The Prosecutor General’s Office suspects Pavlo Grechkivsky, a member of the High Council of Justice, of taking a $500,000 bribe to influence a court decision, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lustenko wrote on Facebook late on Sept. 21.
Grechkivsky, who denied the accusations on Sept. 22, is reportedly an ally of President Petro Poroshenko’s grey cardinals, Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky, and former People’s Front lawmaker Mykola Martynenko. Hranovsky has denied being acquianted with Grechkivsky.
Both Grechkivsky and Kononenko used to be members of former Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky’s faction in the capital’s city council.
Kononenko and Hranovsky have been repeatedly accused of illegally interfering in the law enforcement system, although they deny this.
Lutsenko said that prosecutors had detained a Justice Ministry official who acted as an intermediary and had accepted a $150,000 installment of the bribe. Lutsenko also said on Sept. 22 that some of Grechkivsky’s property, including a high-end Maybach car, had been seized.
However, the Anti-Corruption Action Center said on Sept. 22 that the case might collapse in court because the Prosecutor General’s Office has no jurisdiction over such corruption cases. They can only be pursued by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Lutsenko’s spokeswoman Larysa Sargan did not reply to a request for comment.
The High Council of Justice on Sept. 22 said that it had no authority to suspend or fire Grechkivsky, and that he would likely have to take a vacation. The council said it would consider recommending Grechkivsky’s dismissal if the Prosecutor General’s Office provided more evidence for his alleged crime.
Grechkivsky can only be dismissed by the Congress of Lawyers, which delegated him to the High Council of Justice, Oksana Lysenko, a spokesman for the High Council of Justice, told the Kyiv Post.
Grechkivsky used to co-own 7.5 hectares of land with Artur Yemelyanov, a judge of the Supreme Economic Court, and was suspected by prosecutors of illegally privatizing it, according to a Radio Liberty investigation published last year.
Yemelyanov, who still works as a judge of the court, has been accused of large-scale corruption and corporate raiding, and his wife has 13 million Swiss francs on accounts in Liechtenstein. He denies all accusations of graft.
Another blow to Kononenko and Hranovsky came as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau said on Sept. 22 it had arrested an investigator of a prosecutorial department accused of fabricating political cases on behalf of the lawmakers. The investigator is suspected of stealing fuel vouchers from a village council, the bureau said.
Meanwhile, the department’s head, Volodymyr Hutsulyak, said on Sept. 22 that three of its employees, including Dmytro Sus, had been suspended during an investigation into accusations that they had tortured employees of the anti-graft bureau in August. The prosecutors denied the accusations, saying that the bureau’s special force unit beat them up.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau on Aug. 9 accused another alleged ally of Hranovsky, judge Mykola Chaus, of taking a $150,000 bribe. Chaus subsequently fled to Russian-annexed Crimea.
