Alexander Gorobets: Ukrainian deputies are acting against the presidential administration

A year ago, during the peak of the audio tape scandal, the supervisor of the public organization Antimafia, Ukrainian Deputy Grigory Omelchenko charged the head of the presidential administration, Vladimir Litvin, and the former director of the national joint-stock oil and gas company Neftegaz Ukraine, Igor Bakay, with appropriation of a large sum of money. Igor Bakay authorized the theft of Russian gas from a transnational pipe. According to Grigory Omelchenko’s version, Litvin and Bakay privatized 88 licences for inventions made by the scientific and research natural gas institute in the city of Kharkov and then sold them to Neftegas Ukraine.

Omelchenko said that Litvin and Bakay and other officials privatized the rights of the intellectual property in the sum of 32 million hryvnas (the USD rate in Ukraine last year and now is 1:5.25). Then, they set up a firm, which was selling the same licences to the state for 180 million hryvnas. The supervisor of the Ukrainian Anti-mafia and his associate, People’s Deputy Anatoly Yermak, sent an inquiry to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Mikhail Potebenko, insisting on the necessity to institute criminal proceedings.

A year has passed. The Office of the Prosecutor General has not done a thing, and they have not even sent a respond to the deputies. The case is about Igor Bakay, an oligarch who is close to the head of the state, and Vladimir Litvin, the head of the presidential administration. Of course, they would do nothing about such figures. Furthermore, someone said Litvin was Leonid Kuchma's (Ukraine’s incumbent president) successor.

However, Grigory Omelcheno is also a hard nut to crack. He has prepared another inquiry. This time, the document was signed by deputies Anatoly Yermak and Viktor Shishkin. The latter previously held the post of Ukraine’s prosecutor general. That inquiry was supported by 176 parliamentarians, and now the document obtained the status of the official inquiry of the Ukrainian parliament. The Office of the Prosecutor General, the fiscal administration, and Ukraine’s security service are supposed to respond to that document within a month. In addition, the deputies supported he inquiry to the Ukrainian premier Anatoly Kinakh about the establishment of the governmental committee for conducting a probe about the facts mentioned in the inquiry.

Grigory Omelchenko said that he could judge on the results of the current procedure based on the previous scandals. Omelchenko had to spend six years to force the court to arrest Pavel Lazarenko. The Ukrainian president had materials with information about Lazarenko's currency accounts in Switzerland and America at the end of 1994. Last year, the Swiss court handed down a sentence to Pavel Lazarenko, convicting him of money laundering in Switzerland based on the information of his criminal activity that Omelchenko gave to the Ukrainian. The president knew about Lazarenko’s criminal activity, but he still appointing him to new positions.

The same is going to happen to Litvin. However, the persons mentioned in the parliamentary inquiry are not going to be called into account; they are not even going to be dismissed from their positions. However, this will mean the criminal negligence of the incumbent prosecutor general.

Alexander Gorobets PRAVDA.Ru Kiev Ukraine

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov

Read the original in Russian: http://www.pravda.ru/main/2001/12/24/35073.html