It’s getting more difficult to tell the difference between Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko and Viktor Pshonka, the top prosecutor under disgraced ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
Like Pshonka, Lutsenko has been accused of using prosecutors to fabricate political cases and attack anti-corruption institutions rather than prosecute multibillion-dollar corruption and violent crimes such as murder.
Lutsenko denies the accusations, but his record is damning and calls for his resignation are mounting: Only one top official who served under Yanukovych — ex-Justice Minister Oleksandr Lavrynovych — is currently on trial for graft.
Not a single of the in-absentia corruption cases against Yanukovych and his top officials and not a single in-absentia case against the organizers of the police sniper murders of more than 100 protesters during the EuroMaidan Revolution have been sent to trial.
Yanukovych, who fled to Russia on Feb. 22, 2014, and almost all of his top officials have been taken off Interpol’s wanted list.
Sergii Gorbatuk, the head of the in-absentia cases unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office, says the Yanukovych-era cases cannot be sent to trial because the Ukrainian authorities have failed to bring legislation on such trials into line with international standards.
And only one person — a paid pro-government thug, or “titushka” — is currently in jail for crimes against EuroMaidan protesters.
Meanwhile, Gorbatuk said on Nov. 20 that the EuroMaidan Revolution cases had effectively stopped because the prosecution service had been partially stripped of investigative functions.
Gorbaruk later directly accused Lutsenko, President Petro Poroshenko and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov of sabotaging the EuroMaidan cases. Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer for the families of killed EuroMaidan protesters, said that now the authorities had effectively destroyed Gorbatuk’s department and blocked all EuroMaidan investigations in an effort to cover up for top incumbent officials implicated in the cases. Lutsenko has denied the accusations.
Saakashvili case
Lutsenko, meanwhile, has been pressing a shaky case against former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a political enemy of Poroshenko.
The prosecutor general has accused Saakashvili of accepting funding from fugitive oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of Yanukovych, to finance anti-government demonstrations and plot a coup d’etat.
Saakashvili, who was arrested on Dec. 8, believes the case to be a political vendetta by Poroshenko. The alleged evidence against Saakashvili, presented by prosecutors during a Dec. 11 court hearing, has been dismissed by independent lawyers as very weak.
Saakashvili was released from custody after the Dec. 11 pre-trail court hearing. The judge set no bail and did not place him under house arrest.
“This is the culmination of the government’s political persecution of Saakashvili,” the former Georgian president’s lawyer, Ruslan Cherlnolutsky, said on Dec. 11. “At the same time, since the EuroMaidan Revolution, the Prosecutor General’s Office has not achieved any convictions of those who killed the Heavenly Hundred (as EuroMaidan protesters murdered by Yanukovych’s regime are called in Ukraine).”
He also referred to the imprisonment of Saakashvili’s associates and his allies from the protest movement and what he views as the illegal kidnapping and expulsion of his Georgian associates from Ukraine.
The authorities deny that the Saakashvili case is political. Poroshenko on Dec. 8 promised to “ensure the transparency of the investigation, the complete openness, impartiality of the investigators, and a transparent, fair, and effective trial.”
Yuriy Lutsenko, then head of President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc, speaks to lawmaker Yuriy Boyko on Dec. 21, 2015. Lutsenko has been accused of blocking charges against Boyko in cases that involve alleged theft of natural gas worth $700 million and $400 million during the purchase of oil and gas rigs. (UNIAN)
Publicity stunt
But other recent high-profile cases pursued by Lutsenko have also come to nothing.
In May, the Prosecutor General’s Office arrested 26 suspects linked to a graft case against Yanukovych’s tax and income minister, Oleksandr Klymenko. In a dramatic raid by law enforcers, the suspects were rounded up and then flown to Kyiv by helicopter.
But the “helicopter cases” seem to have been little more than a publicity stunt.
The evidence presented by prosecutors in these cases was also very weak. According to Zlata Symonenko, a law enforcement expert from the Reanimation Package of Reforms, the case against the suspects seems to have been built entirely on the fact that they were appointed by Klymenko.
Most of the suspects in the Klymenko cases have now been released on bail, with little prospect that they will be convicted.
Gorbatuk said that about 40 suspects were expected to be charged in the Klymenko case but escaped prosecution after the case was taken away from his unit in 2016.
Lyudmila Demchenko, head of the State Fiscal Service’s Kyiv branch, and Viktor Dvornikov, a former tax official and currently an adviser to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, were also investigated as part of the Klymenko case, but have not been charged.
Meanwhile, Deputy Finance Minister Oksana Markarova has been investigated in a graft case against Yanukovych’s former chief of staff Andriy Klyuyev, but has also escaped charges, according to Volodymyr Petrakovsky, a former prosecutor and a Reanimation Package of Reforms expert.
And Yanukovych’s former close allies — lawmakers Serhiy Lyovochkin and Yuriy Boiko, and oligarchs Dmytro Firtash and Rinat Akhmetov — have escaped prosecution and reportedly now enjoy good relations with Poroshenko.
In May lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko published the text of what he says is a draft parliament motion to strip Boyko of his immunity from criminal prosecution. Leshchenko said the motion was blocked by Lutsenko, which he denies.
Boyko and Kurchenko are accused of alleged theft of natural gas worth $700 million, while Boyko is also accused of embezzling $400 million during the purchase of oil and gas rigs, which they deny.
Kramatorsk show
One case touted by Lutsenko as a breakthrough was the confiscation by a Kramatorsk court in March of $1.5 billion allegedly linked to Kurchenko. But critics have dismissed the confiscation hearings as a political show trial — both the investigation and the trial were conducted in secrecy over just two weeks, and the ruling was not published.
No proof has been presented that the money is linked to Kurchenko, and offshore firms involved in the case are currently suing Ukrainian authorities over the confiscation.
In November, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, said $157 million of it actually belonged to fugitive lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko’s firms, not Kurchenko, and that it was stolen by unknown people after being confiscated and transferred to the state savings bank Oshchadbank.
Among others things, the confiscated funds were spent on Poroshenko’s ally, the agribusiness tycoon Yuriy Kosyuk, who got 42 percent of all agricultural subsidies allocated by the government from January to June.
Moreover, the first search warrant in the Saakashvili case was issued as part of the Kramatorsk confiscation case. Prosecutors have so far failed to explain how Saakashvili is linked to the case.
Kurchenko ties
Kurchenko in a statement made on Dec. 11 denied having any links with the former Georgian president, but said he had had dealings with Poroshenko.
Kurchenko said that he bought UMH media group from Poroshenko in 2013 for $400 million, but that Poroshenko had paid no taxes on the sale in Ukraine.
The group was formally sold by Boris Lozhkin, a close associate of Poroshenko and later his chief of staff, but Poroshenko has been accused of having an informal stake in the group. In 2014, Austrian authorities opened a money laundering investigation into the sale.
Poroshenko and Lozhkin have denied there was any wrongdoing involved in the sale.
Ironically, top prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulik, who is leading the Saakashvili case and is himself a suspect in a graft case, has himself been accused of having ties to Kurchenko: He used to work with Arkady Kashkin, an executive of Kurchenko’s firms, at the Kharkiv prosecutor’s office, and has admitted having previously been friends with pro-Russian separatist Yevgeny Zhilin, who is closely associated with Kurchenko.
Meanwhile, Saakashvili’s Movement of New Forces and their allies from the Liberation Movement dismissed accusations of ties to Kurchenko because have supported a blockade of an oil product supply scheme linked to firms allegedly controlled by Kurchenko and pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk. They in turn accused Poroshenko of covering up for the scheme.
Poroshenko, Mevdedchuk and Kurchenko deny the accusations of wrongdoing.
Weak evidence
The alleged evidence against Saakashvili presented by prosecutors in court on Dec. 11 has been described by both Saakashvili’s lawyers and independent ones as unconvincing and extremely weak.
Even Arkady Kornatsky, a lawyer and lawmaker from the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction in parliament, said on NewsOne television on Dec. 13 that “there are no signs of any crime in the evidence given (by prosecutors) as grounds for (Saakashvili’s) house arrest.”
Saakashvili’s lawyers also said all three attempts to arrest him — on Dec. 5, Dec. 6 and Dec. 8 — were illegal because no arrest warrants had been issued by courts.
Prosecutors argued that they had a right to detain him without a warrant because he was allegedly in the process of committing a crime. However, they have repeatedly refused to explain which crimes he was allegedly committing.
Moreover, Saakashvili was detained at around 7 a. m. on the morning of Dec. 5, several hours before the case against him was registered, at around 11 a. m. That renders the case completely illegal, his lawyers said.
Kremlin connection
There are even claims that the Kremlin is involved in the Saakashvili case, in an elaborate ploy to smear both him and the Ukrainian authorities.
Since Kurchenko and some of his associates are based in Russia, Serhiy Rakhmanin, a deputy chief editor of the Dzerkalo Tyzhnya newspaper, and Tzvi Arieli, an ex-instructor at Ukraine’s National Guard, have both argued in their blogs that the recordings of alleged conversations between Saakashvili and his associate and Kurchenko and his associate — whether fake or not — could have been obtained by Ukrainian authorities with the cooperation of Russia’s intelligence services.
“I believe it’s a classical political (Russian security service) operation,” Arieli said. He added that Russia’s aim was to discredit both Saakashvili and Ukrainian authorities, exposing their weakness and inability to arrest him.
According to an assessment made by the Kyiv Independent Forensic Expert Institution, the recordings were manipulated, and there are at least 24 fragments merged with each other.
The alleged conversation between Kurchenko and Saakashvili includes fragments of two different conversations merged with each other, which could imply that Kurchenko did not talk to Saakashvili, according to the institution. Moreover, the lengths of the recordings are not sufficient to determine whether the voices are really those of Kurchenko and Saakashvili, the institution added.
Attack on NABU
Meanwhile, Lutsenko earlier this week continued his assault on Ukraine’s only independent anti-corruption agency, the NABU.
He said on Dec. 12 that a bill would be submitted to change the procedures for recruiting NABU undercover agents, and that they would be required to file electronic asset declarations. He also accused current NABU agents of being “outlaws” and the bureau of smuggling equipment.
Daria Kaleniuk from the Anti-Corruption Action Center believes the bill could deal another blow to the bureau, and said it contrasted with Lutsenko’s silence on the failure of all employees of the Security Service of Ukraine to file e-declarations.
In another attack on the NABU on Dec. 6, pro-government lawmakers submitted a bill that would enable parliament to fire the agency’s head, Artem Sytnyk, without an audit of his performance.
However, the bill was removed from the agenda next morning after an overnight campaign on social media by Ukrainian lawmakers and civil activists, and foreign politicians, diplomats, and officials.
Moreover, in November the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine disrupted a NABU corruption investigation into the State Migration Service by publishing the personal data of NABU undercover agents, arresting them and charging one of them with provoking an official to get a bribe.
