President Petro Poroshenko has fired Deputy Chief of Staff Oleksiy Filatov.
The May 11 decision comes weeks after prosecutors brought money laundering charges against him. However, those charges were later canceled.
Filatov was appointed Poroshenko’s deputy chief of staff in July 2014. He was responsible for representing the president in court and providing Poroshenko with legal support for executing his duties in the judicial system, such as the development and implementation of judicial reform.
Rumors have circulated for at least a month that Filatov would be fired. However, previously, the Presidential Administration denied it.
The presidential decree announcing Filatov’s removal from the office provides no information as to why the decision was made. Oddly, it comes only weeks before Poroshenko will transfer power to President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy and all of his staff will likely lose their posts.
In March, Filatov and Poroshenko’s former Chief of Staff Borys Lozhkin were charged with complicity in laundering over $440 million dollars by selling Ukrainian Media Holding, a company founded by Lozhkin, to businessman Serhiy Kurchenko in 2013.
Kurchenko is an associate of ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych and currently resides in Russia. He is wanted in Ukraine for financial crimes.
Both Lozhkin and Filatov have denied wrongdoing.
Prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulik brought charges against both men as part of the so-called Kurchenko case. At the same time, he issued notices of suspicion against two more of Poroshenko’s allies: Valeria Gontareva, the former head of the National Bank of Ukraine, and Kostyantyn Stetsenko, a top executive at investment bank ICU. Both were charged with aiding organized crime and embezzlement. Gontareva was also charged with money laundering.
Both Gontareva and Stetsenko previously denied the accusations.
In the same case, Kulik brought money laundering charges against Mykola Zlochevsky, Yanukovych’s former Ecology and Natural Resources Minister. Zlochevsky has also denied any wrongdoing.
However, soon after that, the Prosecutor General’s Office canceled the notices of suspicion against Filatov, Lozhkin, Gontareva, and Stetsenko.
Larysa Sargan, a spokesperson for the Prosecutor General’s Office, said in March that her office believed the notices of suspicion for all of the individuals except Zlochevsky to be unlawful and invalid.
She said that the notices were not based on evidence, and that they were not served personally to the suspects, as required by law.
Then, on April 21, Zelenskiy won the presidential runoff election, receiving 73 percent of the vote. One day later, the Prosecutor General’s Office issued summonses to the president’s allies in the Kurchenko case.
However, on April 30, Kulik said that Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko had disbanded the high-profile investigations unit and the prosecution unit that had charged the Poroshenko allies. This, Kulik said, led to their investigations being halted.
Later, on May 6, Lutsenko told the Kyiv Post that he would not authorize charges against the Poroshenko allies because he did not believe there was enough evidence against them. He also said that he had disbanded the units investigating them because Deputy Prosecutor General Eugene Enin, who led these units, had resigned, meaning that all the investigators would be assigned to another deputy prosecutor.
Earlier, on April 25, Enin said that he had resigned due to the scandal over the charges against the Poroshenko allies, arguing that the case was politicized
Filatov was also previously charged with illegal enrichment — charges which the Presidential Administration denied. However, after the Constitutional Court canceled a law on illegal enrichment in late February, the case was supposed to be closed.
