Ukraine’s SBU security service said on Feb. 21 it uncovered a large network of people illegally campaigning for one of the presidential candidates, and overseen by a member of parliament.
While they didn’t name the candidate that the network campaigned for, some evidence pointed to Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of Batkivshchyna party and a former prime minister.
SBU Deputy Head Viktor Kononenko said the service planned to conduct over 30 searches across Ukraine as it carries out a criminal investigation into “an election pyramid scheme” where cash was distributed to thousands of agents who were supposed to advocate for the candidate.
It wasn’t clear what exactly was illegal about the scheme, or whether direct bribery of voters was part of it.
Kononenko said that within the scheme, people responsible for constituencies paid locals, or “field workers,” to “make sure a certain amount of people cast votes for a particular candidate.”
According to SBU, the organization had been working since November and planned to reach 600,000 people, with Hr 3 million allocated to be spent in Khmelnytsky Oblast alone. The SBU also claims the organization “has been cooperating with (Russia)” and has Russian citizens in its management.
Kononenko said he wouldn’t name the candidate the scheme was working on so as not to “tie the investigation to any political force.”
However, a representative of presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party, Vitalii Ryabtsev, reported on the same day that the SBU was searching the apartments of party members in Zaporizhia. The Batkivshchyna party members went to the police and Ryabtsev called the searches an orchestrated attempt to stop Tymoshenko’s election campaign, ordered by President Petro Poroshenko, who is in control of the SBU.
“Law enforcement agencies de facto serve the current president,” Ryabtsev said.
Another clue is that in the SBU documents on “election scheme” investigation, the service names a man named Bohdan Ruslan as one of the accomplices in the scheme; Batkivshchyna has a lawmaker in the parliament with the same name. Kyiv Post is trying to get his comment on the issue.
Tymoshenko herself hasn’t yet commented on the situation, but announced she would hold a press briefing on Feb. 22 at 12:30 p.m.
Last week, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko ordered Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office to look into Tymoshenko’s cooperation with U.S. lobbying firms. According to independent watchdog Anti-Corruption Action Center or ANTAC, Tymoshenko hired U.S. lobbyists but didn’t declare spending money on their services. Tymoshenko said someone hired the lobbyists without her authorization, and said she never cooperated with them. However, the Kyiv Post confirmed that in December, Tymoshenko had at least one meeting arranged by a lobbying firm.
Tymoshenko claimed that the Prosecutor General’s Office was just trying to eliminate her as Poroshenko’s opponent in the March 31 presidential election.
