Kyiv’s Pechersk Court on May 25 released many of the 26 ex-tax officials arrested by prosecutors in an anti-corruption raid on May 24, some on bail, some without a bond.
The suspects were detained as part of a corruption case against ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Tax and Revenue Minister Oleksandr Klymenko. They are accused of managing a network of money laundering centers all over Ukraine.
Controversial rulings
The bail amounted to Hr 100 million for Serhiy Shinkarenko, an ex-head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast’s tax office; Hr 15 million for Oleksandr Antipov, an ex-head of Luhansk Oblast’s tax office and an aide to Oleh Nedava, a lawmaker from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, and Hr 12 million for Volodymyr Zadorozhny, the ex-head of Poltava Oblast’s tax office.
Yury Kravchenko, an ex-chief of Kyiv’s Darnytsya District tax office; Yury Mostipan, an ex-chief of Kyiv’s Svyatoshino District tax office, and Tetiana Masolva, an ex-deputy chief of Kharkiv Oblast’s tax office, were released on Hr 1 million bail each.
Kostyantyn Tsirkun, ex-head of Crimea’s tax office; Andriy Kryvolapov, ex-head of Kharkiv Oblast’s tax office, and Oleksiy Yaroshenko, ex-head of Kyiv’s Podil District tax office, were released without bail.
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko lambasted the courts for setting small amounts of bail and releasing suspects without bail. “One more merciful decision, and I’d worry about fire safety at the Pechersk (Court),” he wrote on Facebook, seeming to imply that the court was at risk of an arson attack.
Lutsenko’s critics, however, argued that prosecutors had failed to collect sufficient evidence to prove the suspects’ guilt. They dismissed the anti-graft raid as a public relations stunt.
Shady confiscation
Meanwhile, the Prosecutor General’s Office on May 25 published a Treasury document saying that $1.1 billion confiscated from firms linked to tycoon Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of Yanukovych, had been transferred to the state budget.
The funds were confiscated by the Kramatorsk City Court on March 28. The court concluded a plea bargain with Arkady Kashkin, the nominal owner of a firm linked to Kurchenko.
Kashkin’s lawyer Kostyantyn Sheiko told the Kyiv Post he would not comment on the ruling and refused to send a copy of the decision.
Critics have dismissed the confiscation hearings as a political show trial. Both the investigation and the trial were conducted in secret and in just two weeks.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has claimed that the ruling was classified, while the Kramatorsk City Court said that on May 19 it had sent the ruling for publication in the official register to the state firm responsible for it, IT Judicial Systems.
However, the ruling could not be found in the register as of May 25.
Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer for killed EuroMaidan protesters’ families, and other lawyers argue that the refusal to publish the ruling is illegal and is an effort to hide some shady dealings with Yanukovych associates.
Money recovered?
Oleksa Shalaisky, founder of the Nashi Hroshi anti-corruption watchdog, also lashed out at the Prosecutor General’s Office on May 25. He said at a news briefing that Lutsenko’s claim that prosecutors had recovered Hr 10 billion for the budget in 2016 was untrue.
Andriy Demartino, a spokesman for the Prosecutor General’s Office, did not respond to a request for comment.
Shalaisky’s team has analyzed documents that the prosecutor’s office gave them to prove their justification for the Hr 10 billion figure.
Based on the documents, he argued that almost nothing had been recovered as a result of the convictions of corrupt officials.
The figure is mostly a result of mathematical manipulation, Shalaisky said. Some of the allegedly recovered funds were actually transferred from one state entity to another state entity, while other funds were not actual money but the meaningless nominal value of land and other property, he added.
In some cases, the Prosecutor General’s Office even included court rulings that allowed students to get their scholarships, which would be a loss, not a gain, for the budget.
Some of the rulings used as proof for the Hr 10 billion estimate have been already canceled, others were passed long before Lutsenko’s tenure, and a lot of them are being appealed against, Shalaisky said.
