The police will do all they can to uncover any possible corrupt connections of Oleksandr Volkonsky (Shakhov), who is suspected of organizing the Elita-Center fraud on Kyiv's real estate market, and Ukrainian state officials, Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko said on Friday.
The minister said that the Interior Ministry expects to finish the investigation by the summer of this year.
“I hope that we shall manage not only to prove Shakhov’s guilt, but also the involvement of top Ukrainian officials,” Lutsenko said.
As reported, on November 1, 2007, as suspect in the fraud case, a man named Oleksandr Volkonsky (whose real name turned out to be Oleksandr Shakhov, born in Russia in 1971) was detained in Switzerland. He was extradited from Switzerland to Ukraine on October 9, 2008.
The fraud hit the real estate market in Kyiv in 2006. About 1,500 citizens were victims of the Elita-Center Group, the representatives of which took money from the public as payment for housing that was never built. The total sum stolen from the victims was about UAH 400 million.
