Kyiv Oblast police on Aug. 7 attached an electronic monitor wrist bracelet to Petro Melnyk, a former lawmaker and longstanding rector of the National Tax University of Ukraine who is under house arrest on suspicion of bribery.On July 27, Melnyk, 56, was taken into custody after he allegedly accepted $15,000 from two individuals on behalf of relatives wishing to enter the state-run university in Irpyn, a small town outside Kyiv. His apprehension was part of a joint-sting operation conducted by the internal security department of the Ministry of Revenues and Duties and the organized crime unit of the police.If found guilty, Melnyk faces up to 10 years in prison, confiscation of property and a three-year ban from holding public office, including positions at state-run educational institutes.
He was hospitalized on the same day of his arrest after he claimed to be suffering from heart problems. After he refused to attend court proceedings, he was forcibly transported on Aug. 1 to Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court, first lying on an ambulance bed and then transferred to a wheelchair.
Melnyk’s lawyers said he underwent heart surgery the previous day. During a court recess on Aug. 1, Melnyk showed journalists his thigh wrapped in bandaged gauze. Kyiv’s chief cardiologist, Leonid Kushnir, told journalists outside the courtroom that Melnyk refused to be examined. He added that his diagnosis of Melnyk was based on medical documents that an Irpyn hospital gave him. Kushnir said he found no evidence that Melnyk had heart-related surgery.
The court nevertheless ruled to put him under house arrest for 60 days, starting from July 27, because of his reported health condition.
He is confined to the house of his sister, Olena Melnyk, who heads the land commission of the Irpyn City Council, and can only leave to seek medical treatment at a pre-designated medical facility.
While in court, Melnyk tendered his resignation letter from the tax university where he worked since 1986 when it was still called the Irpyn Industrial Technical School. In 1991 he became head of the institution, which was first renamed as the Ukrainian Finance and Economic Institute under the Finance Ministry and later the State Tax Service Academy. In 2003, the tax university was granted national status.
As rector, he was secretly filmed on Nov. 19, 2004, while addressing the university’s student body in an auditorium, campaigning for Viktor Yanukovych during the latter’s failed bid for the presidency that year. He was also head of the Party of Regions branch in Kyiv Oblast during that time.
Published on YouTube in March 2012, the video shows Melnyk ordering students to obtain absentee ballots and vote for Yanukovych.
“It’s quite clear to me that Viktor Yanukovych will be president,” he tells the audience. “All of us will vote for him at the polls… you shall all get absentee ballots and vote for him… he who doesn’t want to obtain an absentee ballot can go home and stay there.”
Melnyk also served two terms as a member of parliament: in 1998-2002, and 2007-2012, the latter under the Party of Regions ticket.
Towards the end of his second term on March 3, 2012, Melnyk was filmed wrapping his arms around lawmaker Iryna Herashchenko, lifting and swinging her in the air in an attempt to evict her from an election precinct in Obukhiv, Kyiv Oblast following that city’s pre-term mayoral election.
He later said he would only apologize to Herashchenko, an Our Ukraine lawmaker, if she did so first. Later Parliament Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn called the incident “an act of brutality” by Melnyk.
The video was published on YouTube on March 19, 2012.
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].
