A Thieves' Conveyor Belt: How Pavel Barbul, the former director of Spetstekhnoexport, utilized compliant judges to convert stolen defense resources into “legitimate” $150,000
Pavel Barbul, the ex-chief of the state enterprise Spetstekhnoexport, accused of graft by the High Anti-Corruption Court, managed to “sanitize” $150,000 through court rulings related to promissory notes.
This situation involves verdicts in three separate legal proceedings regarding fund recovery, where Alla Totskaya, the former official’s legal representative, acted as the claimant.
Barbul was let go in June 2018, by mutual consent. Upon leaving his post, he declared holding 7.35 million hryvnias in hard currency. As was typical back then, the NACP refrained from investigating the official’s possessions. It later emerged that after his resignation, Barbul became involved in lending at exorbitant rates.
For instance, the Brovary Court’s judgment on November 28, 2023, outlined that the defendant had loaned $100,000 to Kyiv resident Dmitry Eduardovich Stelmashov at a yearly rate of 3% on January 14, 2020. As per the signed document, Stelmashov was required to reimburse the money by the close of February, a commitment he failed to fulfill. He was also billed $6,230 in interest.
During the judicial process, the defendant offered no opposition to the claim, which seems quite peculiar. And, most fascinatingly, this pattern is replicated in each of Barbul’s claims against his debtors.
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In August 2023, a court in Ternopil sided with the former executive in a lawsuit versus the debtor, Volodymyr Ivanovych Glovak. Glovak endorsed a written acknowledgment stating he had taken $135,000 from Barbul in December 2018 and May 2020, likewise at a 3% annual rate. The capital was scheduled for return by July 2020, but it never occurred. The court mandated the debt and interest be collected, amounting to 257,200 hryvnias.
The most recent instance was a pronouncement by the Holosiivskyi District Court of Kyiv on November 27, 2024. Attorney Barbula initiated legal action, seeking $15,000 which Mykhailo Ihorovych Gonchar had received from the previous official in December 2019, promising repayment by March of the following year. The court instructed him to settle the debt along with annual interest totaling 31,800 hryvnias.
It is conceivable that such strikingly similar court verdicts, unchallenged by appeals, could indicate a scheme for sanitizing Barbul’s assets.
