The High Anti-Corruption Court on Sept. 18 failed to arrest or impose bail or any restrictions on Oleksandr Yurchenko, a lawmaker who was previously a member of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party charged with bribery.
The Yurchenko case, which was initially blocked by Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, is seen as a major litmus test for Zelensky’s promises not to tolerate corruption among his own allies.
Yurchenko failed to show up for the court hearing. His lawyer claimed that the lawmaker had contacted people infected with COVID-19 on Sept. 4-7 and was being tested for the disease.
As a result, the court hearing was postponed until Sept. 21.
On Sept. 15, the NABU said that one of its agents had posed as a representative of a foreign investor who wanted to build a solid waste processing factory to produce biomass that can be used as an alternative fuel in Ukraine.
Yurchenko, a member of the Rada’s energy committee, and his intermediary, Ivan Fishchenko, proposed that the agent give them a bribe to introduce an amendment that would apply the “green tariff” — a higher-than-average price for alternative energy bought by the state — to biomass. The bureau published video and audio footage of conversations between the agent, Yurchenko and Fishchenko in July-September 2020.
Fishchenko denied the accusations of wrongdoing, while Yurchenko did not respond to requests for comment.
Fishchenko told the NABU detective that he must give $3,000 to him and $10,000 to Yurchenko for submitting the amendment to the Rada. Afterwards, the agent, Fishchenko and Yurchenko also discussed a further $200,000 bribe for ensuring that the committee and the Rada vote for the amendments.
Yurchenko and Fishchenko also said the lawmaker was interested in receiving 3% of the biomass factory’s shares. He called it “getting a slice of the big pie.”
They said that a majority of the energy committee’s members must be “corrupted” to ensure that the amendment passes.
Fishchenko also said that members of the energy committee had been given bribes worth $50,000 each for amendments involving wind energy. Yurchenko corrected him and said each committee member was supposed to be given an $80,000 bribe. Head of the committee, lawmaker Andriy Gerus, later said that the wind energy amendments never passed through the committee.
Fishchenko said in the recordings that Yurchenko is a protégé of Andriy Kholodov, another lawmaker from Zelensky’s party.
Kholodov has a personal link to Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Kremlin lawmaker who is close to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. In June 2018, Oksana Marchenko, Medvedchuk’s wife, became a godmother of Kholodov’s son. Medvedchuk was at the ceremony, too. Kholodov did not respond to requests for comment.
According to a police register, Yurchenko was also accused of stealing four bottles of beer in Kyiv in 2009, the Censor.net news site reported on Sept. 18, citing NABU sources. However, the police refused to register a case against him.
A NABU source confirmed this information to the Kyiv Post. The source was not authorized to speak to the press.
Prosecutor General Venediktova, a Zelensky appointee and loyalist, initially blocked the case against him, claiming there wasn’t enough evidence to press charges. Soon, she gave in to public pressure and authorized the charges on Sept. 17.
Zelensky was silent on his prosecutor general’s initial failure to authorize the charges against Yurchenko, but castigated the lawmaker on Sept. 17.
“Every official, minister and lawmaker must write somewhere in big letters: If you steal, you’ll be jailed, and if you take a bribe, you’ll be jailed,” Zelensky wrote on Facebook.
In a statement, his office said that “Yurchenko has lost his ethical right to be a Verkhovna Rada member.”
In contrast, Zelensky has failed to react to corruption accusations against his Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Judge Pavlo Vovk. All of them deny the accusations of wrongdoing.
