The department of international legal cooperation of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (PGO) has served a notice of suspicion to former Defense Minister Dmytro Salamatin, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has said.
On his page on Facebook, the Prosecutor General wrote about the essence of the notice of suspicion: “about his involvement in Yanukovych’s criminal organization, taking other people’s property on a particularly large scale by abusing his office and committing treason in the interests of the Russian Federation, undermining Ukraine’s defense, economic and state security by committing deliberate actions aimed at ousting Ukraine from the world arms markets in favor of the Russian Federation.”
Lutsenko said that Salamatin’s deliberate actions to disrupt a contract among the state-run enterprise Kharkiv Morozov Machine Building Design Bureau, the state-run enterprise Antonov and the state-run enterprise Specialized Foreign Trade Company Progress and the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Iraq for the supply, repair and maintenance of military equipment alone caused $560 million in losses for Ukraine.
A statement on the PGO’s website says that the actions by Salamatin led to a significant deterioration in relations between Ukraine and Iraq, which led to “early termination of the above-mentioned contracts, and enabled the Russian Federation to strengthen its bargaining position in this market as a competitor to Ukraine.”
“As a result, since the disruption of the Iraqi contracts, Ukraine has not been able to sign a single large-scale contract in the military domain,” the report says.
The PGO said the notice of suspicion was served on the grounds of the crimes described in Part 1 of Article 255; Part 4 of Article 28, Part 5 of Article 191; Part 4 of Article 28, Part 1 of Article 111 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
Salamatin served as a People’s Deputy of Ukraine from the Party of Regions from 2006-2007. From 2010 to 2012, he headed the Ukroboronprom state concern. From February to December 2012, he served as the Minister of Defense of Ukraine during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych.
