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Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, on Dec. 1 accused the authorities, including the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, of foiling all NABU undercover operations and trying to destroy the bureau.
He said that the SBU and the Prosecutor General’s Office had foiled NABU operations by illegally publishing the photos, passports, names, car license plates and addresses of NABU undercover agents involved in a corruption case into the State Migration Service and obstructing the case. The SBU and the Prosecutor General’s Office, which had previously accused the NABU of wrongdoing in turn, did not respond to requests for comment.
The NABU said on Nov. 30 that the SBU and the Prosecutor General’s Office had illegally interfered in a bribery investigation against Dina Pimakhova, the first deputy head of the State Migration Service. The corruption investigation was carried out jointly by the NABU and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations, Sytnyk said.
The SBU detained seven undercover NABU employees involved in the corruption investigation and charged one of them with provoking Primakhova to solicit a bribe, which the bureau denies. Subsequently the employees were released.
SBU officials and prosecutors also searched the NABU employees’ apartments.
Sytnyk said that information on the corruption case was leaked by other law enforcement agencies, and Primakhova was informed about the corruption investigation and effectively recruited by those agencies to work against the NABU.
“(NABU detectives) are working in the conditions of total obstruction by Ukraine’s whole law enforcement system, especially the SBU’s anti-corruption department and the Prosecutor General’s Office,” Sytnyk said.
He said that the main goal of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the SBU was to “foil all (NABU) undercover operations.”
“Unfortunately the goal has been achieved: all operations have been suspended,” Sytnyk added.
Prosecutors and SBU officials also tried to get information about the NABU’s whole network of undercover agents but failed, Sytnyk said.
Sytnyk also said that the actions of the prosecutors and SBU officials could be due to “the task set by the nation’s leaders to destroy the NABU.”
A conversation between an employee of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Dina Pimakhova, the first deputy head of the State Migration Service.
The NABU has denied accusations by the SBU and prosecutors that its employees provoked Primakhova to solicit a bribe. The NABU argues that she solicited a bribe on her own accord for giving Ukrainian citizenship to an Iranian national and published video footage of a conversation between a bureau employee and Primakhova.
“The amount is big,” she said in the video. “It’s done so handsomely that it’s hard to expose. But 30 (thousand dollars) is the minimum. Tell him it’s 30.”
Primakhova has denied the accusations of corruption.
Meanwhile, the NABU’s investigation against alleged corruption at the National Agency for Preventing Corruption was on Nov. 28 was transferred on the orders of the Prosecutor General’s Office from the NABU to the presidentially controlled SBU.
The transfer of the case to the SBU is deemed by critics to be an effort to bury the investigation, since the SBU is controlled by the Presidential Administration, which was accused by Hanna Solomatina, a whistleblower at the NAPC, of influencing her agency.
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko cited the bureau’s alleged conflict of interest as the reason for the transfer of the case to the SBU, because the bureau is investigating NAPC Chief Natalia Korchak over an undeclared Skoda Octavia A7 car.
Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia investigations unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office, and lawyer Vitaly Tytych told the Kyiv Post that they believe the transfer of the case to the SBU was illegal, because only a specific NABU detective, not the agency as a whole, can have a conflict of interest.
The Kyiv Post has obtained the documents of an audit on which the corruption investigation is based.
