Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky district court at a hearing on Feb. 14 took a decision to seize approximately $300,000 in a British bank account belonging to ex-head of Ukraine’s State Fiscal Service (SFS) Roman Nasirov, the Kyiv-based Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC) has said.
The corresponding petition was filed by prosecutor of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) Andriy Perov on Feb. 7. The money was revealed amid financial monitoring, during which the $300,000 deposit was identified. The funds were then blocked, followed by an appeal to the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) to resolve the issue of seizing the assets.
Lawyers for Nasirov opposed the seizure, saying the financial institution where their client opened an account was not a financial institution according to Ukrainian laws, but a brokerage house. They argued Ukraine’s Criminal Procedure Code says that assets in banks or financial institutions can be frozen. The lawyers said the funds are not deposited in an account in the classical sense, and that there is no exact balance of the funds, as the British side informed about an approximate amount.
Nasirov himself said that it was not money, but “some kind of contract” concluded before 2015, AntAC said.
Perov said the institution where Nasirov’s money is located is a financial one according to British law, and the ex-SFS head opened the account there by depositing cash in 2015.
As earlier reported, SAPO determined that Nasirov for at least three years had funds in the amount of $297,370 in the account at a financial institution in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. At the same time, the money was not mentioned in any of the declarations of the accused during his tenure as civil servant, with the exception of his declaration as a presidential candidate, which was filed immediately after he was informed by the authorities about the funds detected by law-enforcement agencies.
Nasirov, who previously worked in securities trading companies, was elected as Member of Parliament in the fall of 2014 on the Petro Poroshenko Bloc party list. From May 5, 2015, he headed the SFS.
NABU detectives on March 2, 2017, presented charges against Nasirov and apprehended him in the Feofania hospital outside Kyiv. He is suspected of committing a crime pursuant to Part 2 of Article 364 (embezzlement) of Ukraine’s Criminal Code.
Investigators believe that Nasirov in 2015-2016, acting in the interests of MP Oleksandr Onyshchenko, took a number of groundless decisions which resulted in budget losses estimated at over Hr 2 billion.
On March 3, 2017, the Cabinet of Ministers suspended Nasirov as SFS head and appointed Myroslav Prodan as acting head of the agency. He was dismissed on Jan. 31, 2018.
On March 7, 2017, Kyiv’s Solomyansky district court remanded Nasirov to pretrial confinement for two months, setting bail at Hr 100 million after SAPO prosecutors asked the court to set bail at Hr 2 billion.
On March 16, 2017, Nasirov’s wife posted Hr 100 million bail for him. The court obliged Nasirov to transfer all his foreign passports and other travel documents to the State Migration Service.
In December 2018, Kyiv’s district administrative court ruled to reinstate Nasirov as the SFS’s head.
Ukraine’s Central Election Commission on Jan. 21, registered Nasirov as a candidate in Ukraine’s March 31, presidential elections.
