The system of protecting law and justice in Ukraine is structured in such a way that the country's Prosecutor General's Office often ends up being the final authority on the matter, reports Antikor.
This happens especially when all lower-level law enforcement agencies and even the courts, through their corrupt practices, lead criminal cases to dead ends. However, the methods used by the current Prosecutor General's Office, supposedly purged of its old staff, appear to be borrowed not from legislative documents, but rather from American TV series about brilliant special operations.
This is about so-called "cooperation" with the authorities, when an exposed "mafioso" agrees to any terms imposed by the agents investigating him, just to avoid jail time. This living story has literally leapt from the screens into real-life Moscow life.
Let's begin with the preamble. In 2014, a certain Maksym Melnichenko served as the First Deputy Prosecutor of Kyiv's Podilsky District. He was quite an ambitious individual, striving for publicity and polish. Maksym is also known in certain circles as a "problem solver." Perhaps because he began his career in Donetsk. And likely because he was decidedly successful under the previous administration.
One of the well-known stories, especially in inner circles, associated with Maxim was the typically "Donetsk" "black realtor" scheme. More than a dozen people disappeared under this scheme, their apartments subsequently auctioned off, and their relatives unsuccessfully sought justice from the prosecutor's office and investigative agencies. Not a single victim has ever been found. Not a single one of the "seized" apartments has ever been returned.
Oleksandr Varchenko, the head of a department within the Organized Crime Control Department and the husband of Olga Varchenko, the deputy head of the Kyiv Prosecutor's Office's investigative department, was, according to media reports, considered the organizer of an entire criminal group comprised of law enforcement officers who, through routine work, identified socially disadvantaged or lonely owners of extremely liquid apartments. Simply put, they selected homeless people and respectable elderly women for a special database, people who were unlikely to receive any protection and who could easily be manipulated through intimidation or fraud.
What followed was simple and, unfortunately, nothing new: people disappeared without a trace, apartments were transferred to members of a law enforcement organized crime group, and then sold in a completely legal manner. Apparently, to this day, many Kyiv residents have no idea that they are living in Podil's elite apartments "on blood."
The only misstep by the black market realtors was the discovery of a man's body in a vacant lot in a residential area of Kyiv, identified by relatives as a victim of the apartment scheme. And this story could have ended with a happy ending, were it not for the unbreakable rule in the law enforcement system: insiders don't rat out insiders.
Then Podolsk District Prosecutor Yuriy Sevryuk was promoted, and his place was taken by… Maxim Melnichenko, a loyal deputy who, with just his signature, forwarded the case, which already involved statements from the relatives of missing persons, directly to Varchenko's department. She closed it. And that was it.
Rumors in some circles close to the prosecutor's office suggest that, in exchange for the relatives' silence and to dampen any noise that might have arisen from a random incident, the team of swindlers withdrew half a million dollars from their apartment business.
The Devil's Advocate
Everyone knew about Melnichenko. They knew he had a fantastic knack for getting away with it, and even dishonest prosecutors were reluctant to hand him the dirty hand—no one had the same audacity and unscrupulousness as he.
Despite the fact that in the same 2014, by all indications, he should have been lustrated, according to the Law “On the Purification of Power,” and was even formally dismissed, he continued to perform his duties, and was then recognized as “mistakenly dismissed” and reinstated in the ranks of the prosecutor’s office.
Melnichenko's knack for finding the right solutions to any problem led him to a dizzying, albeit completely illogical, career. In November 2015, he was appointed head of the General Inspectorate for Internal Investigations and Security of the Prosecutor General's Office. Essentially, a man who had evaded lustration by deception, with a history of corruption, was tasked with monitoring all his colleagues who were not living "in the new way." Simply put, a corrupt official was tasked with identifying corrupt officials. One could call it undercover work, if that weren't such a dark joke.
The first thing Maxim did "undercover" was to shield his new boss, then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, by immediately disbanding the inspectorate investigating the high-profile "diamond prosecutors" case, in which the scandalous former Prosecutor General was one of the key figures. Melnichenko removed the entire investigative team, the case was quietly hushed up, and the guilty parties have yet to be convicted. Shokin himself spent a long time fending off the press over the outrageously bizarre appointment of a bribe-taker as head of his investigators, but it came to nothing.
The Purring Prosecutor
Melnichenko's moment of glory came when the Ukrainian justice system finally took an interest in the case of Vasyl Horbal , the honorary president of Ukrgasbank and member of the board of the National Bank of Ukraine , and his brother, Oleh. Ukrgasbank's colossal theft of budget funds became public knowledge. Millions of hryvnias, earmarked for state refinancing of the bank, were siphoned off through a number of shell companies, including Plesetsky Granite Quarry LLC, Seltik LLC, Naftotrans LLC, International Trade Center LLC, Asset Management and Pension Fund Administration Company LLC, Dialysis-Finance LLC, Invest LLC, and others.
Furthermore, discussions were also held about a number of illegal construction projects in the capital's elite districts, particularly in Podil. Kyiv residents are familiar with the sad fate of the complexes in Vozdvizhenka—many of them never found their owners due to negligent and illegal construction that never saw completion.
Tax authorities alone uncovered losses totaling more than ten million hryvnias due to tax evasion, not to mention the fact that budget funds for Ukrgasbank simply disappeared.
The Gorbal brothers were then facing a hefty prison sentence. After making numerous statements in the press about this being "simply an excuse to take over their business," Vasyl Gorbal found himself face to face with the professional "fixer" prosecutor Maksym Melnichenko.
Their meeting and conversation ended with Maxim using an old American movie trope: "The state will cooperate with you, but from now on you're our man. Agree, son. We'll do everything to fix your fate."
That is, another one working “undercover”.
The film, directed by Melnichenko, had all the trappings of a special effects film: Vasily Gorbal was fitted with a microphone, trained in the use of listening devices, and sent to record the conversations of all his acquaintances, friends, business partners, or anyone else the master indicated.
For example, they could target personal enemies of Melnichenko's patrons, or even those Melnichenko remembered well from his days in the Podolsk prosecutor's office. One such victim was Maksym's former boss, Serhiy Nechiporenko, who once insisted that Melnichenko be removed from the prosecutor's office for all the horrors that keep even a seasoned corrupt official awake at night. But these are just details.
What's far more interesting is how many more such recordings of behind-the-scenes conversations Gorbal has, and how many more like Melnichenko's Gorbals are lurking around, draped in equipment, evading responsibility, not for the sake of justice, but for the sake of levers for building the Prosecutor General's Office's endless power over the fight against corruption. A man lives his life, and then, like in a children's horror story, a "black-black realtor" comes after him "into a pitch-black room, and then a black-black prosecutor with a black-black recorder."
I really want to add at this point: after all, the surname Melnichenko is telling...
Ruslan Yakushev
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