Little is known about Dmytro Sus's biography, making his career rise all the more surprising. In the late 2000s, he was a lowly investigator in the Khmelnytsky District Prosecutor's Office, worked in the Khmelnytsky Oblast Prosecutor's Office, and in 2014, transferred to the Prosecutor General's Office. There, he held the position of senior investigator for particularly important cases, and a few days before Viktor Shokin's resignation, he was promoted to deputy head of the Department for Investigation and Supervision of Criminal Proceedings in the Spheres of Civil Service and Property—head of the Department for Investigation of Criminal Proceedings in the Spheres of Civil Service and Property, reports Prosecutor's Truth.
With the arrival of Yuriy Lutsenko (read more: Yuriy Lutsenko. The "Terminator" of Ukrainian Politics ) at the Prosecutor General's Office, who promised to eliminate the special status of the Kononenko-Granovskyi VIP department (read more: Igor Kononenko. The President's Army Friend ), Sus didn't disappear from the radar at all. On the contrary, on June 7, 2016, he was among the first supervisors reassigned to the Prosecutor General's Office's "autonomous" unit, which retained its distinctive character. He was appointed deputy head of the Department for the Investigation of Particularly Important Cases in the Economy and head of the Directorate for the Investigation of Criminal Proceedings in the Economy.
The name of Dmytro Sus made headlines in the recent high-profile confrontation between the Prosecutor General's Office and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU). In addition to the major interagency scandal, Sus also distinguished himself in the entertaining affair of organizing a masked show at the Kyiv St. Cyril's Monastery.
The Kononenko-Granovsky Department and out-of-turn appointments
The new Department for Investigation and Supervision of Criminal Proceedings in the Sphere of Public Service and Property, created by Viktor Shokin in February 2016, was immediately dubbed the "Granovsky-Kononenko Department" due to the patronage it enjoyed from two members of parliament close to President Petro Poroshenko.
The origins of this unit are quite fascinating: it was created almost overnight, and a separate building on Petliury Street—the former transport prosecutor's office, which became very popular after the NABU wiretapping scandal—was immediately allocated for the department's needs.
Dmitry Sus, like his boss, Vladimir Gutsulyak, as well as his colleagues, Sergei Storozhenko and Vladimir Rykun, received the position of Deputy Head of the Department thanks to the "leniency" of Ivan Dzyuba, Head of the Internal Security and Employee Protection Department of the Prosecutor General's Office, despite lacking the five years of experience required for the job.
However, perhaps this isn't all that important if you have the President's approval. The main criterion for "selection" into the Department isn't professional merit, but rather the principle of personal loyalty to President Petro Poroshenko—the same principle used to recruit employees for the "Kononenko-Granovsky" Department.
Incidentally, the "lucky ones" who got hired by the Department didn't miss the opportunity to behave arrogantly, boorishly, and even illegally. For example, they started a fight in the Department's courtyard with a resident of a neighboring building, who had been physically injured by Gutsulyak's subordinate. Or they drove drunk around Kyiv and then, when the cops caught them, offered a bribe of 2 hryvnias.
It's not hard to see how Dmitry Sus earned the trust of being a member of the Prosecutor General's Office's "elite department": since 2015, the investigator has been working on the case of the company "Naftogazdobycha," one of whose founders was once Petro Poroshenko, and is now trying to reclaim his stake from DTEK's current owner, Rinat Akhmetov.
The department where Dmitry Sus works is investigating the kidnapping of Oleg Seminsky, the head of Naftogazdobycha, who disappeared while preparing to transfer the company's ownership. Prosecutors working under Sus's direction have begun seizing the accounts, shares, wells, and produced gas of Naftogazdobycha in order to halt the operations of one of oligarch Rinat Akhmetov's businesses. The matter is that Petro Poroshenko is at the heart of the enterprise. Sus personally petitioned for the seizure of the assets, and Akhmetov's lawyers even filed a complaint against him with then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
Thus, the Khmelnytskyi supervisor was elevated to the status of "especially trusted executor," now tasked with investigating anyone who stands in the way of the President and his "Family." His politeness and helpfulness in all things led to Sus's career advancement and financial well-being. At the same time, he made many enemies.
How "Dima Sus" chased away young prosecutors
Dmitry Sus is particularly remembered for the war between the "old" and "new" guards of the Prosecutor General's Office. Last summer, it was he who entered information into the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations (URDPI) and initiated criminal proceedings against David Sakvarelidze's men handling the "diamond prosecutors" case. At the time, this was overlooked, dismissed as an unnecessary attempt to curry favor with Vladimir Guzyr, the First Deputy Head of the Prosecutor General's Office. As subsequent events revealed, this was not an excess of discretion on the part of the investigator, but rather the strict execution of instructions from above. As reported by Prokurorskaya Pravda, documents signed by Sus stated that 10 investigators who participated in the development of the case against the "diamond prosecutors"—Aleksandr Korniyets and Vladimir Shapakin—and in the searches of their residences, were accused of submitting false information to the case, which had already been opened when the operational search operations began against the prosecutors for their deals with the sand miners.
At the same time, the high-ranking investigator Sus requested the personal information of all the employees who participated in the searches of the prosecutors' houses from the SBU leadership and went to the Pechersky Court to demand a search warrant from Sakvarelidze's investigators.
Having learned of this, another "young prosecutor," Vitaly Kasko, then trumpeted this pressure on the investigation, resulting in both sides of the conflict sitting at a roundtable with Petro Poroshenko. While David Sakvarelidze and Viktor Shokin were with the president, the criminal case against the investigators from the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations (URDR) was "cleaned up." But the aftertaste, as in the old joke, remained: Sus became a "blood enemy" of the "young prosecutors." However, for a certain time, he was not "scuttled" by the media...
Everything changed in the spring of 2016, when on March 30, the Prosecutor General's Office, represented by Dmitry Sus, summoned David Sakvarelidze, now former Deputy Prosecutor General and Prosecutor of the Odessa Region, for questioning by phone. The case concerned the disappearance of $2 million allocated for prosecutorial reform. Sakvarelidze wrote a somewhat cowardly post: "This same Sus, several days ago, under threat of charges, and with a search warrant in hand, blackmailed employees of the General Inspectorate and coerced them into 'cooperating' in order to obtain false testimony, which was subsequently to be used at a briefing to discredit me and our team." A souvenir of that spring meeting-interrogation will be a selfie, thoughtfully taken by the Georgian expat's lawyer, Ksenia Prokonova. It should be noted that Sus, to his credit, did not back down and even attempted to play on his opponent's turf.
Having learned his media lesson, inventor Sus, on orders from above, also mocked Kasko. In April 2016, as former Deputy Prosecutor General Kasko was leaving the office of the public organization "Novaya Strana" and heading to his car, he was approached by four plainclothes men, led by a high-ranking investigator. Despite the "young prosecutor's" attempts to deny notifying them of his new status, Sus heroically read a pre-printed text while standing outside the opera house. The performance was a success, but its outcome remains unclear—the investigation into Kasko's illegal seizure of two state-owned apartments continues even under Prosecutor General Lutsenko.
Participation in the seizure of the Kyiv Court of Appeal
Dmitry Sus is also an active participant in the "Chernushenko case"—he was the prosecutor who investigated the case against Anatoly Chernushenko, Chairman of the Kyiv Court of Appeals, who was found in possession of a large sum of money during a search.
On June 19 of last year, a search was conducted in the office of Anton Chernushenko, head of the Kyiv Court of Appeals. Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin announced that he would initiate a motion in the Verkhovna Rada to lift the judge's judicial immunity and arrest him.
The court search marked the latest escalation in the long-running conflict between the prosecutor's office and the appellate court in the Naftogazvydobuvannya case. The prosecutor's office had repeatedly obtained permission to seize the gas production company's property and accounts, but the appellate court overturned these decisions each time. The Prosecutor General's Office conducted the search just as the next hearing in the Naftogazvydobuvannya case was scheduled for the Appellate Court. It was Sus, along with a group of officers, who conducted searches of Chernushenko's home and that of his family members, as well as the top-secret department of the Kyiv Court of Appeals, which houses top-secret materials related to covert investigative operations conducted by the special services throughout Ukraine. After this, the court came under the control of the supervisor's "senior" comrades, carefully implementing the wishes of Granovsky and Kononenko.
A Brief Course in Well Drilling
The "Zlochevsky case" at the Prosecutor General's Office (GPU) has been undergoing some truly strange developments for two years, and mysterious manipulations with it began long before Sus's rise. As the "Prosecutor's Truth" reported, for a long time after the events of Euromaidan, the GPU refused to initiate criminal proceedings against the former official of the "Yanukovych regime," despite British law enforcement officials doing so and even freezing his assets (though they were later unfrozen based on a "certificate" from the GPU stating that no criminal cases had been opened against him in Ukraine).
Sus, in the case of the ex-minister, was used from the "back side" at that time: at his instigation, the property of the ex-minister's companies was first seized, and then mysteriously lifted.
Let's take a closer look at this scheme: in 2014, Sus filed motions in a criminal case regarding the misappropriation of funds by officials of PJSC Ukrgazvydobuvannya (beneficiary Rinat Akhmetov) during the execution of joint venture agreements between 2010 and 2014, as well as tax evasion by officials of ESK Esko-Sever LLC, Pari LLC, First Ukrainian Gas Oil Company LLC, NPP Zond LLC, and Infox LLC. The first three companies are part of the Burisma holding company, where high-ranking positions are held, among others, by US Vice President Hunter Biden's son and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski. But most importantly, this holding company is considered the brainchild of the notorious Zlochevsky.
Moving on, in July 2016, Kyiv's Pechersky District Court seized 32 wells belonging to companies within the Burisma gas production holding company (20 wells belonging to Esko-Sever, 12 wells belonging to the First Ukrainian Gas and Oil Company, and one well belonging to Sistemoilingeniering LLC). But that's only the first part of the action...
Following this, it turns out that the "most humane court in the world," in its July 25 ruling, at the request of Pari LLC, lifted the freeze on 14 wells in Western Ukraine. Surprisingly, Sus himself helped with this, allowing all the freezes previously imposed at his own request to be lifted. The solution is simple: the supervisor fails to appear in court for the hearing of the relevant lawsuits, submitting statements of non-resistance to the plaintiffs.
Similarly, in the same Pechersk court, Sus did not object to another company from Zlochevsky's group of companies (OOO ESK Esko-Sever, which has 21 wells in the Kharkiv region) having restrictions on the use of extracted hydrocarbons lifted, although the court left the wells themselves under arrest.
The same story applies to the two-step scheme involving the seizure of 12 wells at the Proletarske field in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. The finale was truly spectacular: First Ukrainian Gas and Oil Company, which develops them, filed an appeal against the seizure, which was carried out with Sus's consent, but on August 9, for unknown reasons, withdrew its appeal. The proceedings themselves were subsequently closed...
Grandma let me ride
In addition to lacking the necessary experience to work in the newly created Department, Dmitry Sus also does not stand out for his "integrity," although he has already filled out an integrity questionnaire in which he swore that he has not broken the law, is not involved in corruption, has declared all his income, and lives within his means.
The NABU officers' primary target for surveillance of Sus was indicated in a note found: "Sus, Dmitry Nikolaevich, 2010 Audi Q7, ВХ9125ВМ." This was the car he was most often seen in.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs' vehicle ownership registry, this car belongs to Khmelnytskyi resident Maria Yurchik, born in 1930. Moreover, she became the owner of the luxury crossover in June 2015.
Maria Yurchik is the prosecutor's grandmother. She is registered at an apartment in Khmelnytskyi, which, according to the state property registry, belongs to Sus's mother, Lyudmila. His father, Mykola Sus, also listed this apartment as his place of residence.
The price of such a car on the used market currently stands at $35-40. It turns out that this amount can be raised even from a prosecutor's salary. At least, that's what Dmitry Sus himself claims. On Facebook, Sus shared his recipe for acquiring an expensive car. "Work from 08:00 AM to 03:00 AM, and you'll buy yourself a Bentley," he wrote to one commenter. When asked how much he earns, the prosecutor replied, "About 300 a year."
In his 2015 tax return, he reported a salary of just over 261 hryvnias. Another 92 hryvnias from the sale of property helped improve his financial situation. The prosecutor's wife received just over 10 hryvnias in "other income" and somehow managed to earn a whopping 650 hryvnias in salary.
Also, according to Sus, he bought the car for only 12 thousand dollars, and he does not consider the fact that it is registered to his grandmother a problem.
The fate of the prosecutor's Audi remains a mystery. Literally the day after its owner's identity was revealed, the prosecutor reported it stolen and filed a police report.
In search of the car-owning grandmother, 1+1 journalists traveled to Khmelnytskyi, where Sus grew up. There, they were told that late the previous evening, Maria Yurchik had been urgently transported to the dacha. "Someone took the children," they said.
The police confirm they are searching for the car, but they are investigating its owner themselves. The Prosecutor General's Office refuses to comment on the car scandal, and Sus himself insists over the phone that he bought his car for $12 and never filed a missing persons report.
Dmitry Sus also owns two more plots of land, measuring 1000 and 29 square meters. He also owns a 31-square-meter apartment in the prosecutor's dormitory and a 20-square-meter garage. His wife also owns a 44,6-square-meter apartment.
According to his declaration, Sus's garage only has room for a ten-year-old Citroën C4 VTS. Over the past two years, Dmitry Sus's wife has also managed to acquire a car—a 2011 Peugeot 207 is registered in her name.
So, Dmitry Sus is a very valuable and useful person in the Prosecutor General's Office. Over the past few years, he has faithfully served Viktor Shokin, carrying out all his orders, opening cases against those he deems undesirable, and resolving issues that were a thorn in the side of both the Prosecutor General's Office and the country's leadership.
Wherever there's a "tainted case" and it's shady, Sus is there, and he, too, doesn't pay much attention to procedural rules. For this, he receives handsome dividends—promotions and an improved financial situation. Now, for his "valiant" service, he's risen from a lowly GPU investigator to deputy head of the "Granovsky-Kononenko Department" and drives a flashy Audi Q7.
Based on this, Prosecutor's Truth raised several questions:
Why do people like Dmitry Sus, with a considerable history of corruption scandals, easily pass the integrity test?
— How long will it be considered "normal" in our country to register luxury cars in the names of 85-year-old grandmothers?
Why does the Prosecutor General's Office not follow the law in its work, but instead use the services of such tame prosecutors as Dmitry Sus?
Read more: Yuriy Lutsenko: The Terminator of Ukrainian Politics
Igor Kononenko, the President's Army Buddy
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