Almost three months after facing accusations of corruption, Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky is still on the job, digging in and fighting back.
In April the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine released recordings of Kholodnytsky pressuring prosecutors and judges to stop cases against high-profile suspects and tipping off other suspects about planned searches. He left a trail of destroyed investigations along the way.
Kholodnytsky has confirmed the authenticity of the recordings but said they were taken out of context.
The tapes got Kholodnytsky into trouble with U.S. authorities, and recently his U.S. visa was canceled, according to numerous media reports, citing anonymous sources. The U.S. Embassy to Ukraine said the information on the visa was classified, while the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office declined to comment.
But Kholodnytsky looks to have support of top Ukrainian politicians.
A source at the NABU said Kholodnytsky is now obstructing the NABU’s activities even more than ever.
Kholodnytsky didn’t reply to the Kyiv Post’s requests for comment. Before, he has repeatedly denied sabotaging NABU cases and recurring accusations that he is dependent on President Petro Poroshenko.
“Apparently Poroshenko gave an order to save him,” the NABU source said. “I’m 100 percent sure that someone has given Kholodnytsky some guarantees, because over the past two weeks he’s gone crazy.”
Kholodnytsky’s boss, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, filed a request to fire Kholodnytsky to the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission of Prosecutors in March. The NABU added a complaint with a transcript of the tapes from Kholodnytsky’s office.
But three months later, the commission has yet to act on it.
The Prosecutor General’s Office can investigate and bring criminal charges against Kholodnytsky, but has not done so. And while Lutsenko said he wanted Kholodnytsky fired for what he said on the tapes, he also said there was no crime in the prosecutor’s actions.
On the tapes, Kholodnytsky was recorded obstructing corruption cases against Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov; Natalia Korchak, the former head of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, People’s Front lawmaker Georgii Logvynskyi and other powerful figures.
Kholodnytsky, whose office was established in 2015 to prosecute top-level graft, has a history of failed investigations. Courts have ordered him to re-open some of the cases.
Zlochevsky case
Kyiv’s Solomyansky Court on June 15 canceled Kholodnytsky’s decision to close the criminal case into the allegedly illegal acquisition of natural gas production licenses by ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office said it would resume the investigation once it gets the full text of the court decision.
Kholodnytsky closed the case 10 months ago, in August, arguing there was no evidence.
His office also investigated an administrative case against Zlochevsky, but failed to submit it to the court within the required time and had to close it. Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s executive board, has accused Kholodnytsky of blocking the administrative case against Zlochevsky for political reasons. Kholodnytsky has denied the claim.
Okhendovsky saga
In April and June courts also canceled Kholodnytsky’s decision to suspend in 2017 the bribery investigation against Central Election Commission Chairman Mykhailo Okhendovsky, and ordered him to either send it to trial or close it. Kholodnytsky hasn’t complied with the decisions yet.
His office declined to comment on the case.
The investigation against Okhendovsky started in 2016. Back then, the NABU charged Okhendovsky with receiving bribes worth $100,000 in 2010 and $61,000 in 2012 from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. The party’s alleged off-the-book ledgers, published after its disbanding, mention Okhendovsky was paid the money to travel abroad – allegedly in the interests of the party.
In June 2017, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office suspended the case, claiming the investigation couldn’t proceed because it never got responses about Okhendovsky’s travel from foreign bodies.
NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk said that he disagreed with Kholodnytsky’s decision to suspend the case, and that the Okhendovsky case should have been sent to trial.
Other cases
A video published on YouTube in February 2017 shows Kholodnytsky talking to Georgy Logvynskyi, a lawmaker from the Rada’s 81-member People’s Front faction, in a bar in Washington, D.C.
Logvynskyi is under investigation for allegedly embezzling Hr 40 million at a firm called Belvedere Ukraina, and Hr 18 million at Bank Stolytsya.
According to the NABU, it recorded a conversation between Kholodnytsky and Logvynskyi in February. In it, Kholodnytsky told the lawmaker he had the case against him under control and would warn him if any investigative actions were to be taken against him.
After that, according to the NABU, Serhiy Kozachyna, an anti-corruption prosecutor in charge of the Logvynskyi cases, sought Kholodnytsky’s authorization for a notice of suspicion for Logvynskyi. But Kholodnytsky told Kozachyna there was “a political aspect” to the case because of Logvynskyi’s authority, and that he did not want to quarrel with the lawmaker’s backers.
Kholodnytsky told Kozachyna that the Logvynskyi cases should be delayed or closed.
The Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has also closed a NABU unlawful enrichment case against Pavlo Tkachuk, the head of Ukraine’s Army Academy. In 2016 the Slidstvo.info investigative team published a report according to which Tkachuk uses two mansions, several apartments and a high-end Lexus car without having declared them.
The NABU source also claimed that Kholodnytsky had promised to close the corruption case against Interior Minister Arsen Avakov’s son Oleksandr, who allegedly supplied the Interior Ministry with backpacks at an inflated price. Kholodnytsky’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the claim.
Kholodnytsky is also a vice president of the Ukrainian Federation of Football, whose honorary president is businessman Grigory Surkis.
Surkis is under investigation by the NABU in a corruption case into his power company ZaporizhzhyaOblenergo. Anti-graft activists say there is a conflict of interest for Kholodnytsky, but the prosecutor denies there is one.
New tool to control NABU arrives: auditors
Anti-corruption activists allege that the authorities have used Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky to obstruct the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. If so, they are about to get another tool.
The Presidential Administration has denied using Kholodnytsky and auditors to obstruct the NABU.
The authorities could eliminate the NABU independence through an audit. NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk, who is seen as independent from President Petro Poroshenko, could be fired if NABU auditors recommend such a step. The law requires that three independent auditors of the NABU are appointed by the Verkhovna Rada, the Cabinet of Ministers and the president.
On June 19, Poroshenko appointed his long-time associate Pavlo Zhebrivsky as an auditor of the NABU. Zhebrivsky does not have experience in foreign law enforcement, judicial agencies or international organizations, and therefore his appointment violates the law, the Anti-Corruption Action Center and the NABU’s civic oversight council said. He denies the accusations, saying he was a member of the Ukrainian parliamentary delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Previously, the Verkhovna Rada and the Cabinet of Ministers had selected their auditors for the NABU, Ukrainian human rights lawyer Volodymyr Vasylenko and legal scholar Mykhailo Buromensky. Both are former members of the Constitutional Commission, an advisory body for legal issues for the president’s administration. Both were appointed to the commission by Poroshenko. Vasylenko was nominated as an auditor by Radical Party Leader Oleh Lyashko, who is himself being investigated by the NABU in a corruption case.
