You're reading: ​Parliament allows arrest of lawmaker on embezzlement charges

The Verkhovna Rada on July 5 voted to lift the immunity of a lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko, who is accused of leading a criminal group that embezzled Hr 3 billion ($120 million) through fraudulent gas sale deals.

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The lawmakers voted three times, allowing the prosecution, detention, and arrest of Onyshchenko. The votes “for” were 263, 265, and 275 respectively, with the required minimum for each vote to pass being 226.

“This a key vote that will show if we support corruption, or if we’re fighting it,” Tetiana Chornovol, a lawmaker with the People’s Front, said ahead of the vote.

Onyshchenko is accused of embezzling money through Ukrgazvydobuvannya, a state-owned gas trader.

According to investigators at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, Onyshchenko’s accomplices, employees at Ukrgazvydobuvannya, allowed the sale of gas at cheap prices to intermediary companies associated with Onyshchenko, which then resold it at market prices, pocketing the difference.

Onyshchenko also violated a law that prohibits lawmakers from doing business.

Prosecutors have arrested 11 people accused of participating in the scheme, and are looking to arrest more.

Onyshchenko, 45, is a lawmaker with the Volya Narodu (People’s Will) group, elected as an independent in a single-member district in Kyiv in 2014. He made a fortune in the gas trade — the Ukrainian media estimates his net worth as being between $65 million and $243 million.

Onyshchenko used to be a lawmaker with the Party of Regions, the political party of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.

The Party of Regions’ successor in the current parliament, the Opposition Bloc faction, gave practically no votes in favor of Onyshchenko’s arrest in the July 5 vote. Of the faction’s 43 lawmakers, only one voted for the arrest.

The only faction that gave no votes at all was Onyshchenko’s Volya Narodu, a group of 19 lawmakers.

Onyshchenko earlier said that he would be present at the Verkhovna Rada hearing on his immunity, but he failed to appear. Head of Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office Nazar Kholodnytskiy said that Onyshchenko had left Ukraine on a flight to Moscow via Minsk on July 2, three days before the hearing.

On July 3, Onyshchenko posted an Instagram photo of himself watching a UEFA Euro 2016 soccer game with a Russian celebrity Viktoriya Bonya and an unidentified young woman.

Some lawmakers were concerned at the decision of the Verkhovna Rada Regulations Committee to break the investigators’ request into three different decisions, to be voted on separately, arguing that it made the vote more complicated.

Others voiced criticism about the prosecutors not pressing for the arrest of Onyshchenko’s alleged accomplices in high office, who may have helped him pull off his corrupt scheme.

Speaking in parliament before the vote, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko responded to the criticism with a risque joke.

“The behavior of some lawmakers reminds me of a nun who comes to work in a brothel but wants to be treated like Natasha Rostova,” Lutsenko said from the rostrum, hinting that the concerned lawmakers frequently violate the rules themselves, yet want to come across as pure as the central female character in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

Onyshchenko is the third lawmaker from the current parliament to lose his immunity due to criminal charges. On June 3, 2015, the Verkhovna Rada lifted the immunity of lawmaker Serhiy Klyuyev, brother of Yanukovych’s Chief of Staff Andriy Klyuyev, on charges of embezzlement. However, Klyuyev managed to flee to Russia even after the vote was taken.

The Radical Party’s Ihor Mosiyuchuk, who was accused of soliciting a bribe, lost his immunity and was arrested in September, but later the Supreme Specialized Court ruled that the arrest was illegal because parliament had violated its own procedures.

However, Lutsenko vowed that this would not be the last occasion that law enforcement would attempt to bring a corrupt lawmaker to justice.

“This isn’t the first vote to lift the immunity of a lawmaker, and I promise that it won’t be the last,” Lutsenko said, addressing the parliament before the vote on Onyshchenko.

During the debate prior to the vote, some lawmakers once again called for the cancellation of lawmakers’ immunity from prosecution – an issue that has been discussed in the parliament for years, with no progress.

“Immunity is the reason why people run for parliament – to continue stealing from the state scot-free,” Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko said during the debate on Onyshchenko’s case in parliament.

“It has turned parliament into the biggest business club in Europe.”