The High Council of Justice, the Ukrainian judiciary’s highest governing body, has fired Olena Lytvynenko, a controversial judge who suspended the license of Ukrainian low-cost airline SkyUp in May.
Journalists found serious flaws in the case against SkyUp, and it was overturned by another court four months later.
In a Jan. 9 decision, the council said Lytvynenko’s ruling on SkyUp violated procedural law and jurisdiction rules; it constituted negligence, violated human rights, and unlawfully interfered with business activities.
Lytvynenko did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Judge Olena Lytvynenko speaks to the Schemes investigative journalism project. (RFE/RL)
Lytvynenko, a judge at the local court in the town of Baryshivka in Kyiv Oblast, ruled in a bizarre case against SkyUp, a successful domestic airline, which seemed to be based entirely on fraud.
In the case, a woman named Oksana Pasenko filed suit against SkyUp, claiming she was dissatisfied with the service she received from the airline. Lytvynenko then suspended the company’s license, stating that it allegedly provided customers with poor service, failed to adhere to safety norms and had many flight delays.
The decision sparked outrage, and some alleged that the company’s competitors were behind the ruling. Aleksandr Alba, the co-founder of SkyUp, considered it to be an attack on his family business.
However, when journalists investigated the case, they discovered that Pasenko was not a client of the company and had never even been inside a plane. She suggested her identity was stolen to file the case.
The SkyUp ruling and another decision two weeks later — this time to ban Kateryna Rozhkova, the deputy chair of the National Bank of Ukraine, from doing her job — propelled the small-town court to national prominence. It soon earned the reputation as perhaps the worst court in Ukraine.
Founded in 2016 by the Alba family, SkyUp is a Ukrainian private airline specializing in low-cost and charter flights.
