The counterintelligence unit of the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, has confirmed that the common-law wife of Serhiy Semochko, the first deputy chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and her daughter Anastasia Koton are Russian citizens, Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky District Court said in a ruling published on Dec. 10.
Semochko is being investigated by the SBU in a treason case. Despite this, he has not been fired or suspended.
The court gave the SBU access to Semochko’s mobile phone data from Jan. 1, 2014 until Nov. 23, 2018.
In October, Semochko claimed that Lysenko did not have a Russian passport.
The Bihus.info project on Oct. 1 published copies of Russian passports of Lysenko, her daughter Anastasia Koton, and her son-in-law Volodymyr Koton. The authenticity of the passports of Lysenko and Volodymyr Koton was confirmed by Bihus.info through the site of Russia’s Federal Tax Service, which also means they are registered as Russian taxpayers.
Semochko’s family members have also regularly visited Crimea after its annexation by Russia in 2014, Bihus.info said.
Lysenko also owns one luxury house in Kyiv’s high-end suburb of Kozyn, while Anastasia Koton owns two high-end houses there, according to Bihus.info. The houses have an estimated combined value of $8 million.
Semochko admitted on Oct. 16 that Lysenko owns one of the luxury houses, arguing that she had used income from her tourism business in Crimea to fund the purchase. Semochko declined to comment on the assets of Koton and other relatives.
His explanations on the sources of funding contradict the findings of the journalists, according to which the income of his family was hardly sufficient to fund the assets. According to Bihus.info, Lysenko’s income amounted to $135,000 in 2010 through 2018, while Koton’s income totaled $59,000 during the period, and the income of other relatives was negligible. Semochko has never been a businessman, and an intelligence officer’s salary is not sufficient to buy such assets.
The Russian citizenship of Serhiy Semochko’s wife Tetiana Lysenko, according to Russia’s Federal Tax Service.
Semochko is not the only top official with links to Russia.
Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov’s Russian citizenship has been confirmed by the site of Russia’s Federal Tax Service despite his claims that he doesn’t have it.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner, has also published a copy of Trukhanov’s Russian passport and offshore documents, showing he is registered as living in the city of Sergiev Posad in Moscow Oblast.
Lawmakers Yegor Firsov and Volodymyr Aryev previously 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.
Meanwhile, Valentyna Simonenko, a newly-appointed justice of the Supreme Court, registered as a Russian taxpayer in Russian-annexed Crimea in 2015, according to the official register of Russia’s Federal Tax Service checked by the Kyiv Post.
She claims she was registered there “automatically.”
According to High Council of Justice Chief Igor Benedysyuk‘s official biography, in 1994 he was simultaneously a judge of a Russian court martial and a Ukrainian one. Public Integrity Council members say that Russian citizenship was a necessary precondition of being a Russian judge, and that his appointment as a judge of Ukraine was illegal if he had Russian citizenship or was not a Ukrainian citizen.
He has said that he got his Ukrainian passport in 1996 and did not have a Russian or Ukrainian passport before that.
