A court in the capital of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, on July 28 ordered the arrest of 13.1 million Swiss francs ($13.6 million) on accounts owned by the wife of a Ukrainian judge, Ukraine’s State Financial Monitoring Service has reported.
The service, together with the financial intelligence services of
Liechtenstein, discovered that five companies, registered in Panama and
Liechtenstein, had opened the accounts in banks in Liechtenstein and Latvia.
“A substantial amount of money of doubtful origin” has accumulated in
the accounts, according to the report.
The State Financial Monitoring Service said the companies belong to or
have been operated by the acting judge of Ukraine’s Supreme Economic Court and
his wife. The service did not identify the judge.
The service, however, did say that the judge had been one of the
deputies of the chairman of the Supreme Economic Court when Viktor Yanukovych
was president.
According to the official website of the High Council of Justice of
Ukraine, two judges were appointed as the chairman’s deputies of the Supreme
Economic Court on May 16, 2013. They are Artur Yemelyanov and Viktor
Moskalenko.
However, Moskalenko isn’t listed as an acting judge of the Supreme
Economic Court, according to the website of the court, while Yemelyanov is an
acting judge of the fourth chamber of the court.
The court’s press service, when contacted by the Kyiv Post, said it could
neither deny nor confirm that the judge whose assets had been arrested in
foreign banks was indeed Yemelyanov.
A Donetsk native, Yemelyanov appeared in the media spotlight early this
year when he reported that he owns 12 apartments and two houses in his asset
declaration, while his annual salary is about $10,300.
After avoiding journalists for about a month, Yemelyanov finally told
the Hromadske television channel’s investigative program Slidstvo.Info that the
assets belong to his wife, who is “a private entrepreneur.”
According to the Slidstvo.Info, the judge’s wife, Svitlana Yemelyanova,
owns a beauty salon and runs self-development courses, none of which make much money.
The
State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine says it will continue to
cooperate with the financial intelligence services
of Liechtenstein to investigate the sources of the money found in the arrested
accounts.
All the materials of the case have been submitted to the Prosecutor’s
General Office of Ukraine, the service said in a press release.
Kyiv Post staff writer Alyon Zhuk can be reached at [email protected].
