Viktor Shokin
Recently, during a special operation personally led by Deputy Prosecutor General David Sakvarelidze and SBU Chairman Vasyl Hrytsak, special forces were used to arrest two high-ranking prosecutors – Volodymyr Shapakin, First Deputy of the Prosecutor General's Office Investigative Department, and Oleksandr Korniets, Deputy Prosecutor of the Kyiv Region. We won't list all the money, diamonds, and other valuables seized from these officials – enough has been written about them. What's striking is that they were arrested while their boss, Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, was away, conveniently on vacation. So, does that mean he wasn't aware of his subordinates' corruption?
The only one who modestly and rather unconvincingly claimed Shokin's connection to the detainees was MP Mustafa Nayyem. However, he didn't make this claim in a parliamentary inquiry or in any other form mandated by law as a government official. He modestly wrote about it on his Facebook page. All the other journalist MPs, including Nayyem's colleague, the former truth-telling journalist Serhiy Leshchenko, modestly omitted this fact. So, could it be that the Prosecutor General truly knew nothing about his bribe-taking subordinates or about what was going on within the Prosecutor General's Office? To answer these questions, we need to delve a little deeper into the biography of the head of Ukraine's oversight agency.
So, Viktor Nikolaevich Shokin.
If we ignore his studies at the Agricultural Academy, his work as a technician at the Botanical Garden, and his military service, we can say that he began his career in the legal profession in 1980, as an investigator in the Kyiv Prosecutor's Office of the Moscow District. He then rose through the ranks of investigator—senior investigator, department head, investigator for particularly important cases, and so on. But that's the visible part of his career.
Viktor Nikolaevich's family connections are of primary interest. First, he is the godfather of current President Petro Poroshenko. And the latter had been pushing Shokin even before he became head of state. It is said that back in 2004, it was Poroshenko, a "close friend" and godfather of Viktor Yushchenko, who lobbied for Viktor Shokin's appointment as deputy to then-Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun. The family of the Prosecutor General's Office (GPU) head is also of interest. It seems like everyone in their family is a prosecutor.
His adopted daughter, Tatyana Gornostaeva, is the deputy prosecutor of the Odessa region. Incidentally, she was recently embroiled in a scandal involving the newly appointed governor of the Odessa region, Mikheil Saakashvili. Read more: Is Saakashvili helping Shokin take revenge on his ex-wife? Or is he punishing Shokin?
Her husband's father, Oleksiy Gornostayev, also works in the Southern Palmyra region. He's the deputy prosecutor of Odesa's Kyiv district. And Viktor Nikolayevich's in-law, Mykola Gornostayev, works in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast; he's the deputy prosecutor of that region. If that's not protectionism, then what is?
But let's judge the prosecutor by his "cases." The first "case" in which Viktor Shokin, as they say, "came into the spotlight" was the case of the White Brotherhood and Maria Devi Khristos. It is said that it was he, then a relatively young senior investigator for especially important cases in the Kyiv prosecutor's office, who spread rumors that "the KGB or GRU of the General Staff of the Russian General Staff were involved, and that the brotherhood's leader, Yuri Krivonogov, was actually an officer of the Russian special services." Furthermore, they planted a rumor in the press that the White Brotherhood leaders were confiscating apartments, property, and money from their followers. However, the verdicts against the White Brotherhood leaders make no mention of this. They were convicted under Articles of the then Criminal Code: 187-5 (Seizure of State or Public Buildings or Structures), 209 (Encroachment on Citizens' Health Under the Guise of Religious Rituals), and 101 Part 1 (Intentional Bodily Injury). But the young investigator was right to be involved in a high-profile case. And from then on, his career took off.
The most resonant of the “cases” of the future head of the GPU is, perhaps, the “case Boris Kolesnikov" 2004 model. At the time, the media reported that the case was initiated by Petro Poroshenko, while he was the head of the National Security and Defense Council. Allegedly, the plan was to arrest Kolesnikov and Renat Akhmetov's brother, Ihor, and receive two million dollars for closing the case. With this
He approached then-Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun with the proposal. Apparently, the original plan was to open a case under the article "Separatism." But then, apparently, something went wrong. For some reason, Piskun didn't personally handle the case, and cases involving such state-level crimes are always under the personal control of the Prosecutor General. Then Viktor Nikolayevich opened the case. It was a case under Part 4 of Article 189 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, "Extortion on an especially large scale." That is, a criminal offense perfectly within the purview of the Deputy Head of the Prosecutor General's Office. Kolesnikov spent some time in pretrial detention. And after some time, quite coincidentally, the case was closed. It's difficult to say what portion of this money Shokin received, if any. But the fact is that the case was dismissed, and the suspect was released, and later fully acquitted.
Viktor Shokin is linked to many serious, high-profile cases. These include the "Yushchenko poisoning case," the "Yevgeny Kushnarev case," and the "Gongadze case." Let's talk about the latter.
As is well known, the main figure in this case, the link between the perpetrators and the masterminds, was the infamous General Alexey Pukach. In 2005, Pukach was in Ashdod, Israel. Three SBU officers, led by then-Deputy Chairman Andrey Kozhemyakin, traveled there. They succeeded in obtaining sanction from an Israeli court to detain Gongadze's alleged killer. Pukach was placed under surveillance, and an operation to capture him was already underway. But literally the day before the arrest, Israeli intelligence services demanded additional documents from the SBU officers, forcing them to notify the Prosecutor General's Office. The very next day, a Ukrainian newspaper reported that SBU officers in Israel were preparing to detain Pukach. The operation was thwarted, and the Israeli prosecutor's office, upon learning of the newspaper article, refused to authorize the arrest. The journalists later admitted that Shokin personally leaked this information to them. Considering the status and importance of the defendants in the "Gongadze case," whom Pukach later named, one can imagine the level of preference Viktor Nikolaevich received for a short conversation with journalists.
And these aren't all the cases the current Prosecutor General has had a hand in. Of course, he's been working in the prosecutorial system for a very long time, and has been around for a long time. Rumor has it that he was the one who got his godfather off the hook for the scandalous construction project in Mariinsky Park. Whatever the case, Petro Oleksiyovych certainly finds it convenient to work with such a head of the Prosecutor General's Office. However, there's one caveat: Viktor Shokin is a protégé and even, to some extent, an adherent of the system Poroshenko promised to "break" when he received the Ukrainian people's mandate. And not a single high-profile case—not the "Heavenly Hundred," not the "Yanukovych Family Case," not even the other high-profile and utterly obvious cases related to the Maidan—has been brought to trial in the six months he's been in charge.
And finally, one more interesting fact. Shokin's colleagues consider him a workaholic. They say he often stays up late. You can come to him at eleven o'clock at night and talk business; he generally likes to be kept up to date with everything. And yet, this inveterate "workaholic" suddenly, at such a crucial moment for the prosecutor's office as the arrest of its top officials, finds himself on vacation. As they say in such cases: "Coincidence? I don't think so." Rather, according to the current government's logic, the president's godfather should be above suspicion.
Denis Ivanov for SKELET-info
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