After years of his repeated denials, Odesa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov’s Russian citizenship was confirmed at Odesa’s Malinovsky Court late on Feb. 12.
The hearing was part of a Hr 100 million embezzlement case, where Trukhanov is one of the suspects.
A person with the same full name, birth place and birth date received one Russian passport in the republic of Dagestan in 2002 and another Russian passport in the city of Sergiyev Posad in Moscow Oblast in 2003, prosecutors said at the court, citing responses sent by Russian authorities. The first passport was replaced with a new one in 2011 when Trukhanov turned 45.
The passports were annulled in 2017 – long after the Trukhanov citizenship scandal broke – due to alleged procedural violations, according to Russian authorities. Russia’s Sergiyev Posad Court has published its 2017 decision on canceling Trukhanov’s Russian citizenship.
Trukhanov, who has denied ever holding Russian citizenship, thanked the prosecutors for their evidence and said that the issue of his citizenship would be “removed from the agenda.”
The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, has previously claimed it had found no evidence of Trukhanov’s Russian citizenship. The SBU did not respond to a request for comment.
Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov’s passport, according to OCCRP.
Ukrainian law bans the voluntary acquisition of another citizenship for Ukrainian nationals, and officials are not allowed to have dual citizenship. Lawyer Vitaly Tytych told the Kyiv Post that criminal cases could be opened against Trukhanov and SBU officials for concealing his Russian citizenship.
Under Ukrainian law, officials and candidates for state jobs undergo checks by the SBU over whether they have double citizenship.
In 2014 to 2016, lawmakers Yegor Firsov and Volodymyr Aryev published what they said were documents from Russia’s Federal Migration Service showing Trukhanov has two Russian passports: one issued in Moscow Oblast and another in the republic of Dagestan.
The database on the site of Russia’s Federal Tax Service shows that Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov is a Russian citizen.
In 2017 other documentary evidence emerged that Trukhanov is a Russian citizen, according to the database on the site of Russia’s Federal Tax Service.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner, also published a copy of Trukhanov’s Russian passport and offshore documents in 2018, showing he was registered as living in the city of Sergiev Posad in Moscow Oblast.
A document from Russia’s Federal Migration Service shows that Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov was a Russian citizen.
Documents published by Slidstvo.info show that Trukhanov owns a hidden network of offshore firms that control companies that have received city contracts. Trukhanov and his ally Alexander Angert were members of a mafia gang in the 1990s, according to an Italian police dossier.
