Kazakhstan’s military court on July 24 sentenced two employees of a Ukrainian state-run arms exporter to six years in prison for large scale bribery of a Kazakh defense ministry official in January.
UkrSpetsExport
employees Oleksandr Shokliarenko and Oleksandr Khruliev were
caught giving a $200,000 bribe to Kazakh Major-General Almaz Asionov in
exchange for assistance to receive a lucrative arms and aviation technology contract
on Jan. 26 at an international airport in Astana.
In turn, Asionov
was sentenced to 11 years in prison, said Sholpan Shyketaeva, spokesperson for
the Kazakh military court.
UkrSpetsExport
said it “couldn’t comment” on the situation, but affirmed that it will “study
all legal options to have the company employees (Shokliarenko and Khruliev)
brought back to Ukraine.”
In May
2012, Ukraine’s defense ministry announced a deal to supply Kazakh military
forces with armored troop carriers worth about $150 million.
In
February Oleksiy Melnyk, a defense expert at the Razumkov think tank in Kyiv, told
the Kyiv Post that UkrSpetsExport features in many international scandals.
In May,
the Kyiv
Post reported that Ukraine had tried to sell eight MiG-21 jets to Croatia
that were contracted to Yemen.
“Perhaps
the biggest recent scandal was because of the failure of Ukraine to fulfill its
military contract with Iraq, which happened over Ukrspetsexport’s new
management’s attempt to eliminate intermediaries of the deal,” Melnyk said.
In 2009,
Ukraine made a $550 million deal to supply armored personnel carriers, planes
and related services to Iraq. The deal was frozen last year.
“The arms
business is extremely vulnerable to corrupt schemes because of its secrecy and
the huge sums of money that deals entail,” Melnyk explained.
In 2012, Ukraine exported major conventional arms worth $1.344 billion
becoming the fourth largest arms exporter in the world, according to data
published by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached [email protected].
