You're reading: Prosecutors revive case against Yanukovych’s justice minister

The Prosecutor General’s Office has revived a corruption case against ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Justice Minister Olena Lukash after it had been dormant for years.

Lukash served as the Cabinet’s chief of staff in 2012-2013 and the justice minister in 2013-2014. In 2015, the Prosecutor General’s Office charged her with embezzling Hr 2.5 million via government tenders. She was arrested in Kyiv but released on bail. The bail requirements were eventually dropped and the case had been effectively suspended. 

Civil society has urged the newly-appointed Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka to investigate top-level crime more effectively than his predecessor Yuriy Lutsenko. Going forward with the Lukash case could also be a way to dispel accusations that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration is covering up for top Yanukovych-era officials.

Lukash wrote on Facebook on Oct. 11 that she has received a summons to be interrogated at the Prosecutor General’s Office as a suspect on Oct. 17, and the charges against her had been changed. She dismissed the case as a fabrication and a political vendetta. 

Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia cases unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office, told the Kyiv Post that the new charges are more comprehensive and refer to a larger number of accomplices. A charge of forgery was added to the embezzlement allegations. 

Lutsenko argued in 2017 that Lukash’s indictment had not been authorized due to a lack of evidence. Lutsenko also transferred the case from the Prosecutor General’s Office to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.

Riaboshapka recently returned the case to Gorbatuk’s unit from the NABU.

Gorbatuk has accused Lutsenko of blocking the Lukash case.

“They are destroying the case,” he told the Kyiv Post in 2018.

Gorbatuk also accused the previous leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office of reaching corrupt bargains with Yanukovych associates and blocking cases against them for political reasons. Lutsenko denied the accusations.