Ex-special forces soldier and Interior Ministry investigator has been revealing misdeeds of high officials for a decade, but he's found it hard getting anyone to act on his evidence
as responsible for sparking many of the high-profile scandals concerning abuse of office by top officials.
Among those against whom he has levelled corruption allegations are President Leonid Kuchma, former President Leonid Kravchuk, former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, presidential adviser Oleksandr Volkov and former Naftogaz Ukrainy President Ihor Bakai.
In spite of what Omelchenko sees as incontrovertible evidence against them, however, most of the individuals he has pursued have not been prosecuted, and many have remained in power.
Anti-imperialist, anti-mafia
Born in the Poltava Oblast village of Novoselytsy in 1951, Omelchenko as a schoolboy tried several times to run away from home to join the fight against U.S. imperialism in Cuba.
Omelchenko later had a chance to fight imperialism for real when he served in Soviet special forces in the early 1970s. As an expert in unarmed combat, he reportedly took part in operations within the Soviet Union and overseas.
After graduating from the Kyiv Shevchenko University in 1976, Omelchenko joined the Interior Ministry as a criminal investigator. In one case, he investigated the KGB’s funneling of Communist Party cash to foreign banks.
In 1988, he became a teacher in the Higher Militia School in Kyiv.
A Communist Party member since 1970, he was a delegate to the XXVII Party Congress in 1991. The same year, however, he quit the party and founded the patriotic organization Union of Ukrainian Officers.
On the afternoon of Aug. 19, Omelchenko received a warning from a Moscow colleague about the hardline Communist coup. He immediately burned the lists of Union members and prepared for arrest. He then spent the remaining three days of the emergency organizing resistance in Kyiv to the plotters’ local supporters.
Soon after independence, Omelchenko and his colleague Anatoly Yermak created Anti-Mafia, an unofficial organization. When, in 1992, he was appointed head of the Security Service (SBU) department for fighting corruption and organized crime, Omelchenko used the organization to investigate a number of major cases.
These included the activity of Pavlo Kudyukin, head of the Black Sea Shipping Company (Blasco). Omelchenko alleged that Kudyukin was able to carry out his scams with the patronage of then President Leonid Kravchuk.
Some time later, Omelchenko’s group turned its attention to Lazarenko, then the president’s representative in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, investigating the accounts of the companies with which he was associated.
By that time, Omelchenko and Yermak had become convinced that their positions in the SBU did not allow them to expose the misdeeds of the highest officials of the country effectively.
“We decided to change the situation radically, so we went into politics,” Omelchenko said.
Omelchenko was elected to parliament in 1994, and reelected in 1998 and 2002. He is now a member of Yulia Tymoshenko’s opposition bloc.
Omelchenko, who owns a three-room flat in Kyiv near the Lukyanivka Metro, declared an income for 2002 of Hr 37,252, including his deputy salary, military pension and teaching fees.
Gunning for Kuchma
Besides supervising the parliamentary investigation into the deaths of the journalists Georgy Gongadze and Ihor Oleksandrov, Omelchenko is currently collaborating with U.S. investigators in the money laundering case against Lazarenko.
“Back in 1994, two years before Lazarenko was appointed prime minister, I sent in my first enquiry about his accounts in Swiss banks,” Omelchenko recalled.
However, Omelchenko complains that Ukraine’s law enforcers have consistently ignored the information he digs up.
Among his opponents, Omelchenko lists, alongside the country’s highest officials and the presidential entourage, all the holders of the post of prosecutor general from 1994 to the present.
“I have repeatedly called on all the prosecutor generals to open criminal cases concerning the facts addressed in my deputy enquiries, or to officially refuse to do so,” he said. “But they fail to do one thing or the other.”
In 1997 a criminal case was opened against him for fabricating materials included in his enquiries. The cases were dropped after a couple of months, since no offence was identified.
Omelchenko said that prosecutors probably wanted to identify his sources, since he regularly obtains confidential information. As a deputy, he is not obliged to reveal his informants.
“My opponents simply don’t understand that in the Kyiv Higher Militia School, I taught thousands of the current employees of the SBU and the Interior Ministry,” he said.
Not all the targets of Omelchenko’s investigations have allowed his allegations to go unchallenged, however. In 2001, Vadym Rabynovych, a media owner and the leader of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, accused Omelchenko of spreading false rumors about him.
“Omelchenko said that I exported 700 kilograms of gold out of Ukraine, and that was how I was able to build a menorah in Israel,” Rabynovych told the weekly BEK. He said the allegations had been investigated by the Ukrainian and Israeli security services, and were found to be baseless.
Omelchenko said that two individuals helped him gain his status as an anti-corruption fighter. The first was his friend and colleague Anatoly Yermak, whom Omelchenko described as “almost a brother.” Yermak was killed in a road accident earlier this year.
The second is the current president, whose activity Omelchenko has followed closely.
According to Omelchenko, his attitude towards Kuchma as a public figure is highly negative. “But as a man, I’m sorry for him: He is being compelled to do things he was not meant to,” he said.
During the 2001 anti-presidential demonstrations, Omelchenko gave the president a present.
“I gave him an American documentary film about the revolution in Romania in 1989, which contained footage of the execution of the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife, and I expressed the hope that the president would not suffer a similar fate,” he said.
In taking his deputy oath in 2002, Omelchenko added to the standard text a promise to bring about the early resignation of the current president and his criminal prosecution.
On July 29, Omelchenko announced that the parliament’s ad hoc commission investigating the Gongadze and Oleksandrov murders would ask the parliament to include the issue of impeaching the president on its agenda for the next session.
This would require 226 deputies to support the proposal to include the issue on the agenda. An investigating commission would then be created to look into the allegations of criminal activity against the president.
Omelchenko claims the commission has evidence that Kuchma was complicit in the kidnapping of Gongadze, which led to his subsequent murder.
A futile struggle?
Omelchenko said that he does not live in fear of assassination.
“I do not experience animal fear. I exercise caution and consideration, which is a professional instinct, and a reaction to extreme situations,” Omelchenko said.
He also claimed to receive protection from sympathizers in the Security Service.
Oleksandr Skipalsky, president of the Institute for Economic Research, is a former head of the Defense Ministry’s intelligence department and a member of Omelchenko’s Union of Ukrainian Officers.
“Omelchenko has no real levers of influence,” Skipalsky said. “He cannot call anyone to account. All he can do is operate within his powers as a deputy, and as a deputy he is able to do rather a lot.”
A deputy with a long record in parliament, Omelchenko has shown himself able to adapt to changing political circumstances. For example, he is now a member of Yulia Tymoshenko’s bloc in the parliament, though in the past he made enquiries concerning Tymoshenko’s business activities as head of the corporation United Energy Systems of Ukraine. Omelchenko said that prosecutors failed to uncover evidence of criminality, and that he is satisfied that his allegations against her have been cleared up.
“During World War II, countries that were polar opposites in ideological terms united to combat a common enemy,” Omelchenko explained, insisting however that his ideological differences with Tymoshenko are not wide.
Acknowledging that many see his efforts as fruitless, Omelchenko said that he is somewhat tired from his struggle.
“Sometimes it seems to me that either I’ve gone crazy or the entire country has,” Omelchenko said.
This article was first published in Russian in Korrespondent magazine on July 29 as part of its series devoted to the Top 100 most influential individuals in the country.
