Courts have arrested 17 out of 23 previously detained tax officials of the time of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, press secretary of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Larysa Sarhan has said.
“As of today, out of the 23 former tax officials detained as part of the anti-corruption operation, 17 have already been arrested with an increase in the amount of bail. The amount of bail has been set between Hr 1 million and Hr 150 million,” Sarhan wrote on her Facebook page on Thursday.
She noted that according to preliminary data, the tax service under the leadership of former head of the Income and Tax Ministry Oleksandr Klymenko inflicted Hr 95.921 billion of damage to the state due to non-payment of taxes.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office reported earlier Klymenko, who headed Ukraine’s Ministry of Revenues and Taxation from 2011-2014, is suspected of belonging to a criminal group headed by disgraced ex President Viktor Yanukovych that incurred almost Hr 96 billion in losses to Ukraine’s state budget.
On May 24, law-enforcement agencies conducted raids in 15 of Ukraine’s regions in a special anti-corruption operation targeting ex-officials of Ukraine’s former ministry of taxes and income headed by Oleksandr Klymenko, who fled to Russia following the Revolution of Dignity in early 2014. A total of 23 former tax officials were detained.
