Ukrainian Prosecutor General Vitaliy Yarema has said his office has opened a series of criminal cases against former president Viktor Yanukovych and his former inner circle.
In an article for the Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (Weekly Mirror) newspaper (www.zn.ua) entitled “The List of Justice,” Yarema says the cases are among about 30 priority tasks that he has set for his office. The tasks make up what he has named a “list of justice.”
“Large-scale embezzlement of state funds” is one of the top tasks, he says.
“The bank accounts, securities, other assets to a total of 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,” Yarema says.
Moreover, “at the initiative of the Prosecutor General’s Office, the European Union Council has imposed restrictive sanctions on 22 former Ukrainian senior officials and persons connected to them. The former senior officials have had their assets on bank accounts in Switzerland, Latvia and Liechtenstein seized,” the prosecutor says.
“In August, the Prosecutor General’s Office signed a cooperation agreement with the International Centre for Asset Recovery of the Basel Institute on Governance, a leading nongovernmental organization in the investigation of corruption and money laundering cases,” he says.
Dzerkalo Tyzhnia has said in comments on Yarema’s article that “Ukraine risks losing the assets of Yanukovych’s henchmen frozen by the West” as “the new government is being too unhurried in investigating their activities.”
