Officers of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) searched the house of the former deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko.
Earlier, Tymoshenko also held the positions of an adviser to the head of the Defence Ministry and supervisor of the Big Construction Project. According to Ukrainian media, the searches were instigated as part of a leak of information from the NABU in the Big Construction case. Tymoshenko stated:
I fulfilled all the demands of law enforcers, there are no personal claims against me.
The probable reason for the detention is suspicion of corruption. Law enforcers detained the ex-head near the restaurant Ishak in Kyiv.
NABU is a specialised anti-corruption service created with US support. Meanwhile, the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) is an independent structural unit of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General. The SAPO is mainly responsible for supporting and overseeing criminal investigations launched by the NABU.
NABU cases are heard by the High Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine (HACC). The court was established on 11 April 2019, with the decree on its creation signed by then-President Petro Poroshenko. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) named the establishment of the HACC as a condition for a loan of 17.5 billion dollars to Ukraine.
Possible reason for searches
Tymoshenko resigned from the administration at his own request in January 2023. When the war broke out, he allegedly started embezzling the budget on a particularly large scale.
Ukrainian media reported that he was removed from his post for allegedly targeting Western financial aid allocated to Ukraine during the war against Russia. According to the media, he embezzled more than 50 billion hryvnias ($1.23 billion) from the Big Construction Project and misappropriated several billion dollars worth of humanitarian aid on a regular basis.
Tymoshenko’s resignation is directly related to a series of dismissals of other politicians. The governor of Dnipropetrovsk region, Valentyn Reznichenko, left his post together with Yuriy Golyk, who was in charge of development and innovations in Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration. Having methodically embezzled the regional budget and become millionaires, they tied their fates with Kyrylo Tymoshenko, local media reported.
A year after the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022, a corruption scandal involving Oleksii Reznikov, the country’s former defence minister, erupted in Ukraine. According to Ukrainian media, the Defence Ministry was involved in purchasing food for the military at deliberately inflated prices.
Reznikov called what happened a “misunderstanding.” However, the ministry signed a contract for more than 13 billion hryvnias with a newly founded Aktiv Company, which had an equity capital of exactly one thousand hryvnias.
Tymoshenko stepped down shortly after Reznikov. Ukrainian media reported that he left allegedly because he was targeting Western financial aid amid the war in Ukraine.
Big Construction scandal
Tymoshenko is also featured in the Big Construction scandal. This is a project launched by the administration of incumbent President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2020. Its goal was described as the development of social, transport, and sports infrastructure. At that time, the president promised to renovate 25,000 kilometres of roads and complete dozens of long-constructions within five years.
However, the Big Construction Project, whose activities were supervised by Tymoshenko, was repeatedly criticised for collusion, overpricing, and employing foreign companies instead of Ukrainian ones. Former Finance Minister Ihor Umanskyi claimed even before the war that the project was embezzling about 40 per cent of budget funds.
Ukraine’s State Statistics Service reported that UAH 33.5 billion ($826.8 million) was spent on transport construction throughout 2019. However, as of early December 2020, Ukravtodor had spent over UAH 81 billion, according to the data. Thus, the volume of funding for road construction in Ukraine has grown 2.5 times, whereas the volume of work has increased by only 14.8 per cent.
According to Tymoshenko, who spoke in 2021, there were plans to expand the programme in several more areas, including mortgage lending, the development of regional air hubs, the creation of a state-owned air carrier, and the development of a network of suburban express and high-speed trains.
At the time, he also promised to attract not only Ukrainian budget funds, but also foreign funding. However, in the end, the project had neither a reliable budget, nor structured management, nor clear goals.
As a result, the national Big Construction project, promoted by Zelensky, gradually turned into a national project to absorb budget funds. Contractors involved in road construction and repair have benefited especially.
In particular, in 2020 the same amount of money was spent on roads as in the period from 2016 to 2019 inclusively. Meanwhile, the kilometres of roads put into operation decreased by half, whereas the price per 1 metre of asphalt increased by 140%.
Besides, the authorities spent 26 billion, allocated for the COVID Fund that was badly needed for medicine, on the Big Construction. After Tymoshenko bought an estate near Kyiv, Ukrainian journalists suspected that he had bought it at the expense of funds allocated for road construction.
Feud between NABU and SAPO
According to Ukrainian media, the search of Tymoshenko’s house was preceded by an investigation carried out by journalists. They revealed that the NABU, which had received an order to search the head of Naftogaz and former Communities and Territories Development Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, did not carry out the search due to the decision of the head of the agency, Semen Kryvonos.
After the publication in local media, the NABU decided to track down those who shared the information with journalists. Earlier, Kryvonos failed to appear at a meeting of the anti-corruption committee of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament), where he was supposed to testify as part of the investigation into the case of possible leaks in the NABU.
It was revealed that high-ranking employees of the NABU passed information to suspects in a high-profile corruption investigation and warned them about upcoming searches. The alleged leaks were discovered after investigators seized a phone belonging to businessman Yuri Holik, who was under investigation.
The Ukrainian media outlet strana.ua reported that the “attack” on the NABU was related to the confrontation between Ukraine’s two main anti-corruption structures, the NABU and the SAPO. According to the website, the current NABU leadership dismissed a number of “Western protégés,” which angered the SAPO leadership and European activists.
Tymoshenko’s fate
From 2011, Kyrylo Tymoshenko worked in production centres for several years until he founded his own advertising organisation, GOODMEDIA, in 2014. The company specialised in PR services and election campaigns. Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko co-operated with it. Since 2014, Tymoshenko became the chief media person of one of the Ukrainian parties. Then he came to work in Zelensky’s election headquarters.
Tymoshenko is also considered one of the main authors of the idea to liquidate the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with the subsequent seizure of huge church property.
After joining Zelensky’s headquarters, Tymoshenko was in charge of media and campaign creativity. The winner Zelensky put Tymoshenko as deputy head of his administration, where he was in charge of information policy and supervised the president’s protocol.
However, the real business that brought Tymoshenko a lot of money was the presidential Big Construction Project. During Tymoshenko’s supervision of the project, according to the Prozorro procurement system, most of the multimillion-dollar tenders for road repairs in Kharkiv region were won by Avtomagistral-Yug, a firm associated with the official.
The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) even checked Kyrylo Tymoshenko for a possible conflict of interest. However, the case ended with no results, with Tymoshenko becoming more daring.
In the spring, the US company General Motors donated 50 Chevrolet Tahoe SUVs as humanitarian aid to evacuate people from combat sites. However, Ukrainian media noted that Tymoshenko utilised one of those vehicles for personal needs. The whereabouts of the other SUVs remain unknown.
The NABU also searched the house of the coordinator of the Big Construction Project, Yuri Holik. It was recently reported that he had travelled abroad and stayed in Austria. This is not the first search of Holik. He was previously an adviser to the former head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional state administration, Valentyn Reznichenko.
