You're reading: Ex-Agriculture Minister Prysyazhnyuk wanted on corruption, embezzlement charges (UPDATE)

Mykola Prysyazhnyuk, fugitive ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s friend and his only agriculture minister, faces up to 12 years in prison for allegedly embezzling $67 million from the state, the prosecutor’s office announced on April 7.

The Kyiv City Pechersk District Court has issued an arrest warrant for the former minister. His whereabouts are unknown,
and local media reports say he is hiding out abroad.

Prysyazhnyuk, 54, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $67 million in transactions related to the purchase of sugar through the state-run Agrarian Fund of Ukraine.

The announcement came more than two weeks after authorities on March 21 searched and found $286,000 and Hr 659,000 in cash, including high-end luxury watches, at his residence during the course of conducting a criminal investigation.

In 2102, Prysyazhnyuk declared $28,000 in income. His official salary that year was nearly $27,300. The year before he declared an income of nearly $1 million, of which $27,875 was his official salary as agriculture minister. While in office, public officials are forbidden to have foreign or domestic commercial interests.

Lichtenstein and Switzerland in late February froze the Zhytomyr Oblast native’s assets.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk has accused Yanukovych and other former high-ranking officials of emptying state coffers and said $37 billion of credits had disappeared. Altogether, in the past three years $70 billion had disappeared into offshore accounts, he added.

Ever since being appointed as agriculture minister in March 2010, Prysyazhnyuk has been linked to numerous corruption scandals. He has maintained his innocence in them.

Investigations by Forbes Ukraine, online news site Ukrainska Pravda, and investigative site Slidstvo.info have linked to him Golden Derrick, a company that received permits from local governments in two oblasts without undergoing a bidding process or auction to develop and produce oil and gas in 28 deposits.

In another case companies tied to Prysyazhnyuk received more than $217 million in government contracts to insulate some 500 buildings owned by the state, such as kindergartens, schools and orphanages. Slidstfo.info found that energy-saving insulation wasn’t installed or only partially installed in many of the buildings.

He was also accused in 2011 of corruption for giving an obscure, unknown grain trader favorable treatment in the allocation of grain export quotas. Dubbed the “Great Grain Robbery” by foreign grain traders, Prysyazhnyuk denied any involvement in giving Khlib Investbud preferable treatment in an interview to the Kyiv Post.

According to past interviews Pryzyazhnyuk gave, he has known Yanukovych since the mid-1980s where they met while working for Ordzhonikidzevuhillya, a coal mining production company in Yenakievo, the ex-president’s hometown.

Yanukovych managed the bus depot there while the former agriculture minister was the chief technologist of capital construction.

[Editor’s Note: This article was updated to reflect the amended dollar amount that the ex-Agriculture Minister is suspected of embezzling and to include news of the court order to arrest him.]

Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].