Odesa Mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov was arrested in Kyiv Boryspil airport on Feb. 14 and transferred to the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine. The arrest, which was made after Trukhanov arrived back in Ukraine on a flight from Warsaw, Poland, followed the issue of a notice of suspicion by the NABU a day earlier. Trukhanov is suspected of embezzling funds from contracts assigned for repairing a highway and approving loans meant to help refurbish the local airport – the money has since vanished.
Nazar Kholodnytsky, who heads the Specialized Anti-corruption Prosecutor’s Office says the prosecutors asking Trukhanov to be held in custody and set the sum of the bail for Hr 50 million.
“I hope the court would start the hearing today,” Kholodnytsky told the journalists during the news conference.
Trukhanov said in a Facebook post that he wouldn’t hide from anything, especially since “the truth and the law are on his side.”
“Moreover, I halted my trip and asked my lawyer to contact NABU and inform them of my arrival time in order to avoid further speculation,” reads the post published on Feb. 14.
Trukhanov’s deputy Pavel Vugelman was also detained later at the airport by the State Border Service. He had arrived from Tel-Aviv, Israel and will be transferred to the NABU to be issued his notice of suspicion.
In 2017, the NABU began to investigate the circumstances surrounding the tenders for Odesa Airport and highway repairs relating to companies reportedly associated with the mayor. According to NABU, the city has lost more than Hr 100 million.
Despite the ongoing investigation, Trukhanov hasn’t been seen in Odesa for more than a month-and-a-half, as he’s been on vacation since Dec. 27. He flew in Kyiv from Warsaw after being on business trips to Davos, Switzerland and Athens, Greece.
On Feb. 13, other members of Trukhanov’s team, including the head of the communal property department Oleksiy Spector, and the chairman of the permanent commission on communal property issues Vasily Shkryabay, were also issued with notices of suspicion. Neither of them are currently in Ukraine.
Oleksandr Lemenov, an expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, has little hopes that the court decision would be objective in Trukhanov’s case.
“We will see huge debates,” Lemenov told the Kyiv Post, adding that it would be difficult to prove Trukhanov’s complicity in the embezzlement case.
Documentary evidence emerged on Nov. 20 that Trukhanov is a Russian citizen, according to the database on the site of Russia’s Federal Tax Service. The database shows his name, date of birth, Russian passport number and Russian individual tax number. Trukhanov denied having a Russian passport. “Don’t believe in lies and rumors,” he said.
Lawmakers Yegor Firsov and Volodymyr Aryev previously published what they said were documents from Russia’s Federal Migration Service, according to which Trukhanov has two Russian passports: one issued in Moscow Oblast and another in the republic of Dagestan. According to offshore documents leaked as part of the Panama Papers last year, Trukhanov is registered in the city of Sergiev Posad in Moscow Oblast, the Slidstvo.info investigative show reported. Under Ukrainian law, Ukrainian citizenship is lost once a person who is more than 18 years old voluntarily acquires the citizenship of another state. All Ukrainian public officials, including mayors, must be Ukrainian citizens.
The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, did not respond to a request for comment on whether it would investigate the evidence. Previously the SBU said that Trukhanov’s Russian citizenship cannot be proven. Trukhanov has also been accused of organizing and financing pro-Russian separatists in Odesa in 2014 – an accusation that he denies. Documents published by Slidstvo.info show that Trukhanov owns a hidden network of offshore firms that control companies that have received city contracts.
Trukhanov associates and Odesa businessmen Alexander Angert and Vladimir Galanternik have been accused of spearheading corruption in Odesa, and according to an Italian police dossier were members of a mafia gang in the 1990s. Trukhanov, Angert and Galanternik deny accusations of wrongdoing. Andriy Aksyonov, mayor of the city of Dobropillya in Donetsk Oblast, is also a Russian citizen, according to the database of Russia’s Federal Tax Service. Aksyonov did not respond to a request for comment.
