Amazing story by my friends who are attorneys in Russia, part of the former president of Ukraine, Vanessa Kachadurian analysis.
The following is an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which is based in Washington, D.C., a Kyiv Post partner. Kyiv Post staff writer Vlad Lavrov coordinates this project. The author, Denys Bigus, is a Kyiv-based journalist and television host for ZIK’s “Nashi Groshi” (Our Money) program.
At the end of March, the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, detained what it described as two key members belonging to the criminal gang of fugitive young oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, who is accused of embezzlement and theft of public money, and causing multibillion-dollar damages to the state, mostly through tax evasion. Kurchenko, suspected of being a front man for President Viktor Yanukovych, overthrown on Feb. 22 during the EuroMaidan Revolution, remains in hiding.
The two suspects were taken to the SBU's pre-trial detention center. One was Arkadiy Kashkin, the director of Gas Ukrainy 2020, a company that preceded Kurchenko's energy holding VETEK. The other, Denys Bugai, headed the supervisory board of BrokBusinessBank, also part of the fugitive’s business empire.
On April 24, Bugai was set free, but not Kashkin. Yet Bugai remained a member of the Justice Ministry's working group on legal reform, despite the fact that he – president of the Ukrainian Bar Association and co-owner of Vashchenko, Bugai and Partners, had worked closely with Kurchenko since 2013. He had overseen business deals for the most controversial oligarch during Viktor Yanukovych's presidency. Bugai, in his turn calls the charges against him "based on unverified information" and a "premature conclusion of the investigators."
"As a lawyer, I provided legal assistance to the business owned by Kurchenko. The hereby mentioned legal assistance, as a rule, dealt with consulting on the matters of corporate, antimonopoly and media law," Bugai said. "My consultations had nothing to do with budget funds."
According to shredded documents found in Kurchenko's office and restored by the Paper Division project, apart from those seized by the SBU, Kurchenko had an army of 102 lawyers working for him. Of those, 70 were employed by the legal department of VETEK and divided into several groups.
At least some of them understood that their role was to legitimize an illegal business. In particular, one document clearly recorded a “rehearsal of questioning” with one of the lawyers. According to journalists and volunteers of Paper Division, these lawyers could become precious witnesses in untangling the crimes allegedly connected to Kurchenko. But so far, investigators at the general prosecutor's office have failed to tap into their knowledge.
The documents found in VETEK's legal department were some of the least damaged, and offer a glimpse into the staffing schedule and job descriptions of the department's employees. The monthly budgets of various legal groups below do not include salaries of group leaders and department heads.
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