You're reading: Fire bomb hits home of Ukraine lawmaker who fights corruption in energy sector

An unknown assailant tossed a can of flammable liquid at the house of Victoria Voytsitska, a Samopomich Party lawmaker active in battling corruption in the energy sector. It caused a brief fire but no injuries.

The
incident happened in the early hours of March 17 at Voytsitska’s home in the
village of Kozyn in Kyiv Oblast, to the south of the capital.

Voytsitska
regards the incident as an assassination attempt.

The
lawmaker said the attackers had been aiming at a car parked near the house, but
missed, and instead the can struck the wall. She thinks that if the attacker
had hit the car, the house would have caught fire as well.

Prosecutor
General Viktor Shokin took the investigation under personal control. The
incident was qualified as a terrorist attack.

“I
have no idea who did this to me. But I’m sure this is not just ordinary vandalism,”
Voytsitska told the Kyiv Post.

The
Samopomich Party in a statement published on the party’s website said it considers
the attack motivated by the lawmaker’s struggle against corruption in the
energy sector. The statement links the attack to Voytsitska’s speech at the parliament
Energy Committee meeting on the eve of the attack on March 16. There,
Voytsitska spoke of alleged violations at state gas company UkrGasVydobuvannya.

Voytsitska has requested investigations
into allegations of corruption at state companies UkrGasVydobuvannya and
UkrNafta. She has filed four claims to National Anti-corruption Bureau (NABU)
since the beginning of the year, all regarding the alleged violations among the
management of state enterprises.

At the Energy Committee meeting on
March 16, its deputy head lawmaker Ihor Nasalyk suggested to allow the
companies who have licenses for natural gas production to share the licenses,
allowing other companies extract gas under the same license. Voytsitska was
against it.

“Today we (blocked) yet another
attempt to steamroll through a corruption scheme under the
pretense of rescuing the oil and
gas production sector,” she wrote on Facebook after the meeting. “This is the
third time Nasalyk tries to push this scheme.”

Nasalyk said he didn’t
have anything wrong in mind when offering to allow sharing licenses.

“The guys from UkrGasVydobuvannya
asked us for this. We have similarly tense discussions in every committee. And
Voytsitska is not as experienced in the
energy sector as she thinks,” Nasalyk said.

Oleg Prokhorenko, the СEO of UkrGasVydobuvannya,
backed Nasalyk’s idea to share licenses.

“Imagine you have several gas wells
in one area and only one license, and one of these wells is out of order. So
another investor can buy it, repair it, and continue to extract gas, using the
same gas field as you,” Prokhorenko said.