The Prosecutor General’s Office has issued a summons to several top allies of President Petro Poroshenko for questioning in embezzlement and money laundering cases.
The suspects are expected to be questioned and charged on April 23 and April 25, prosecutors said.
The move comes on April 22, just a day after Poroshenko’s defeat in the second round of the Ukrainian presidential election. The prosecutor’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the summons, or their timing.
Valeria Gontareva, the former head of the National Bank of Ukraine, and Kostyantyn Stetsenko, a top executive at investment bank ICU, are expected to be charged with aiding organized crime and complicity in embezzling Hr 2 billion ($74 million) by buying and selling government bonds. The scheme allegedly involved Serhiy Kurchenko, an associate of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine during the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and currently resides in Moscow.
Gontareva, Poroshenko’s former Chief of Staff Borys Lozhkin and his Deputy Chief of Staff Oleksiy Filatov are expected to be charged with complicity in laundering over $440 million through the 2013 sale of UMH, a major international media company founded by Lozhkin.
The Prosecutor General’s Office is also planning to charge Mykola Zlochevsky, Ukraine’s ecology minister under Yanukovych, with laundering $36 million.
All of the suspects have previously denied the accusations of wrongdoing.
Gontareva, who lives in London, said she would not go to Ukraine for questioning and invited Ukrainian prosecutors to come to the United Kingdom. Representatives of Stetsenko, Lozhkin, and Filatov said they could not currently comment on the matter. A lawyer for Zlochevsky did not respond to multiple messages from the Kyiv Post.
Kulik controversy
In March, prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulik issued notices of suspicion for Gontareva, Stetsenko, Lozhkin, Filatov and Zlochevsky.
However, Larysa Sargan, a spokeswoman for the Prosecutor General’s Office, said in March that the leadership of her agency believed the notices of suspicion for all of the individuals, except for Zlochevsky, to be unlawful and invalid.
She said that the notices of suspicion were not based on evidence, and they were not served personally to the suspects, as they should be.
However, Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia cases unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office, told the Kyiv Post that the leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office had no right to cancel notices of suspicion issued by prosecutors.
Anti-corruption activists, including Reanimation Package of Reforms expert Oleksandr Lemenov, said Sargan’s statement indicated that Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko wanted to save the allies of his political boss Poroshenko.
On April 11, Kulik also said that Poroshenko, Filatov and Poroshenko Bloc lawmakers Igor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky had illegally interfered in the UMH money laundering case. Kononenko and Hranovsky did not respond to requests for comment.
Poroshenko denied the accusations on April 11. He claimed that Kulik had gone to Israel, where tycoon Igor Kolomoisky lives, and decided to take part in the oligarch’s political games. Kolomoisky denied meeting Kulik.
Accusations
The case against Gontareva and Stetsenko is linked to a 2017 Kramatorsk City Court ruling on a plea bargain with Arkady Kashkin, the nominal owner of a firm allegedly linked to Kurchenko. The plea bargain allowed the court to confiscate money and state bonds linked to Kurchenko’s firms.
According to the classified court ruling, which was leaked to the news network Al Jazeera, ICU — a bank which provides services to Poroshenko — served as a broker for Kurchenko’s companies under Yanukovych. The bank denies any wrongdoing, saying that it just brokered for the companies and was not aware of any criminal activities.
Another suspect, Lozhkin, sold his UMH media group to Kurchenko for $400 million in 2013. Filatov was a legal consultant involved in the deal.
Lozhkin was fired as an advisor to Poroshenko in 2018 after Al Jazeera contacted him over a document obtained by the news agency that allegedly shows that the money paid for UMH came from a loan secured with Kurchenko’s allegedly stolen assets.
Some analysts believe the sale price was far more than the real value of UMH, and that is why there are suspicions that money laundering and a kickback were involved. Lozhkin denies all accusations of wrongdoing.
Austria opened a money laundering case into UMH’s sale, but it has seen no progress due to a lack of cooperation from Ukrainian law enforcement. Moreover, Kurchenko said no taxes had been paid on the sale in Ukraine, which prompted accusations of tax evasion.
