Backroom dealings between Ukrainian authorities and members of the entourage of ousted ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych have allowed suspects in high-profile corruption cases to escape prosecution, an opposition lawmaker said.
Reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko on May 16 alleged that some top Yanukovych allies previously under investigation, including lawmaker Yuriy Boyko, had reached secret deals with prosecutors.
Leshchenko’s claims come after the Prosecutor General’s Office in January and February announced that it had struck plea bargains with some suspects in cases from the years that Yanukovych was in power from 2010–2014.
But Leshchenko and lawyers familiar with the cases say the details of the plea bargains are secret, in violation of the law. “It’s especially cynical that these ‘plea bargains’ are absolutely secret, and society is deprived of the opportunity to oversee the authorities’ work,” Leshchenko said.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has denied accusations that it made secret backroom deals, instead portraying the plea bargains as signs it is making progress in the cases.
Meanwhile, in late April Interpol removed Yanukovych, his chief of staff Andriy Klyuyev and his Energy Minister Eduard Stavytsky from its wanted list due to a lack of progress in the investigations. Serhiy Kovalyov, a lawyer for Yanukovych’s Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov, said on May 18 that Arbuzov had also been removed from Interpol’s wanted list.
Boyko scandal
Leshchenko on May 16 published the text of what he says is a draft parliament motion to strip Boyko, the former energy minister and the leader of the Opposition Bloc, the main offshoot of Yanukovych’s now-defunct Party of Regions, of his immunity from prosecution.
Boyko could then have been arrested and put on trial in a case that involves alleged embezzlement during the sale of natural gas.
However, Leshchenko said the motion was blocked first by ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and then by his successor, Yuriy Lutsenko.
The existence of the motion was confirmed by a source at the Prosecutor General’s Office who cannot be named because he is not authorized to speak to the press.
Lutsenko’s spokeswoman Larysa Sargan denied the existence of the draft motion, pointing to a 2016 report by Sergei Gorbatuk, the head of the prosecution service’s department for trials in absentia. Gorbatuk said in the report that not enough evidence had been collected to support a motion to prosecute Boyko in a separate case involving the embezzlement of $400 million during the purchase of oil and gas rigs.
However, both Gorbatuk and Leshchenko called Sargan’s bluff, saying that Gorbatuk’s report was about a different case, and did not say anything about the motion in the natural gas case.
Sargan responded by publishing another document by the prosecution service’s chief investigator, Yuriy Hryshchenko, saying there had been no motions to prosecute Boyko.
But Leshchenko dismissed the document, saying that Hryshchenko would write anything because he is a loyalist of the authorities.
Although the case of the oil rigs had been previously known as the “Boyko rigs” investigation, Lutsenko has claimed that Boyko had little to do with it, and that the main suspects in the case are the Katsuba brothers, Serhiy (a lawmaker until 2014) and Oleksandr (the former deputy head of state oil and gas company Naftogaz under Yanukovych).
“The Prosecutor General’s Office got an order from the Presidential Administration to block the motion to strip Boyko of immunity as part of the strategic alliance between Boyko and (President Petro) Poroshenko” Leshchenko said. “He would be a convenient competitor for Poroshenko in the second round of the (2019) presidential election.”
At the same time, the oil rig case was taken away from Gorbatuk’s department and transferred to the military prosecutor’s office in October 2016 to make sure that Boyko remained safe, Leshchenko claimed. The transfer of this and other graft cases to the military prosecutor’s office has been questioned, because it is not deemed competent to investigate civilian corruption cases.
Gorbatuk said in a report filed with Lutsenko that the transfer of the case had no legal grounds and would hurt the investigation. He also said that there had been no progress in the case whatsoever before it was transferred to his department in June 2016.
According to another document filed by Gorbatuk, his department was also preparing notices of suspicion on top incumbent officials of the Energy Ministry and Naftogaz, but they were not filed after the case was taken away from the department.
Tax mafia
Other top officials have also escaped being charged.
In an embezzlement case against Yanukovych’s Tax and Revenue Minister Oleksandr Klymenko, about 50 suspects were expected to be charged before the case was taken away from Gorbatuk’s department in 2016. Now only about 12 suspects have been charged.
The officials who avoided prosecution in that case include Lyudmila Demchenko, head of the State Fiscal Service’s Kyiv branch, and Viktor Dvornikov, a former deputy head of Kyiv’s Pechersk District tax office and an advisor to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
“Gorbatuk was upbraided by (Deputy Prosecutor General Yury) Stolyarchuk and Shokin,” Leshchenko said. “They were pressuring him not to touch Dvornikov, because he’s a close friend of Klitschko.”
Demchenko must have been fired under the lustration law on the dismissal of Yanukovych-era top officials but has escaped lustration due to a controversial court ruling. Leshchenko attributes the ruling to Demchenko’s alleged ties to Poroshenko and his allies.
As of late 2016, the State Fiscal Service had failed to fire 42 Yanukovych-era officials subject to lustration and had also failed to carry out the lustration of officials who cannot explain their wealth, according to the Justice Ministry.
Potential suspects who escaped punishment in the Klymenko case also include Viktoria Maltseva, ex-head of Kyiv’s Pechersk District tax office, and two former officials of the Pechersk District tax office – Svitlana Karpenko and Yevheny Ostapenko – as well as other top officials of the Tax and Revenue Ministry and its Kyiv branch.
Meanwhile, Vladyslav Filatov, an employee of the Center for Democracy and the Rule of Law, on May 15 published on Facebook what he said was a photo of Yanukovych’s ex-Deputy Chief of Staff Yury Chmyr in front of the Presidential Administration in Kyiv. The photo triggered speculation that Chmyr was trying to curry favor with Poroshenko to escape prosecution. The Presidential Administration said information on visits to the administration was secret.
Chmyr is being investigated in a criminal case into the crackdown on and murder of EuroMaidan protesters in February 2014.
Ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s ex-Deputy Chief of Staff Yury Chmyr in front of the Presidential Administration in Kyiv on May 15. (Vladyslav FIlatov )
Secret ruling
Apart from being accused of letting some suspects off the hook completely, critics say the Prosecutor General’s Office has also struck shady deals with others.
On March 28, the Kramatorsk City Court concluded a plea bargain with Arkady Kashkin, the nominal owner of a firm linked to Yanukovych associate Serhiy Kurchenko. The plea bargain allowed the court to confiscate money and state bonds worth $1.5 billion linked to Kurchenko’s firms.
But critics have dismissed the confiscation hearings as a political show trial. Both the investigation and the trial were conducted in secret and in just two weeks.
The Prosecutor General’s Office and the Kramatorsk City Court have refused to publish the ruling, in what critics believe to be an effort to conceal violations of the law and behind-closed-door deals.
The prosecutor’s office told the Kyiv Post that the ruling cannot be divulged because it is allegedly a “secret of the investigation.”
Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer for the families of slain EuroMaidan protesters, said this was illegal because there could be no secrets in an investigation after a court verdict is passed, and all court rulings must be published.
The Kramatorsk City Court cited an entirely different reason, claiming that the March 28 decision cannot be published because the presiding judge is on vacation. Under Ukrainian law, the short version of a court ruling must be published immediately after it is issued, while the full text must be divulged no more than five days after the ruling.
Two pages of the text have been leaked to the strana.ua news website. Based on these pages, Tytych characterized the ruling as “outright trash that will have very dangerous consequences.” The text does not even make it clear if it’s a regular or in absentia trial, and whether the judge even considered the case at all, while the accused is misnamed as a “suspect,” Tytych said.
Plea bargains
The Prosecutor General’s Office closed an embezzlement case against Yanukovych’s Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky in January, and in February concluded plea bargains with Oleksandr Katsuba, the former deputy head of Naftogaz, Andriy Holovach, an ex-deputy head of the tax agency, and former Deputy Economy Minister Oleksandr Sukhomlyn.
Katsuba, Sukhomlin and Holovach were given suspended sentences.
The content of the plea bargains is unclear because they have been made secret, in violation of the law, Tytych said. He also said that the amounts the officials paid back to the state under the deals are far less than the losses incurred.
Losses attributed to Katsuba are estimated at Hr 12 billion, but he only paid Hr 100 million to the budget, according to statements by Prosecutor General Lutsenko. Sukhomlin and Holovach paid a total of Hr 150 million to the budget. They caused losses worth Hr 4 billion and Hr 3 billion, respectively.
Zlochevsky paid Hr 180 million to the budget, though the losses attributed to him totaled Hr 1 billion.
“These (plea bargains) are very prone to corruption,” Tytych said. “The less they contributed to the budget, the more in bribes they could have paid.”
