Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaly Kasko (Read more about it in the article Vitaly Kasko – a swindler, a corrupt official, a "shot-down pilot"), who oversaw international legal cooperation and the return of assets withdrawn from Ukraine by Viktor Yanukovych and his inner circle under three post-Maidan Prosecutor General's Office heads, now serves the interests of fugitive oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko. This was reported in a blog post on Ukrayinska Pravda by People's Front MP Tetyana Chornovol.
She notes that Kasko is a member of the Interdepartmental Commission for Asset Recovery under the Presidential Administration, and, as other members claim, it was Viktor Shokin's deputy who was given all the data regarding accounts in EU countries frozen under the current sanctions against a number of former high-ranking Ukrainian officials.
"It was precisely because this information began to flow exclusively to Kasko that he became a rich man sitting on a golden egg. He effectively became the chief negotiator with whom the criminals needed to reach an agreement at the Prosecutor General's Office (GPU) in order to quietly lift the freeze on their foreign accounts," Chornovol asserts.
According to her, after the Ministry of Internal Affairs created an asset recovery department, headed by Olena Tyshchenko, Kasko's established monopoly was threatened. Chornovol sings the praises of his odious friend, who supposedly became a champion of justice.
"For example, Tishchenko was in contact with the criminal police of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Latvia, and... they have already investigated a case of laundering 80 million dollars in Latvia through offshore companies, which were backed by Ukrainians, and in particular Kurchenko," the MP asserts.
She notes that the Latvian side contacted the Prosecutor General's Office and the "international department" supervised by Kasko about the 80 million being frozen in accounts, but if the Ukrainian side does not contact the authorities of the Baltic state in the prescribed manner, these funds will be recovered and placed in the Latvian budget.
"During the visit, representatives of the Latvian Ministry of Internal Affairs submitted three requests to the Prosecutor General's Office for international legal assistance in organizing the interrogation of several individuals. Among them was a person residing in Kyiv who, from his Ukrainian IP address, managed the accounts of Kurchenko's companies in Latvia and transferred funds from them using electronic access codes. However, despite the information provided, Kasko's office took no action to ensure the seizure of the funds in the Latvian accounts and to include this information in the criminal proceedings opened by the Prosecutor General's Office," Chornovol stated.
In this regard, she accuses the Deputy Prosecutor General of deliberate inaction, the purpose of which was "to prevent the receipt of information about Kurchenko's companies' Latvian accounts and subsequent cash transfers to Europe." "This isn't just about Kasko knowingly working to prevent Ukraine's budget from receiving $80 million, but also doing everything he could to lose information about the transactions and transfers of funds in the accounts further to Europe. Investigating this information would have allowed the Ukrainian investigation to seize and recover significantly larger amounts of funds that were hidden by Kurchenko and registered to proxies," Chornovol wrote.
She claims that the allegedly orchestrated media campaign against Tishchenko began immediately after she informed Interior Minister Arsen Avakov of the need to urgently seize $80 million of Kurchenko's "Latvian" funds as part of a criminal investigation opened by the police. "But Kasko blocked the signing of this order, not on his own responsibility, but citing an alleged order from the Prosecutor General," the MP describes her version of events.
During the debriefing at the Prosecutor General's Office, it was revealed that Viktor Shokin had issued no instructions on this matter, and Vitaly Kasko went further, allegedly claiming that Kurchenko's funds had not been identified in Latvia. "But as a talented lawyer, he refused to take responsibility and claimed that the State Financial Monitoring Service had not provided the necessary evidence," Chornovol describes the incident. She notes that despite the instruction voiced during a meeting with Shokin and Kasko to facilitate the investigation of the "80-million Kurchenko case," the deputy head of the Prosecutor General's Office never did so and removed the criminal case from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
"At a meeting with Shokin, it was decided to travel to Latvia to review the case materials on money laundering by Kurchenko's companies in September 2015. As a result, nothing was done, and the international legal order from the Prosecutor General's Office (GPU) to review the money laundering case materials was never prepared. At the same time, Kasko's department prepared a trip for the GPU investigator on the Kurchenko case to the Latvian Ministry of Internal Affairs without the corresponding international legal order," Chornovol claims, accusing Shokin's deputy of sabotage.
According to her, Kasko was personally involved in organizing this trip, and as a professional lawyer, he was well aware that in order to familiarize himself with the case materials and subsequently disclose banking secrecy and freeze accounts, it was necessary to first prepare procedural documents (obtain court permission to conduct investigative actions, as well as send an international legal request), which was not done.
"Despite this, he arranged for an investigator to travel to Latvia without these documents, which simply means the investigator had no procedural right to review the 'Latvian case' materials. Even if representatives of the Latvian Ministry of Internal Affairs show him anything, he can only tell it as a story for children, since information obtained improperly cannot be used in Ukrainian criminal proceedings," the People's Front MP stated.
Chornovol views these actions by the "young prosecutor" as a waste of time. "He doesn't have much time left to drag things out in Kurchenko's interests, since the case in Latvia has been investigated and is set to be closed by February 2016. Then the funds will be recovered and transferred to the Latvian budget, and we will lose the trail of funds siphoned off by Kurchenko to other countries," the MP concluded.
It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Kasko and the Chornovol-Tyshchenko-Pashinsky group have exchanged insults. Prokurorskaya Pravda previously reported that the deputy head of the Prosecutor General's Office criticized the group's "updated" bill, which proposes the confiscation of property belonging to a list of officials and businessmen close to Viktor Yanukovych.
Furthermore, Kasko called the Ministry of Internal Affairs' asset recovery department, created specifically for Elena Tishchenko, a pointless undertaking that goes beyond the legal framework and police jurisdiction. It was Kasko who also published information that the Prosecutor General's Office suspects the former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs' asset recovery department of forgery.
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