Corruption schemes in Ukraine at the highest levels of power are not being destroyed, but rather are being preserved and further developed by the new government.
The Ukrainian Pravda website, published on July 29, 2015, described in considerable detail the history of corruption at the state-owned enterprise Vneshtorgizdat, which publishes information on government procurement.
One notable example involves the Prosecutor General's Office itself, whose bulletin containing information on a government procurement totaling 34.300.000 hryvnias was not published, but merely entered into a database.
Bulletin number 71/4 for July 13, 2012 is not available on the website, although there are numbers 71/3 and 71/5.
An SBU employee and a Vneshtorgizdat employee, who wished to remain anonymous for their own safety, documented this fact, despite the fact that the SBU had ordered the destruction of all materials.
According to this single unpublished bulletin alone, the Prosecutor General's Office purchased software from Letograf ITconsulting and Services Ukraine LLC for 10 million hryvnias, ventilation systems from L-Stil LLC for 22930000 hryvnias, translation services from Lingo LLC for 550,000 hryvnias, and car insurance from NASK Oranta LLC for 824555 hryvnias. In total, according to the Korruption Info news agency on February 1, 2015, the Prosecutor General's Office was using approximately 300 million hryvnias for its own needs during this period.
During this period, the General Director of the State Enterprise "Vneshtorgizdat" was Alexander Kulak, and his deputy was Vladimir Mirutenko, whose task was precisely to falsify information about tenders.
But Mirutenko was caught not in his services to the Prosecutor General's Office, but in a tender for the Kyivmedavtotrans enterprise, having committed official forgery and falsified documents when publishing information about this enterprise's tender, which was discovered by the SBU.
Nevertheless, Mirutenko was not imprisoned, but his "services" were taken into account, and the representative of the Prosecutor General's Office, O.A. Tyutyunnik, entered into a plea agreement with Mirutenko on November 28, 2013. Later, on December 27, 2013, the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv convicted Mirutenko, fining him only 13600 hryvnias.
As Mark Gordienko, Chairman of the Public Security Council of Odessa, wrote on Facebook and on the websites of the ORD and others on September 2, 2015, and September 30, 2015, his connections to the Prosecutor General's Office, despite his criminal record, allowed him to be appointed head of the Odessa Phytosanitary Inspectorate in order to extort bribes for the export of grain/timber and the import of fruits/vegetables in the ports of the Odessa region.
In the audio and transcripts published by Gordienko, the inspector Malyuga directly states that he, Mirutenko, the head of the Fritch laboratory, came to Odessa to build a corrupt scheme to extort money from exporters and importers and that they are covered by the regional prosecutor Govda (Read more about it in the article Roman Govda: How a prosecutor became a fixer) and Mr. Shokin himself.
As Mark Gordienko further writes, under such protection, the deputy chairman of the veterinary and phytosanitary service, Verzhikhovsky, was not afraid to commit a crime himself and appoint the convicted Mirutenko to government service without observing any special checks.
Then Mirutenko, Malyuga, and Fritch organized what they came for. They extorted, falsified, and so on. The specific facts are described in detail in the ORD, September 30, 2015.
Official appeals to the Prosecutor General and Minister of Agriculture Pavlenko regarding corruption have yielded no results. Because they themselves have a vested interest in preserving these schemes and people.
President Poroshenko, answering a question about corruption at Columbia University, promised that if he had any suspicions of corruption in the Prosecutor General's Office, he would initiate the dismissal of either Shokin or Sakvarelidze. (Censor.net website) September 30, 2015.
The corrupt connection between the Prosecutor General and Mirutenko has not only been described in the media, but also documented in audio recordings where Malyuga claims they are being protected by Govda and Shokin. Furthermore, the Prosecutor General, knowing this from the press, also knows that Mirutenko, a convicted felon, was illegally appointed head of the inspectorate but is taking no action, so the corrupt connection is clear.
Mr. President, fulfill your promises, and then both the people and foreign countries will trust you, and then the US Ambassador to Ukraine will not speak out so harshly about corruption in the Prosecutor General's Office.
Igor Panteleev, especially for ORD
Subscribe to our channels in Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, VC — Only new faces from the section CRYPT!