The criminal regime of Yanukovych and Prosecutor General Pshonka never hesitated to appoint their ilk to important, key positions. A kinship of spirit brought them together and imbued the shared pursuit of enriching the "family" with a certain romanticism, a certain intoxication of thieves' luck.
But the regime fell, the second Maidan took place, and the appointments to cozy positions in government bodies, which were logically outlandish, remained.
In 2006, a young and hot-blooded investigator named Vova Nechiporenko was working in the Odessa district prosecutor's office. He was the brother of the longtime prosecutor of Kyiv's Shevchenko district, Serhiy Nechiporenko, who was also the son-in-law of the nationally beloved Kivalov. He worked, committed petty crimes, and had no troubles. Until he stumbled into the trap that every negligent law enforcement officer gets into, deciding that if he's going to steal, steal big, and sleep with the queen.
In those distant times, the prosecutor's office still investigated criminal cases, including murders. Investigator Nechiporenko was assigned to yet another such case. Police officers worked deftly and detained a suspect with the intriguing last name of Gnyrya. The court arrested him and placed him in pretrial detention. A routine matter, you might say, but not for the hot-blooded investigator. He issued a warrant to seize the suspect's car, an old Nissan Bluebird. Although the make isn't important here, something else is. Why seize a car in a murder case? Well, why? The murderer's wife came to the investigator, and Nechiporenko offered to lift the seizure for a then-presumptuous bribe of $2. What should a woman do when she won't see her husband for the next 15 years, and even if any car is seized by the state? They shook hands, and the money ended up in Nechiporenko's deep pocket, and the car from the impound lot went to its owner.
However, this wasn't enough for him. After all, it's a big city, high expenses... Seeing himself as the arbiter of human destinies, the young investigator suggested to Gnyra's wife that they settle the matter and release her husband, reclassifying the case as grievous bodily harm, whereupon the court would issue a suspended sentence and no bribes would be required. He made such an insistent offer that the woman became frightened and contacted the SBU. Nechiporenko's subsequent conversations were recorded, where the investigator, with a thieving demeanor, promised to "resolve" everything, "screw the case," for nothing—20 hryvnias, naturally not Ukrainian hryvnias. It's noteworthy that, from a moral standpoint, the investigator seemed, pardon the expression, a complete freak. After all, for a normal person in society, murder is the most serious crime, and the perpetrator should, at a minimum, receive life imprisonment for having coveted the most sacred thing a person has—life. For a normal person, but not for Nechiporenko.
He was detained by security forces while handing over the money. The young investigator exercised his right to make a phone call—his older brother in Kyiv immediately came to his aid. Just a couple of hours later, the bribery case was reclassified as attempted bribery, the inspection report was destroyed, and the investigator was released home on bail.
The order to dismiss him under this disgraceful article was not long in coming. That same day, Nechiporenko, head bowed, left the prosecutor's office, seemingly forever. But it was not to be.
With the help of Kivalov's father-in-law, the godfather of the Ukrainian judicial system, Nechiporenko appealed the decision to open a criminal case against him. The Primorsky District Court of Odesa, and then the regional appellate court, overturned it. Only a year later, after filing a cassation appeal, did the regional prosecutor reopen the case, and this time, attempts to resolve the matter through the courts were unsuccessful.
These documents are still in the court archives and were kindly provided to the editors upon request.
The investigation dragged on for two years, and Nechiporenko, as in the well-known joke, swapped places with his former employer, while simultaneously trying to resolve the case and his reinstatement. In 2009, the loyal regional prosecutor, Prysyazhnyuk, ordered the case dropped, and the court ordered Nechiporenko's reinstatement. He was trying by all means to forget the incident of three years ago, a move facilitated by Yanukovych's rise to power, the strengthening of Kivalov's forces, and the subsequent promotion of the investigator to prosecutor in the regional prosecutor's office.
And then things took off. Extraordinary promotions, promotions, and then the former corrupt official Nechiporenko, now a colonel, set off to conquer the heights of the Bilhorod-Dnistrovsk prosecutor's office, home to the lucrative recreational areas of Zatoka, Sergeyivka, and Kurortne. And where his uncle, Igor Gavrilovich Nechiporenko, a city council member from the Party of Regions and the father of that same Kyiv prosecutor, Sergey, popularly nicknamed "Harry Potter," had established a considerable business.
Igor Gavrilovich's nickname stemmed not so much from his name as from the similarity in architectural style between the buildings erected along the seashore. Remember Harry Potter's castle in Odessa, and who owns it? Apparently, matchmakers even go to the same architect.
The village of Zatoka, Solnechnaya station, and the "Rechnik" recreation center of the Nikolaev seaport. Back in the mid-2000s, without an auction, competitive bidding, or the knowledge of the State Property Fund, the same Igor Gavrilovich "Harry Potter" purchased the center by agreement with the port's management. To be on the safe side, the state-owned center's cabins were demolished, and three large castles were built in their place, without any expert assessments or permits.
Remarkably, to save space on the small base, the ugly restaurant/canteen is being built right on the beach, in the coastal strip. What's there to worry about when you have relatives like that?
This is far from the only business of the Nechiporenko family for which an investigator with a very tarnished reputation was sent from Odessa to Belgorod-Dnistrovskyi to directly protect it.
Incidentally, it was dispatched in expensive SUVs with "family" license plates number 7000. City residents could see Deputy Prosecutor Nechiporenko cruising the streets every day in a car like this:
or like this:
Agree, a prosecutor's salary of 5 thousand hryvnias per month just allows for the purchase of such "inexpensive" toys.
But here, in addition to the usual law enforcement protection schemes, Vladimir was overcome by a familiar criminal instinct. After all, if you were willing to save a murderer, essentially becoming his accomplice and just like him, then you'd certainly have the courage to commit lesser crimes.
In November 2014, Nechyporenko, now deputy prosecutor of Belgorod-Dnistrovskyi, along with his young student, Oleksandr Grammatik, committed a series of new crimes in the temporary detention center of the city police department. They included an illegal interrogation, an illegal search, and coercion to testify. A video with exclusive footage was posted on YouTube.com, titled "Nechyporenko's Prosecutor's Lawlessness." Over two thousand views, widespread publicity, and a rally by the victim's friends outside the prosecutor's office (the video is also posted on the same website under the title "Lustration of Prosecutor Nechyporenko")—none of this compelled the Prosecutor General's Office, following its good old tradition, to once again assign Volodymyr's status to the other side of the table, as a suspect. Apparently, ten years ago, prosecutors were more faithful to their oaths and weren't above using a hot iron to burn away the taint of corruption from their bodies.
Only after a month of the victim's wife's wanderings through the courts, on December 18, the Belgorod-Dnistrovskyi Court ordered the prosecutor's office to open a criminal case against the werewolves in prosecutorial uniform. We hope that the appellate court, where the wife of one of them, Natalia Yakovlevna Nechiporenko, serves as the chief of staff, will make a fair decision and give the Prosecutor General's Office a chance to purge itself of accomplices of murderers, bribe-takers, and criminals within its ranks.
Pavel Temny, ANTIKOR
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