Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has said information from the investigation into corruption in Ukraine’s defense industry, upon which investigative journalists relied for their report aired at the end of February 2019, was leaked in September 2018.
“We established the exact date, the exact month the information was leaked. It was in September 2018. I won’t ask the question, ‘Why were investigative reports aired at the height of the election campaign?'” Lutsenko said at a hearing of the Verkhovna Rada’s temporary investigative commission into theft in Ukraine’s Armed Forces and the undermining of the state’s defense from 2004 to 2017. The hearing was held in Kyiv on March 13.
According to Lutsenko, all information in the possession of investigators was transferred from telephones and was not tampered or changed from February 22, 2017, until it was examined by experts.
Lutsenko said investigators do not have part of the information received by journalists in the leak. He gave the example of a conversation between one of the suspects, Vitaliy Zhukov, and the head of the state-run Ukroboronprom Concern, Pavlo Bukin, which was contained in the report of the investigative journalists but missing from the information transferred from the phones.
As reported, journalists from Bihus.info on March 11 aired parts four and five of a five-part investigative report that alleged Ukraine’s State Fiscal Service, the Military Prosecutor’s Office and the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) knew about illegal schemes in Ukraine’s defense industry used by Ihor Hladkovsky with his business partners Zhukov and Rohoza.
