Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka on Oct. 8 appointed Viktor Trepak, former deputy chief of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), as a deputy prosecutor general.
Trepak played an instrumental role in uncovering secret payments that Ukraine’s former leadership made to Paul Manafort, a lobbyist and political consultant, convicted for financial crimes including fraud in the U.S., where he is serving seven and a half years in prison.
Trepak, 44, headed the SBU anti-corruption department between 2015 and 2016. He said on Facebook that Riaboshapka personally offered him the position of his deputy. The rumors that Trepak might become Riaboshapka’s deputy have circulated since Riaboshapka became prosecutor general in August.
“I see the new position as a unique opportunity to do my best in the area I have been involved in for the last 20 years,” Trepak wrote on Facebook.
He added that the new law enforcement system is currently being formed in Ukraine where “prosecution would play a key role.”
Trepak became widely known when he obtained the secret ledger book of the former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and handed it over to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
The Party of Region’s ledger book, which was later leaked to the media, showed the party had paid bribes worth about $2 billion to different officials and politicians. Among the people that the party made off-the-books payments to was Manafort, then-chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, who had previously consulted Yanukovych and his party.
The uncovering of Manafort’s payments during the 2016 presidential campaign is the key pillar in a conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the U.S. presidential election to benefit the Democrats. The theory is popular with Trump’s administration.
Trepak was also involved in a prominent arrest of top prosecutors Oleksandr Korniyets and Volodymyr Shapakin on suspicion of bribery in 2015. They became known as the “diamond prosecutors” because of gems found in Korniyets’ house. That notorious case, however, didn’t end up with any convictions in Ukraine and the prosecutors involved in its investigation were later sacked.
In 2016, Trepak was pressured to leave his post as he believes because of his investigation of the “diamond prosecutors” case. Trepak also accused Viktor Kononenko and Oleksandr Granovsky, two lawmakers close to then-President Petro Poroshenko, of backing his resignation.
Since then, Trepak retired from the security services and focused on an academic career. Since September 2018 and until recently he taught criminology and criminal justice at Ivan Franko National Lviv University, where the father of Andriy Bohdan, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, teaches civic law.
In January, Trepak also joined the team of Anatoliy Grytsenko, a former defense minister, for the presidential campaign.
Riaboshapka, who in 2016-2017 worked at a National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAZK) but resigned accusing the authorities of obstructing the work of this body, also took as his deputy another of Grytsenko’s loyalist former lawmakers, Viktor Chumak.
