A prosecutor said on March 29 he had issued notices of suspicion to several top allies of President Petro Poroshenko, only for the charges later to be canceled by the leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The notices were issued by prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulik.
The letters to which the notices of suspicion were attached, which were supposed to be sent to the suspects, were published by the UNIAN news agency.
Valeria Gontareva, the former head of the National Bank of Ukraine, and Kostyantyn Stetsenko, a top executive at investment bank ICU, were charged with aiding organized crime and complicity in embezzling Hr 2 billion ($74 million) by buying and selling government bonds, according to UNIAN. The scheme allegedly involved Serhiy Kurchenko, an associate of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
Borys Lozhkin, Poroshenko’s former chief of staff, and his Deputy Chief of Staff Oleksiy Filatov were charged with complicity in laundering over $440 million by selling Ukrainian Media Holding in 2013. Gontareva was also charged with money laundering.
Filatov and Gontareva could not immediately be reached for comment. Lozhkin’s press office said he had not received any notice of suspicion and could not immediately comment on its contents, while ICU said neither the company nor Stetsenko had committed any crimes. ICU added that the lawfulness of its actions had been confirmed by court rulings.
All of the suspects have previously denied the accusations of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Yanukovych’s Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky was also charged by Kulik with laundering $36 million. He previously denied the accusations of wrongdoing.
Charges canceled
Larysa Sargan, a spokeswoman for the Prosecutor General’s Office, said that the leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office believed the notices of suspicion to be unlawful and invalid.
She said that the notices of suspicion were not based on evidence, and they were not given to the suspects, as they should be.
Sargan attributed the incident to “pre-election fever,” and said that the State Investigation Bureau would investigate Kulik’s actions. The bureau did not respond to a request for comment.
Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia cases unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office, told the Kyiv Post, however, that the leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office had no right to cancel notices of suspicion issued by prosecutors.
Anti-corruption activists, including Reanimation Package of Reforms expert Oleksandr Lemenov, said Sargan’s statement indicated that Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko wanted to save the allies of his political boss Poroshenko.
Controversial prosecutor
Kulik, who did not respond to a request for comment, is himself a controversial prosecutor.
Yuriy Butusov, chief editor of the censor.net news site, claimed on Facebook that Kulik, previously a Poroshenko loyalist, had gone to Israel, where tycoon Igor Kolomoisky lives, and concluded an alliance with him against Poroshenko. Kolomoisky denied meeting Kulik.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine in 2016 charged Kulik, a deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s Office’s department for international legal cooperation, with unlawful enrichment of Hr 2 million ($80,000). The case was closed in March after the Constitutional Court in late February canceled a law on illegal enrichment.
Kurchenko scheme
Kulik led a corruption case against Kurchenko. In 2017 Kramatorsk City Court concluded a plea bargain with Arkady Kashkin, the nominal owner of a firm allegedly linked to Kurchenko. The plea bargain allowed the court to confiscate money and state bonds linked to Kurchenko’s firms.
According to the classified court ruling, which was leaked to the news network Al Jazeera, ICU, which provides services to Poroshenko, served as a broker for Kurchenko’s companies under Yanukovych. The company denies any wrongdoing, saying that it just brokered for the companies and did not know of any criminal activities.
Anti-corruption activists have been saying that the involvement of ICU could have been the real reason for making the court ruling classified.
ICU is headed by the president’s financial adviser Makar Paseniuk, who has worked for Poroshenko since at least 2009, according to media reports. Several people from ICU hold or used to hold top government jobs: Gontareva, ex-Energy Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn, Dmytro Vovk, the head of Ukraine’s energy regulator, and Oleksandr Zhyvotovsky, the head of the telecommunications regulator.
UMH sale
Another suspect, Lozhkin, told sold his UMH media group to Kurchenko for $400 million in 2013.
Lozhkin was fired as an advisor to Poroshenko in 2018 after Al Jazeera contacted him over a document obtained by the news agency that allegedly shows that the money paid for UMH came from a loan secured with stolen assets.
Some analysts believe the sale price was far more than the real value of UMH, and that is why suspect that money laundering and a kickback were involved. Lozhkin denies all accusations of wrongdoing.
Austria opened a money laundering case into UMH’s sale, but it has seen no progress due to a lack of cooperation from Ukrainian law enforcers. Moreover, Kurchenko said no taxes had been paid on the sale in Ukraine, which prompted accusations of tax evasion.
Poroshenko has always claimed he had sold his 3 percent stake in UMH in the months prior to the deal. However, an analysis of Cyprus company records by Al Jazeera indicates that, on the day of the sale, he still held the shares via a company in the British Virgin Islands.
Unless he divested himself of the BVI company beforehand, at the point of sale, Poroshenko stood to receive $15 million, tripling his initial investment, Al Jazeera reported. A spokesman for Poroshenko said he did not own, directly or indirectly, any shareholding in United Media Holdings on Oct. 28, 2013.
If he took part in the deal, it is not clear if Poroshenko paid the appropriate tax on the deal, given that it was executed in offshore tax havens.
