Valentyn Manko, former deputy commander of Dnipro-1 Regiment, has accused Hennadiy Korban, a Dnipropetrovsk businessman and a friend of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, of kidnapping people and using the fighters of volunteer battalions in his criminal schemes.
The accusation came as the Kyiv Court of
Appeals heard a case on Korban’s house arrest. Korban, the UKROP party leader,
was detained on Oct. 31 on suspicion of involvement in organized crime,
embezzlement, and kidnapping. A Kyiv court has placed him on house arrest until
Dec. 31.
Yevheniya Kravchuk, a spokeswoman for the
UKROP party, told the Kyiv Post by phone that she couldn’t comment on the issue
because she didn’t know the details of the case. A request for comment sent
later by the Kyiv Post also went unanswered.
In his Facebook post on Dec. 1, Korban blamed prosecutors, saying that “they found former volunteer fighters who used to work with us and ask them to give false testimony.”
Korban has denied the accusations against him
and attributed the kidnapping to a supposed conflict between Velychko and a
group who allegedly stole 500 businesses from the city government. These
people, including ex-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Governor Oleksandr Vilkul and former
acting Mayor Maxim Romanenko, made municipal firms bankrupt and then
re-registered them to private owners, Korban told a group of journalists in Dnipropetrovsk on Nov. 13.
One of the charges against Korban is that he
kidnapped Oleksandr Velychko, head of the Dnipropetrovsk city council’s legal
department, in February. A month later, a video popped up on YouTube showing
Velychko admitting he had staged his own kidnapping to escape responsibility
for an embezzlement scheme.
In another video, published later, Velychko
said that he had been kept at a Right Sector base in Donetsk Oblast’s Pisky for
nine days. In that video, he accused Korban of kidnapping him. He said he was
forced to lie that he staged his own kidnapping in the first video.
Mankorecalled that Korban claimed Velychko was a separatist, and suggested
using him in a prisoner exchange to get Ukrainian prisoners returned.
“(Korban) told us that the operation was
discussed with Ukraine’s Security Service. So we started preparing the
procedure (of exchange), when he put it off the next day,” Manko said in Kyiv
on Dec. 1. “He told us to deliver Velychko to the city of Novomoskovsk. Then
the police blamed us for kidnapping Velychko (since it looks like that), but
there were people affiliated with Korban who were responsible.”
Manko claimed to be a member of Right Sector now. However, on Dec. 1, Right Sector issued a statement saying that Manko “has nothing to do” with the battalion.
Manko was one of the main suspects in
Velychko’s kidnapping. He was also accused of attacking a farm in the village
of Novosilka in Donetsk Oblast, during which documents and agricultural
machinery was stolen.
Manko brushed off the accusations, saying that
the case was “fabricated.”
He said Korban’s lawyers later met with him
and tried to force him to take responsibility for Velychko’s kidnapping, but he
didn’t give in.
Yet, the fighters “never rejected Korban’s
help when he supplied the fighters of the Dnipro-1 Regiment with bulletproof
vests and uniforms,” according to Manko.
“If we knew what he would ask us to do in
exchange for that, we’d have never accepted it,” Manko said during the news
conference in Kyiv.
Manko said Korban “did help the Ukrainian
military,” but never forgot about his enrichment.
Police also accused Korban of kidnapping
Serhiy Rudyk, who headed Ukraine’s land management agency, in August 2014 and
Marian Blazhivsky, the head of the traffic police department in Dnipropetrovsk
Oblast.
“They both were held by Korban’s people,”
Manko said, adding that Korban had been using fighters of volunteer battalions
to cover up his crimes.
Korban earlier stated that he had a “dispute”
with Rudyk in his office after Rudyk had appointed the head of the agency’s
local branch.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected].
