The National Anti-Corruption Bureau and anti-corruption prosecutors said late on Aug. 9 they had caught Mykola Chaus, a judge of Kyiv’s Dnipro district court, with a $150,000 bribe.
Nazar Kholodnytsky, the chief anti-corruption prosecutor, posted on Facebook a picture of dollar bills in a glass jar confiscated from Chaus.
However, Chaus cannot be arrested until parliament strips him of immunity.
Volodymyr Kryvenko, a deputy head of the bureau, said anti-corruption prosecutors would file a notice of suspicion for Chaus on Aug. 10.
He also suggested holding an emergency session of the Verkhovna Rada to deprive Chaus of immunity. Parliament is on summer break until Sept. 6.
Immediately after the anti-corruption bureau’s move, Chaus took a vacation until Sept. 1.
Chaus could not be reached for comment. Calls to the Dnipro district court went unanswered.
Analysts see the case against Chaus, who has been repeatedly accused of ties to lawmaker Oleksandr Hranovsky, as part of a broader conflict between the National Anti-Corruption Bureau on the one hand and Hranovsky and Ihor Kononenko – President Petro Poroshenko’s grey cardinals – as well as Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, on the other hand.
In the latest episode of the conflict, prosecutors reportedly linked to Kononenko and Hranovsky raided the bureau last week, accusing it of illegal wiretapping.
Chaus is “Hranovsky’s tame judge,” while Hranovsky is “a protégé of Poroshenko and Kononenko who oversees prosecutors and courts,” Sergii Leshchenko, a reformist lawmaker from the Poroshenko Bloc, wrote on Facebook on Aug. 10.
“Chaus’ arrest is a gauntlet thrown down by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau at the rotten corrupt leadership,” he added. “So we’re keeping our fingers crossed but we should expect Lutsenko to carry out new searches at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.”
Chaus has been seen as a staunch loyalist of both ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his successor Poroshenko. Despite the supposedly automatic distribution of criminal cases, Chaus has regularly received the most controversial and high-profile cases and consistently ruled in favor of Poroshenko’s administration and the president’s allies.
During the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, Chaus issued rulings against EuroMaidan protesters. A commission for firing judges has ruled that Chaus’ rulings were unlawful, and that he should be dismissed, and the disciplinary section of the High Council of Justice confirmed this conclusion. But the High Council of Justice has refused to dismiss the judge, which critics see as a payback for Chaus’ political loyalty.
“Then I realized that the High Council of Justice would not cleanse (the court system) and would not create an independent judiciary,” Roman Maselko, a lawyer for the AutoMaidan car-based protest group, said on Facebook on Aug. 10. “Its task is to keep the status quo when every court has a puppet judge who is kept on the hook and who’s ready to fulfill any order… Will the council be held responsible for its decision to keep Chaus?”
Last December Chaus issued an arrest warrant for Gennady Korban, a political opponent of Poroshenko, in a kidnapping and embezzlement case. Lawyers argue that Korban was arrested with numerous procedural violations.
In April Chaus removed Yury Ivanyushchenko, an ally of Yanukovych charged with embezzlement, from a wanted list, triggering a public outcry and accusations of corruption.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
