A former director general of UkrOboronProm, the Ukrainian state-run defense production giant, was served a formal notice of suspicion for allegedly failing to declare properties worth millions of hryvnya, the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) said on Nov. 12.
According to law enforcement, the unidentified official may have failed to declare an unspecified amount of income as well as two apartments in Kyiv valued at more than Hr 3 million and a Range Rover car worth Hr 10 million, which were owned by the official’s fiancee, in asset declarations from 2016.
The agency noted the investigation has been ongoing since August 2019.
Meanwhile, reports in Ukrainian media identified Pavlo Bukin, UkrOboronProm’s chief from late February 2018 to late August 2019, as the official handed the notice of suspicion from NABU.
Bukin was appointed by then-President Petro Poroshenko to replace Roman Romanov, Poroshenko’s close ally who eventually resigned amid public pressure after a number of corruption scandals at UkrOboronProm.
Bukin took the office with vows to fight corruption and transform the outdated industrial giant into a modern arms-producing corporation.
But the official was allegedly involved in yet another major corruption scandal at UkrOboronProm that erupted in early 2019, which led to the dismissal of Oleh Hladkovsky, then-deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council and Poroshenko’s longtime friend and business partner.
Bukin was also implicated in a scheme in which he and Hladkovsky received kickbacks for the selling altimeters used in repairs of a Kazakh Antonov An-26 aircraft at inflated prices.
In late August 2019, Bukin was eventually fired and replaced by Aivaras Abromavicius, the former economy minister.
In 2016, when the official failed to declare income and properties according to NABU, Bukin was the director general of the UkrSpetsEksport, a UkrOboronProm affiliate with a monopoly on the country’s arms sales.
