Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko wrote on Facebook on March 30 that he had asked the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission of Prosecutors to fire Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky.
The Prosecutor General’s Office and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating a criminal case against Kholodnytsky.
Kholodnytsky said on March 30 that the accusations against him were unfounded, and that Lutsenko would effectively get direct control over the NABU as a result of his dismissal.
Wiretapping equipment was installed by the NABU in an aquarium in Kholodnytsky’s office more than a month ago.
NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk told the Dzerkalo Tyzhnya newspaper in a March 30 interview he had asked the Prosecutor General’s Office to approve a notice of suspicion for Kholodnytsky. He said that the NABU had recorded evidence of his alleged crimes.
Sytnyk said in the interview that Kholodnytsky had leaked information on searches to suspects who were expected to be searched.
He has pressured anti-corruption prosecutors to make certain decisions and pressured courts to issue unlawful rulings, Sytnyk claimed. For example, Kholodnytsky has pressured a court not to consider a NABU motion to search a friend of his, Sytnyk added.
Moreover, Kholodnytsky has blocked draft notices of suspicion brought by prosecutors, sabotaged their cases and urged a witness to give false testimony, Sytnyk argued.
Sytnyk argued that Kholodnytsky had been sabotaging the embezzlement case against Odesa city officials. The main suspect in the case is Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov.
When NABU detectives came to Odesa for searches, the suspects had left somewhere and others were abroad and were trying to reach shady deals with courts, Sytnyk said in an apparent reference to Trukhanov.
Sytnyk said that Kholodnytsky had leaked information to suspects in the Odesa case.
He said that Kholodnytsky was also sabotaging cases into People’s Front lawmaker Georgy Lohvynsky’s Zoloty Mandarin firm, top officials’ electronic asset declarations and the business interests of the owner of a large agribusiness group, as well as the case into Health Minister Ulana Suprun’s complaint against a person who tried to bribe her.
According to Dzerkalo Tyzhnya’s sources, Sytnyk was referring to cases against Natalia Korchak, ex-head of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, and agribusiness tycoon Oleh Bakhmatyuk.
Kholodnytsky has refused to sign some notices of suspicion for some cases for one and a half or two years, Sytnyk said. Such cases include those into power company Cherkassyoblenergo and railway monopoly Ukrzaliznytsa, he added.
Kholodnytsky has also pressured his first deputy Maksym Hryshchuk to change charges against a suspect in the case that involves the Lviv Armor and Tank Plant, and Hryshchuk refused, according to Sytnyk.
Sytnyk argued that Lutsenko would not be capable of getting direct control over the NABU because Hryshchuk must become the acting chief anti-corruption prosecutor until a new one is selected.
But the Prosecutor General’s Office believes that Lutsenko should effectively become the acting chief anti-corruption prosecutor after Kholodnytsky’s resignation, taking direct control over the NABU, according to the Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper’s sources at the Prosecutor General’s Office.
“Now the NABU will be under Lutsenko’s control,” Zlata Simonenko, a law enforcement expert from the Reanimation Package of Reforms, told the Kyiv Post. “It’s a pretty sad situation.”
If Kholodnytsky is dismissed, Lutsenko will be able to block NABU cases by selecting loyal anti-corruption prosecutors and refusing to authorize searches for judges and lawyers, said Volodymyr Petrakovsyi, a law enforcement expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms.
A source who was not authorized to speak to he press told the Kyiv Post that the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office had been allegedly recorded by the NABU promising to a suspect that it would transfer a case to the police in exchange for a bribe.
When Kholodnytsky was the first deputy chief prosecutor of Crimea in 2014 to 2015, prosecutors of the Crimea prosecutor’s office were arrested and investigated over allegedly extorting a bribe for releasing a suspect. A source who was not authorized to speak to he press said that Kholodnytsky was implicated in the case.
The Kyiv-based Crimea prosecutor’s office investigates crimes linked to Russian-annexed Crimea.
Kholodnytsky has been repeatedly accused of blocking corruption cases in the interests of President Petro Poroshenko and his inner circle, which he denies.
