The Prosecutor General’s Office plans to ask Kyiv’s Pechersk Court to order the arrest of ex-Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaly Kasko on charges of fraud, the former top prosecutor told journalists on April 13.
Kasko, who was interrogated on April 13, told the Kyiv
Post that prosecutors had given him a copy of their request for an arrest
warrant.
The court hearing is scheduled
for 9:30 a.m. on April 14, Kasko’s lawyer Oxana Tomchuk wrote on Facebook.
Vladyslav Kutsenko, a spokesman for the Prosecutor
General’s Office, confirmed Kasko’s statement.
Lawmakers Mustafa Nayyem, Svitlana Zalishchuk, Sergii
Leshchenko, Viktor Chumak and Ihor Mosiychuk said they would ask the court to
release Kasko, and that they would provide guarantees that he would not abscond.
Prosecutors claim Kasko illegally received two
apartments from the Prosecutor General’s Office.
He argues that the case is fabricated and constitutes
revenge by ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and acting Prosecutor General
Yury Sevruk for his criticism of the prosecutor’s office.
“Through his
puppets at the prosecutor’s office, the president is taking revenge on Vitaly
Kasko for opening the case against diamond prosecutors (Oleksandr Korniyets and
Volodymyr Shapakin) and public criticism of Shokin,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive
director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, wrote on Facebook. “The system
is resorting to the Soviet totalitarian methods of intimidation and attacks on
this person to protect its corrupt and rotten essence. With an iron fist, the
system did everything to destroy a person who dared oppose the prosecutorial
Mordor.”
Kasko resigned as a deputy prosecutor general in
February, saying that Shokin had transformed the prosecutorial system into a
corrupt “dead body” that “creates and tolerates total lawlessness,” as well as
making it “a tool of political intimidation and profiteering.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached
at [email protected]
