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Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia case unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office, has accused his boss, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, of unlawfully interfering in his activities and called for Lutsenko’s dismissal.
Lutsenko, his spokeswoman Larysa Sargan and Deputy Prosecutor General Eugene Enin did not respond to requests for comment. Previously Lutsenko had denied sabotaging Gorbatuk’s cases and unlawfully interfering in them.
Gorbatuk said on June 23 that Lutsenko had ordered the liquidation of his unit.
He claimed in an interview with Hromadske TV published late on June 23 that Lutsenko had constantly interfered in the criminal cases of his unit, which investigates murders during the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and other EuroMaidan crimes. He accused Lutsenko of illegally taking away cases from his department by issuing reports with allegedly false information that they are investigated inefficiently.
“If we combine the complaints that we have written due to their interference into our activities, I can say that Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has nothing to do with the law,” Gorbatuk said. “He doesn’t know the law and doesn’t want to know it. He’s not even trying to comply with the law.”
Gorbatuk also said that Lutsenko “prosecutes whoever he wants and refuses to prosecute whoever he doesn’t want to prosecute, and the absence of evidence for him is secondary.”
“(Lutsenko) has taken so many unlawful actions that could be classified as crimes that this is definitely grounds for his dismissal,” Gorbatuk added.
Gorbatuk told the Kyiv Post on June 24 that he did not know whether Lutsenko had already signed the order to liquidate his department.
Gorbatuk, who is known to be an outspoken prosecutor, attributed the liquidation to his criticism of the authorities’ alleged shady dealings with ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s associates.
The Prosecutor General’s Office confirmed the department will be liquidated but denied the accusations of doing it as retribution. Instead, the office said the restructuring was in line with the concept of separating investigative and prosecution functions.
Gorbatuk said that Deputy Prosecutor General Anzhela Stryzhevska would oversee prosecutors and investigators transferred from his unit.
The liquidation of Gorbatuk’s department comes days after Gorbatuk and one of his subordinates, Andriy Radionov, said that Stryzhevska and another deputy prosecutor general, Eugene Enin, had no right to negotiate with Yanukovych’s Energy Minister Eduard Stavytsky. They said that Enin and Stryzhevska had no procedural status in the Stavytsky case, which was overseen by Radionov.
Enin denied any links between these events.
The version of Radionov and Gorbatuk contradicts the official version of events earlier given by the Prosecutor General’s Office, which denied accusations of wrongdoing and claimed that the negotiations with Stavytsky had complied with the law.
Enin and Stryzhevska met with Stavytsky in 2016 in a hotel in Tel Aviv in Israel to negotiate the charges against him, according to an audio recording of the meeting leaked to Slidstvo.Info and published on June 9. The recording implies that the investigators could have conspired with the ex-minister, who has been wanted for embezzlement since 2014, in a backroom deal to soften the charges against him.
The journalists also released another tape – an audio recording of a call between a man sounding like Stavytsky and an unidentified mediator, whom he refers to as “Kolya.” They discuss the future meeting with Stryzhevska, and “Kolya” says he will bring and offer her “200” – presumably a bribe of $200,000.
