The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine has detained Dmytro Sus, a former investigator of the main investigative department of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.
Sus is suspected of embezzlement, illicit enrichment through abuse of office and lying on his asset declaration.
Sus was detained on July 25 in Kyiv Boryspil International Airport. National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine will soon request the court to choose a preventive measure for the suspect, NABU’s press service said on July 26.
If found guilty, Sus might face up to eight years in prison and be banned from holding a public post for three years.
Vitaliy Shabunin, head of the executive board of Anti-Corruption Action Center, a non-governmental watchdog, welcomed the move, saying that Sus is not just “yet another corrupt prosecutor.”
“He did for Prosecutor General’s Office the same things that (ex-judge Mykola) Chaus did in court,” he said, referring to Chaus, a judge of Kyiv’s Dniprovsky District Court who in August was detained while receiving an alleged bribe of $150,000 and later fled to Moldova.
Sus’ detention came after his dismissal from the Prosecutor General’s Office on April 13. He was dismissed for failing to include his car, a Citroen C4, into his asset declaration for 2014-2015, and the apartment he lived in into the e-declaration for 2016.
Activists and journalists also slammed Sus in November 2016 for not revealing his other car, an Audi Q7 worth $60,000, in the so-called “goodness questionnaire of a prosecutor.” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yury Lutsenko has introduced this questionnaire for the prosecutors to show their assets and prove that they are not corrupt.
After this omission was caught, Lutsenko transferred Sus, then the deputy head of the special economic crime investigation department, to the lower position – investigator at the Prosecutor General’s Office’smain investigative department.
Before that, Sus and Volodymyr Hutsulyak, his former boss, were accused of fabricating political cases on behalf of Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky, key lawmakers with the President Petro Poroshenko’s faction. They have been repeatedly accused of illegally interfering with the law enforcement system, although they deny this.
Sus was also involved in clashes between the Prosecutor General’s Office and NABU employees in August 2016. The Bureau’sdetectives were conducting surveillance of Sus, as he was one of the suspects in a corruption criminal case. While prosecutors accused NABU of illegal surveillance, NABU said that it had been authorized by a court.
Later that month, NABU released video interviews with its detective saying they were illegally detained by the Prosecutor General’s Office, beaten up and tortured by prosecutors, a claim the PGO denied.
One of those interrogated said that prosecutor Sus personally had threatened to send him to the territories of Donbas occupied by the joint Russian-separatist forces.
The interrogation was over only after NABU officers came to the Prosecutor General’s Office and released their colleagues.
Sus’ version of the events was different. He told NewsOne TV channel on Aug. 12 that he and other prosecutors had been followed by the bureau detectives, whom they invited to their office to discuss the surveillance. Then the NABU’s special-force unit arrived, attacked everyone and broke all of the prosecutors’ phones.
