Fifth President of Ukraine (2014-2019) Petro Poroshenko and his wife Maryna Poroshenko joined a charity campaign organized by public activists in support of detained Head of the Main Directorate of Development and Material Support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Dmytro Marchenko.
Poroshenko said this during a concert of the Ot Vinta band within the framework of the marathon to raise funds to bail Marchenko out, according to the statement on the website of the European Solidarity Party.
The court ruled to set the amount of bail for Marchenko at Hr 20 million. More than 3,000 activists raised over Hr 1 million over three days and Poroshenko’s family decided to pay the shortfall.
“Someone hoped that the conditions of total terror organized against volunteers, volunteer fighters, our soldiers who defended Ukraine against Russia’s aggression and whose names have been written into the history of Ukraine forever, would defeat us. But we will not give them a chance to break us. Because the truth is with us, the God is with us,” the politician said.
As reported, on November 11, 2019, Pechersky District Court of Kyiv arrested Marchenko for 60 days with the right to pay bail of UAH 76 million. He is suspected of purchasing poor quality equipment at unreasonably high prices for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
On June 26, 2019, Director of the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) Roman Truba said that employees of the State Bureau of Investigations and the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine are conducting about 40 raids on homes of certain Defense Ministry officials, employees of commercial structures and office buildings as part of an investigation into criminal proceedings on procurements for the Armed Forces of Ukraine at inflated prices.
The tentative amount of losses incurred by the Ministry of Defense due to overpricing is about Hr 100 million, Truba said. In particular, this includes the purchase of 100,000 sets of military uniforms at inflated prices and 20,000 bulletproof vests, most of which do not match the quality characteristics.
On November 5, 2019, five defense officials were presented suspicion of a purchase of substandard bulletproof vests for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
On November 28, 2019, Kyiv Court of Appeals ruled to reduce the amount of bail to Hr 20 million.
