Serhiy Semochko, the former first deputy chief of the Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service, has asked a court to reverse former President Petro Poroshenko’s decree on his discharge, the Ukrayinska Pravda online publication reported with reference to Semochko’s lawyer, Yuriy Bezuyevsky.
Semochko, who filed the suit on May 23, sees Poroshenko’s decree as unlawful and wants to be reinstated in his job, Bezuyevsky said.
New Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will act as the respondent in the case.
The suit will be handled by the Cassation Administrative Court, which has already assigned a board of judges to hear the case. The court’s schedule so far does not indicate the date for the hearing, and the lawyer said he was unaware of it, either.
It was reported earlier that Poroshenko had discharged Semochko from his job on April 12, 2019.
The anti-corruption journalistic project called Nashi Groshi (“Our Money”) with Denis Bihus issued a TV report last October saying that Semochko’s family owned homes near Kyiv worth millions of U.S. dollars and that his relatives had Russian citizenship apart from Ukrainian.
The National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has opened proceedings on illegal enrichment charges in relation to Semochko.
The Security Service said it was analyzing the information concerning Semochko published in the media in a criminal case on high treason charges opened based on journalist Denis Bihus’s report.
Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service chief Yehor Bozhok said on October 17, 2018, that there were no legal reasons for dismissing Semochko as his first deputy.
Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky District Court said in its later ruling that the Ukrainian Security Service’s counterintelligence directorate confirmed that Semochko’s wife and her daughter had Russian citizenship.
The investigation asked the court to sanction access to Semochko’s and his family members’ telephone communications over the nearly five previous years. The court granted the request, particularly allowing the detectives to find out the locations from where Semochko, his wife, and her daughter have made calls.
