Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky District Court late on Dec. 31 arrested ex-lawmaker Maksym Mykytas, who had testified against President Volodymyr Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff Oleh Tatarov.
The ex-lawmaker was sent to a detention center in a kidnapping case without the right of bail for two months – an unusually harsh restriction for Ukrainian courts. Previously he had been under house arrest in a separate embezzlement case.
Mykytas’ lawyers claim that the kidnapping case was fabricated to make him withdraw his testimony against Tatarov. The police, which is investigating the case, has denied the accusations.
Mykytas, ex-president of state-owned construction firm Ukrbud, was previously charged with alleged embezzlement conducted through an Ukrbud housing development contract for Ukraine’s National Guard in 2016-2017.
He agreed to a plea bargain and testified against Tatarov. As a result, Tatarov, who formerly worked as a lawyer for Ukrbud, was charged on Dec. 18 with bribing forensic expert Kostyantyn Dubonos on behalf of Mykytas to get false evaluation results that helped the company. Tatarov denies the accusations.
Zelensky and his appointed Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, have been accused of protecting Tatarov from prosecution ever since information on the investigation into him first surfaced on Dec. 1. The Tatarov case was effectively buried on Dec. 30 when new prosecutors appointed by Venediktova refused to arrest him and said the legal grounds for the charges were not sufficient.
Earlier, Venediktova denied any wrongdoing. Zelensky said on Dec. 25 that Tatarov must prove his innocence, but added that he would only fire Tatarov if the deputy chief of staff was involved in corruption recently while working for him.
Kidnapping case
The police on Dec. 29 charged Mykytas with organizing the kidnapping of an unidentified man on Dec. 8.
The police argued that kidnappers who allegedly received orders from Mykytas met an unidentified man, broke into his car and forced him to write a promissory note for $800,000 using threats. Several hours later, the police arrested the alleged kidnappers and released the alleged victim.
The defense argued that the police falsified evidence in the kidnapping case. The police responded that the evidence was valid and lawful and threatened the lawyers with responsibility for divulging investigative secrets.
Mykytas’ lawyer Artur Gabriyelan said on Dec. 30 that one of the alleged kidnappers, identified only as Chernov, had used two different phone numbers to write to himself to falsify correspondence with Mykytas. Chernov initially named the two different numbers “I” and “very important Serega” and later renamed “I” to “Maksym Mykytas”, according to the defense lawyers.
The defense published screenshots of the correspondence from the two phones with the name “I” and identical screenshots from the phones’ wastebasket with the name “Maksym Mykytas.”
“(Tatarov) is using the police investigators that he controls to take revenge and put pressure on Mykytas to make him withdraw his testimony,” Gabriyelan said on Dec. 29.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), which opened the case over the Ukrbud contract, said that “these developments are concerning, given the possibility of using criminal proceedings to block NABU investigations and putting illegal pressure on the whistleblower to help the people he exposed evade criminal responsibility.”
Mykytas’ lawyers also said at Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky District Court that there is evidence that there was unlawful interference in the automatic distribution of court cases. They said that Natalia Abbasova, the judge who heard the case, had been the only one out of all the court’s judges who was available for distribution, which prompted suspicions.
Ukrainian investigators have exposed many cases of unlawful interference in the automatic distribution of court cases with the aim of sending cases to politically loyal or corrupt judges.
The court did not respond to a request for comment.
Tatarov case blocked
The Tatarov case has faced continued sabotage by prosecutors and courts.
On Dec. 1, Venediktova replaced the group of prosecutors in the Tatarov case as they were preparing to bring charges against the deputy chief of staff and going to a court to apply for his arrest. As a result, the charges were blocked.
Later, the NABU opened a criminal case into what it believes to be Venediktova’s unlawful interference in the Tatarov case by replacing prosecutors in order to save him from prosecution.
On Dec. 14, Serhiy Vovk, the discredited head judge of Kyiv’s Pechersk Court, ordered Venedikova to transfer the case from the NABU to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which is considered to be less independent and less effective than the NABU. Venediktova’s deputy Oleksiy Symonenko transferred the case to the SBU on Dec. 24. The NABU and the SAPO believe the transfer of the Tatarov case to be unlawful.
Under Ukrainian law, the Tatarov bribery case falls directly into NABU’s jurisdiction, and NABU cases cannot be considered by other law enforcement agencies. Disputes on NABU’s jurisdiction can only be considered by the High Anti-Corruption Court and cannot be heard by the Pechersk Court.
