kidnapping, questioned them himself and beat them, Anton Gerashchenko, a lawmaker from the People’s Front party, said in February.
Kernes was put under partial house arrest in March 2014 and released in April. In July the kidnapping case against him was suspended due to an attempt on Kernes’ life and the serious wounds he suffered, although in August Interior Minister Arsen Avakov wrote on Facebook that it had been resumed.
Kernes already has a criminal record.
In 1992 he was sentenced by a Kharkiv court to three years in prison for robbery and fraud.
The completion of the Kernes investigation follows an intensification of the Prosecutor General’s Office’s activities following the appointment of Viktor Shokin as its head in February.
In a recent development, on March 25, Shokin suspended from work Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Bahanets, head of the office’s main investigative department Ihor Shcherbina and two other top officials – Anatoly Moroz and Yury Kovtun – during an unspecified internal probe.
Another recent move that may signal changes in the justice system is the resignation on March 26 of Oleksandr Nechitailo, chairman of the Supreme Administrative Court.
Ukrainian courts in their current condition are widely believed to be a major obstacle to the introduction of the rule of law in Ukraine.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
