You're reading: Yatsenyuk, Martynenko under investigation following new bribery accusations

Prosecutors are investigating Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his associate, former lawmaker Mykola Martynenko, after they were accused of selling parliamentary seats in the October 2012 elections.

Martynenko
resigned from parliament last month amid a Swiss bribery investigation against
him and accusations that he was profiteering from state firms.

Martynenko’s
spokesman Andriy Lyashenko denied the latest accusations, while Yatsenyuk’s
spokeswoman Olga Lappo, who has previously denied all corruption allegations,
did not reply to repeated requests for comment by phone and e-mail.

The Prosecutor
General’s Office confirmed to the Kyiv Post on Jan. 12 that prosecutors were
investigating ex-lawmaker Ihor Skosar’s claim that he gave a bribe to Yatsenyuk
through Martynenko for a place on the Batkyvshchyna Party’s parliamentary list.
Yatsenyuk was the leader of Batkyvshshyna’s parliamentary faction at that time, while ex-Prime Minister
Yulia Tymoshenko — imprisoned at the time — was leader of the party.

“Currently we can
neither confirm nor deny whether the bribe was given because Skosar is evading
interrogations, which makes the investigation more difficult,” the Prosecutor
General’s Office said in an e-mailed statement.

Skosar, who could
not be reached for comment, first made the statement on Ukraine’s ZIK
television channel in 2014.

“In 2012 I
personally gave a $6 million bribe to Arseniy Yatsenyuk through Mykola
Martynenko, a lawmaker from his faction, for a place on his list and negotiated
personally with Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who is currently prime minister,” Skosar
said in a letter sent to Serhiy Leshchenko, a Verkhovna Rada member from the
Petro Poroshenko Bloc, and published by the latter on Jan. 8. “…Though several
months have passed since I made the statement, none of Ukraine’s law
enforcement agencies has reacted to it.”

He asked
Leshchenko to help him publicize the case.

Skosar left
Batkyvshchyna in 2013 when many members of parliament, called “tushki,” quit
opposition parties and allied themselves with then-President Viktor Yanukoych.
Yatsenyuk then accused such lawmakers of being paid for switching to
Yanukovych’s side.

Skosar
subsequently supported some initiatives by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

Lyashenko told
the Kyiv Post he believed that Skosar’s statement was “a fake from a Yanukovych
‘tushka’ that’s been used as a discrediting tool since the Yanukovych era.”

Leshchenko wrote
in his blog on Jan. 9 that the criminal case into Skosar’s statement had been
opened in June but argued that prosecutors had been sabotaging it.

The case was
transferred to the newly-created National Anti-Corruption Bureau in late 2015,
he said.

The National
Anti-Corruption Bureau, which did not reply to a request for comment, is also
investigating two other cases against Martynenko.

He is accused of
accepting 30 million Swiss francs from Czech engineering firm Skoda for giving
it a contract to supply equipment to state-owned nuclear power firm Energoatom
and of links to a uranium supply scheme at the company.

Martynenko was
scheduled to be questioned by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau on Dec. 29
but did not show up, citing illness.

The bureau said
later he had not shown up either for a Jan. 11 interrogation because he was
scheduled to be questioned by Swiss prosecutors on Jan. 12.

Artem Sytnyk,
head of the bureau, told the Ukrainski Novyny news agency on Jan. 12 that Martynenko could be
brought to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau “by force” for questioning.

Sytnyk said
Martynenko could be more afraid of his bureau than of Swiss prosecutors.

In response,
Martynenko lashed out at Sytnyk in a statement released on Jan. 12.

“Artem, you
shouldn’t seek to be feared and shouldn’t scare anyone,” Martynenko said. “It
would be better if you were loved and respected and if your posts on social
networks were liked.”

Martynenko
claimed that Sytnyk aspired to resemble Andrei Vyshynsky, a Stalin-era top
prosecutor involved in show trials.

He also urged
Sytnyk to communicate less with Leshchenko, calling the latter a “hatchet man.”

Meanwhile, the
National Anti-Corruption Bureau has rejected Leshshenko’s request to check
whether Martynenko violated income declaration rules in 2011 and 2014,
Leshchenko told the Liga.net news portal on Jan. 11.

The law on
criminal penalties for incorrect data in income declarations came into effect
in April 2015 and has no retroactive force, the bureau argued. The bureau said
it had submitted the information to the Interior Ministry in case an
administrative violation took place.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]