Anti-corruption advocates file case regarding delay with the decision on 'Yanukovych's billions' in Ukraine
Valeriya Lutkovska, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, has initiated the opening of a case regarding the confiscation of $1.5 billion belonging to the entourage of former President Viktor Yanukovych, due to the delay in the publication of a judgment by the Kramatorsk City Court. This was stated in a message published on Facebook by the Ukrainian office of the non-governmental international organization anti-corruption Transparency International.
The message states that a month ago, the organization appealed to Lutkovska with a request to punish those responsible for the violation of the right to public access to information regarding the funds confiscated from the Yanukovych regime. According to the organization, the decision for confiscation has not yet been entered in the court register. Transparency International noted that the opening of the case would speed up the work of state bodies and put an end to the violations related to access to this data.
At the end of April this year, Oleksandr Turchynov, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, said that the Oschadbank administration had begun transferring $1.5 billion from the accounts of Yanukovych to the state budget. Later, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said that the country's former president's money would go toward "restoring the fighting capacity of the Ukrainian army." "This money was stolen from the people of Ukraine. Now we have returned it to the state treasury," Poroshenko reported on his Twitter page.
Vitaliy Serdyuk, the lawyer for the former Ukrainian leader, said that Yanukovych has nothing to do with the funds confiscated from Oschadbank's accounts. "I completely refute this information ... I have an account statement for Viktor Yanukovych from Oschadbank on my hands, which states an absolutely different amount. It is about 28 million UAH ($1.1 million USD), which is currently in custody and which is not currently being confiscated," said the lawyer. According to Serdyuk, the 28 million UAH are the personal savings of Yanukovych, from which all taxes were paid. According to the lawyer, he intends to publicly refute the information regarding the confiscation of "the allegedly arrested, non-existent $1.5 billion" in court.