Investigative journalist Alina Strizhak alleges that she and her family were threatened by an unknown man shortly before she broadcast a story on the possible illegal acquisition of property linked to Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Danilenko.
Danilenko was Prosecutor General Vitaliy Yarema’s chief of staff during Yarema’s stint as first deputy prime minister from March to June. After Yarema became the nation’s top prosecutor, Danilenko went to work for him there.
Prosecutors did not respond to a request for comment from the Kyiv Post and refused to discuss the issue by phone.
Strizhak’s allegation comes amid a series of scandals linked to Yarema’s office, with critics accusing the prosecutor of preserving the corrupt practices of former President Viktor Yanukovych’s regime. The latest scandal was triggered last week by the office’s decision to close the criminal case against Evhen Bakulin, former head of state-owned oil and gas monopoly Naftogaz. Prosecutors reacted to the public outcry by resuming the investigation.
Strizhak works for Nashi Groshi, a show on the Lviv-based ZIK television channel that has extensively covered alleged corruption at the Prosecutor General’s Office and other government bodies. On Sept. 23, ZIK aired an episode of the show called “A deputy prosecutor general seizes more land and lakes than Yanukovych.”
“Several days before the show (on the property linked to Danilenko) was aired, I received a letter supposedly written by a colleague of mine,” Strizhak said, according to Nashi Groshi’s website. “The letter contained files that turned out to be a virus. On the next day, an unknown man came and threatened me and my family. He advised me not to carry out investigations.”
Strizhak told the Kyiv Post that, although the man who threatened her did not mention Danilenko or the Prosecutor General’s Office specifically, the only plausible reason was her story about the Danilenko family’s property. She said it would have made no sense to threaten her in connection with her earlier stories because they had already been aired.
Denys Bigus, head of the Nashi Groshi project, said by phone that this was the first such threat in the show’s history. He added that the Prosecutor General’s Office had not yet reacted to the scandal.
“They’re still silent,” Bigus said. “I hope the Prosecutor General’s Office will wake up.”
Bigus also said the Security Service was supposed to investigate cases in which officials of the Prosecutor General’s Office were suspects.
Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the interior minister, wrote on Facebook on Sept. 23 that he had talked to Bigus and that police officers would help Bigus create a facial composite to find the culprit.
Vitaliy Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, also commented on the Danilenko scandal.
“If Vitaly Yarema doesn’t jail his friend and deputy Danilenko, the prosecutor general is also implicated,” he wrote on Facebook. “If Petro Poroshenko allows Yarema not to do anything about this case, he is also implicated. Corruption always has names.”
The story reported by Nashi Groshi targeted 140 hectares of ponds near the villages of Mala Soltanivka and Velika Soltanivka in the Kyiv Oblast’s Vasylkiv district that they said were illegally privatized by a firm called Soltanivka Kaskad. Under Ukrainian law, the ponds could not be privatized and could only be leased.
Soltanivka Kaskad used to be owned by Vyacheslav Danilenko, the son of Anatoly Danilenko; Nikita Ilyin, the son of Gennady Ilyin, who is former head of President Petro Poroshenko’s security guards and a deputy chairman of the Kyiv city council’s anti-corruption committee representing Mayor Vitaly Klitchko’s UDAR party, and Ruslan Skarboviychuk, a member of the Verkhonva Rada and a former member of the Communist Party, Nashi Groshi reported.
Currently, Soltanivka Kaskad belongs to Ilyin’s nephew Yevgeny and Skarboviychuk’s sister Lesya Shvets, according to Nashi Groshi.
The company’s telephone number is registered at the address of Myroslava Chubuk, a business partner of Alexei Lisa – a co-founder of Kyiv-invest, a firm controlled by the Danilenko and Ilyin families, Nashi Groshi reported.
Near Soltanivka, there is a luxury estate owned by Anatoly Danilenko in the village of Khlepcha, according to the Nashi Groshi show. Bigus said by phone that Danilenko’s security guards had stolen Nashi Groshi journalists’ camera tripod when they tried to investigate the estate.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
