Ukraine’s Security Service chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said that his agency has completed investigation of 82 cases related to Ukraine's former top officials, including fugitive president Viktor Yanukovych.
The SBU reported they have tracked the officials’ assets and accounts and handed the information to the general prosecutor’s office, Nalyvaichenko said during a news conference in Kyiv on Nov. 18.
The prosecutor’s office opened dozens of criminal cases against Yanukovych and his inner circle after their escape from Ukraine in the wake of the EuroMaidan revolution in February.
“The bank accounts, securities, other assets totaling more than Hr 6.2 billion and $1.8 billion, and the movables and real estate of former senior officials have been confiscated in order to compensate the state for the losses,” General Prosecutor Vitaliy Yarema was quoted as saying by the Ukrainian newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (Weekly Mirror) on Nov. 17.
Previously, Ukraine’s officials estimated that Yanukovych stole some $70 billion in assets from Ukraine in three years of his presidency.
Nalyvaichenko says he hopes to see those Yanukovych and other officials on trial some day, but said the SBU will focus mostly on bringing their property back to Ukraine. He said the agency will also collect materials to ask for extradition of these officials from other countries.
“However, the question of extraditing these people, it’s just a matter of time,” Nalyvaichenko says. Most people from Yanukovych’s inner circle found shelter in neighboring Russia, which has no extradition agreement with Ukraine.
Nalyvaichenko also said that his agency is sensing the help of the hackers in countering terrorism in Ukraine, and thanked them for cooperation. Earlier, Ukraine’s hacker Eugene Dokukin of so-called Ukrainian Cyber Forces claimed that his group blocked around $1 billion on the accounts of Russia-backed separatists during the last five months.
Recently the group blocked webmoney accounts of the activists of so-called Kharkiv People’s Republic, the separatist movement in Ukraine’s second-largest city.
“This is how we stopped financing the terrorism,” Dokukin posted on his Facebook page on Nov. 17. “Ukrainian Cyber Forces attacked the separatists again. Since June we have blocked $1 billion on at least 128 terrorists’ accounts,” according to the post.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]
