2 Ukrainian ECHR officials accused of using position to embezzle millions in state funds
A Ukrainian judge of the European Court of Human Rights and a government official who oversees the body’s work in the country have been accused of forging a court verdict and defrauding about $2 million from the state budget.
The incident in question dates back to late 2017 when the European Court of Human Rights passed a ruling in the lawsuit filed by the Zolotoy Mandarin Oil company against the power utility company of Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev. Zolotoy Mandarin Oil demanded that the Kiev Energy Company pay compensation of more than 54 million hryvnas or just under $2 million for fuel that it had kept in its depots and failed to return to its owner despite an earlier decision by the Ukrainian courts.
A source in the Ukrainian Finance Ministry has told the Ukrainian daily KP that Natalya Sevostyanova, the deputy finance minister who oversaw the work of the government plenipotentiary with the ECHR, “mistranslated” the ruling and then used some leverage in the court bailiff service to transfer the abovementioned $2 million to the accounts of the Zolotoy Mandarin Oil company. “In reality, the court ruling was forged,” the source said.
The same source also told the KP daily that one of the judges of the European Court of Human Rights is Anna Yudkovskaya, the wife of the Ukrainian MP Georgy Logvinsky and Sevostyanova’s personal friend and alleged that both women could have a role in the work of the Zolotoy Mandarin Oil company.
The extremely fast money transfer attracted the attention of Ukrainian law enforcement bodies and soon the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau launched an investigation into the supposed misuse of funds by Sevastyanova and her possible accomplices.
However, when in December 2017 investigators attempted to extract the documents on the Zolotoy Mandarin Oil funds transfer, Sevostyanova had ordered that part of these papers be destroyed and another part be given to the head of the Finance Ministry’s office of plenipotentiary for ECHR-related issues, Olga Davydchuk, for safekeeping. This bid was thwarted – anti-corruption agents found the torn papers in the rubbish and visited Davydchuk’s apartment where they got the rest of the documents.
The ministry’s source has told KP that Sevostyanova had allegedly attempted to influence the probe through her friend’s husband, Logvinsky, and even the head of Logvinsky’s ‘Popular Front’ political party as well as former Ukrainian PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
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