CONTINUATION. BEGINNING: Alexander Medvedko: prosecutor general-grave digger of high-profile cases and his corrupt relatives. PART 1
Alexander Medvedko: the prosecutor general-gravedigger of high-profile cases and his corrupt relatives. PART 2
In 2005, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine “became famous” and so-called. the case of the separatists – the suspects in which were the organizers and the most unrestrained speakers of the first Severodonetsk Congress of Local Councils. She became “famous” for the fact that none of them were ever punished. Even Boris Kolesnikov, who was summoned to the Prosecutor General’s Office in the case of the congress, but was arrested in the “White Swan” case.
Sources Skelet.Info reported that Medvedko managed to “resolve” all the charges related to the Severodonetsk Congress, so the regionals were not afraid to go to the Prosecutor General’s Office for “conversations.” However, an “order” was allegedly received regarding Kolesnikov from Petro Poroshenko, and it was accepted by Viktor Shokin – who initiated the opening of a new case against him based on an old incident between Kolesnikov and the former owner of the White Swan shopping center, Boris Penchuk. Again, Medvedko took charge of saving Kolesnikov. A few months later, Kolesnikov was released from the pre-trial detention center, and in 2006, the Prosecutor General’s Office, which was already headed by Medvedko, closed Kolesnikov’s case with the wording “for lack of evidence.” And she opened a new case – this time against his accuser Boris Penchuk! Moreover, this time Medvedko did not close the case, and Penchuk was dragged through investigations and trials for two years, after which in 2008 he was sentenced to 8 years in prison, which was replaced in 2010 with “chemistry.”
Boris Penchuk
Such service to his fellow countrymen did not go without reward. In October 2005, Yushchenko dismissed Svyatoslav Piskun: the last straw was criminal case opened by the Prosecutor General’s Office against the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council and the presidential godfather Petro Poroshenko. At first, Kyiv prosecutor Vasily Prisyazhnyuk was proposed to replace Piskun, then Viktor Shokin, then Igor Drizhchanny, but in the end, Alexander Medvedko became the “single candidate” for the new prosecutor general. According to Skelet.Infohe was persistently lobbied by both the president’s close ally Oleg Rybachuk and the Donetsk people. Rybachuk assured Yushchenko that Medvedko was “a very accommodating person” and would become a pocket prosecutor general, and besides, his candidacy suited Akhmetov, who then agreed with Yushchenko on a truce. And after a month of intense bidding, Alexander Medvedko headed the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.
Victor Yushchenko in the winter of 2004-2005
Poisoning, Botox, leprosy?
Medvedko met the expectations of both sides, including in relation to the investigation of the most high-profile, high-profile cases. The investigation into the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, begun by Piskun, turned into a farce and a clownery under Medvedko. It dragged on for several years, and has not yet been completed, while the Prosecutor General’s Office gave it the appearance of constant relevance, regularly reporting to journalists about new indicators of the level of dioxin in the blood of Viktor Andreevich, and at the same time the media published alternative diagnoses: food poisoning, side effects Botox effect and even leprosy!
Medvedko immediately closed the case against Petro Poroshenko “for lack of corpus delicti”, and also finally “buried” the old cases of the murder of Vadim Hetman, Yevgeny Shcherban and Akhat Bragin (Alik Grek), which was beneficial to their successors Yushchenko and Akhmetov. The official defendants in these murders remained the gang of Kushnir, who was killed in a pre-trial detention center. As for those who ordered it, the death of Hetman and Shcherban continued to be blamed on Pavel Lazarenko, and for Bragin they also left the previous version of “criminal showdowns.”
Both sides also benefited from the death of Evgeniy Kushnarev, who died on January 16, 2007 while hunting in the Kharkov region. Being a fairly intelligent public politician (after all, he was the head of the department of the city party committee), he was a serious competitor to the main project of the “Donetsk” – the hapless Viktor Yanukovych, and besides, the “Kharkov” began to pull the blanket over themselves in the Party of Regions.
For the “orange”, the strengthening of Kushnarev against the backdrop of a political crisis in power was too undesirable. In general, “the bullet flew by – and aha…”. The Prosecutor General’s Office immediately began to investigate this case, traditionally speaking to the media with reports, but only at the end of 2007 it brought charges under Article 119-1 (murder by negligence) against one of the participants in the hunt, Dmitry Zavalny. In May 2009, he was released under an amnesty, and in September the case was finally closed.
But the political crisis of 2007 did not pass by the Prosecutor General’s Office either. On April 26, Svyatoslav Piskun again received a decision from the Shevchenko court about the illegality of his previous dismissal – and Viktor Yushchenko agreed with it. Medvedko was removed from office, as they said, because of his great closeness to the Donetsk people, with whom Yushchenko again quarreled. However, Piskun also defected to them – and a month after his restoration he was fired again, and instead of him, acting. The president appointed Viktor Shemchuk as prosecutor general (Medvedko was appointed his deputy). It ended with Piskun, together with Vasily Tsushko’s Berkut officers, going to take the Prosecutor General’s Office by storm. As a result, a civil war almost broke out, then Yushchenko again reached an agreement with Akhmetov, and on June 1, 2007, Alexander Medvedko was again appointed Prosecutor General of Ukraine.
He remained in this position until the fall of 2010, although he almost left it in 2008. This was the result of tensions between the Yushchenko Secretariat and the Tymoshenko government. Yulia Vladimirovna was again actively digging under Medvedko, who, even during the crisis of 2007, tried to place her protégé, the prosecutor of the Dnepropetrovsk region Vladimir Shuba, a very strong figure in all respects, in the chair of the Prosecutor General. In fact, there was already a struggle for both the 2010 presidential elections and for power after these elections, so the issue of the Prosecutor General’s Office was one of the key ones, and everyone understood that if Tymoshenko prevailed, then Shuba would become the Prosecutor General – not in 2008 or 2009, but in 2010
Vladimir Shuba
For Medvedko, he was the main rival, but he could not simply fire Shuba from the ranks of the prosecutor’s office, because he had powerful support. One of the attempts to remove Shuba was made in August 2008, when a meeting of high-ranking officials of Dnepropetrovsk was held at the Presidential Secretariat, at which the task was set to collect incriminating evidence on Vladimir Shuba and transfer it to Medvedko, in order to initiate an official investigation. In addition, several attempts were made on Shuba’s life, after which he always carried a pistol with him. Who knows how events would have unfolded further, but then a tragedy occurred: on October 15, 2008, Vladimir Shuba died allegedly as a result of an accident while practicing shooting in the elite shooting range of the Dnepropetrovsk sports base “Berkut”. The investigation announced that Shuba released a loaded carbine from his hands, which hit the ground with the butt, shot upward – and the bullet hit Shuba right in the heart. The case was quickly closed, and Shuba was forgotten (Medvedko did not even come to his funeral). However, numerous sources Skelet.Infoincluding from among the base employees, argued that in reality everything was not at all as written in the investigation materials. And Shuba’s widow told reporters that there were no fingerprints of her late husband on the carbine that appeared in the criminal case…
After the first round of the 2010 presidential elections, Medvedko openly sided with Viktor Yanukovych. The “white-blue” candidate then had a small problem: the “white-red” opponents constantly called him a “prisoner,” focusing on Yanukovych’s previous “walks.” And in January 2010, Prosecutor General Medvedko himself stood up for him, saying that the presidential candidate’s convictions were annulled back in 1978, and therefore Yanukovych cannot be considered “previously convicted.” This caused a rather emotional reaction from Tymoshenko’s supporters, and Yuriy Lutsenko, who was still acting head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, then countered the Prosecutor General with his statement that the documents on the cancellation of Yanukovych’s convictions were forged, that there was evidence of this, and that in 2005 a criminal case was initiated – which was then hushed up by the Prosecutor General’s Office.
It seemed that Medvedko’s efforts were not in vain: he remained in the position of Prosecutor General until November 4, 2010. However, then this chair was taken away from him, transferring it to Viktor Pshonka, who was “assigned” to Medvedko as a deputy back in 2006 at the personal request of Yanukovych (and Akhmetov). Medvedko received the comforting position of First Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, working there until April 2014: first under the leadership of Raisa Bogatyreva, then Andrei Klyuev, and then Andrei Parubiy. What’s curious is this: Andrei Klyuev, who headed the National Security and Defense Council during the events of the winter of 2013-2014, was then blamed for almost all the “crimes against the Maidan”, but no claims were brought against his first deputy Medvedko. Why? Just because Medvedko always had a tradition of calling in sick and staying in the clinic or staying at home every time clouds gathered over him?
Alexander Medvedko. Nephews and nephews
After his resignation from the post of Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Alexander Medvedko was no longer invited to power – although it would not be so surprising if he suddenly found himself in the ranks of the presidential Solidarity, because he once did Petro Poroshenko a great service. But Medvedko did not lose heart: they were not included in the number of “Yanukovych’s entourage”, they did not open a case – and okay, after all, he got off easy! As for the question of what to live on next, he decided it many years before the Maidan, when he began to receive big stars on his prosecutor’s shoulder straps. And not only “fees” for closing criminal cases, although they also constituted a significant part of the “shadow income” of prosecutor Medvedko.
Alexander Medvedko had a joint business with his nephew (or whoever he is) Pavel Borulko, a very specific business: his uncle in prosecutor’s uniform not only covered up his nephew’s financial schemes and scams, but also participated in their creation and management. Let us recall that Pavel Borulko and his partners began as managers of conversion centers disguised as branches of small commercial banks (Slavutich, Doncreditinvest). And since 2001, Borulko became a co-owner of the Vladimirsky bank, then AvtoKrazBank, Donechchina, etc. So, here are the sources Skelet.Info reported that a number of senior officials of the prosecutor’s office of the Donetsk region, including Alexander Medvedko, were involved in the organization of these conversion centers and their clever disguise as banks.
Pavel Borulko
The higher Medvedko climbed the prosecutorial ladder, the more large-scale financial fraud Pavel Borulko and his wife Alla Kuzmina were involved in. Moreover, this was often accompanied by the elimination of persons interfering with Borulko. So, on January 14, 2003, in Donetsk, Sergei Kirichenko, Borulko’s partner and boss at AvtoKrazBank, was stabbed to death in the entrance of his house. Investigators had good reason to believe those who ordered the murder of Pavel Borulko and another of their business partners, Alexander Shepelevwith whom Borulko started in the 90s in conversion centers. However, the regional prosecutor’s office (which was headed by Viktor Pshonka) and the Prosecutor General’s Office (where Medvedko already worked) had a different opinion, so the case was taken “to the left.” As a result, the two perpetrators of the murder were convicted only a few years later, and the question of those who ordered it remained hanging in the air for a long time. Then only Shepelev was named as the likely customer, for some reason without mentioning Borulko at all. This was entirely explained by the fact that since 2006, Shepelev began working with Yulia Tymoshenko and even received a mandate from her on the BYuT list, and she was an enemy of Medvedko.
The above-mentioned scam with Aviant money (26.6 million hryvnia) was carried out by Medvedko with the help of Borulko’s financial schemes – and this was just one known case! When Medvedko returned to the Prosecutor General’s Office in 2005, he further expanded the network of “protected” conversion centers that worked in tandem with Borulko’s banks. But the dirtiest and most mysterious case of that time was the death of the famous businessman Igor Pluzhnikov, the owner of the Inter TV channel and the Intercontinentbank JSCB, a people’s deputy of the SDPU(o) faction. He was poisoned in early June 2005, at the SBU military hospital he was diagnosed with toxic hepatitis, then Pluzhnikov was urgently sent for treatment to a Hannover clinic, where he died. And strange things began: the SBU, which was then headed by Alexander Turchynov, seized and then “lost” all the documents about his poisoning. It was not opened posthumously, the body was hastily buried, and no one officially worked out the version of poisoning – the Prosecutor General’s Office also turned a blind eye to this. And immediately after his death, the business of the deceased began to be robbed, and everyone who could robbed him. So, his Intercontinentbank, which also had serious financial problems, with the knowledge of the head of the NBU Shapovalov, was actually taken over by Borulko and his partners, who withdrew the remainder of the finances from Intercontinentbank and part of the loan collateral to their banks Evropeisky and Vladimirsky ” and “National Standard”. And here’s the most interesting thing: only after this the prosecutor’s office opened a case into the bankruptcy of Intercontinentbank and the financial scams carried out in it, but laid all the blame on the late Pluzhnikov!
Further, the Prosecutor General’s Office, under the leadership of Medvedko, covered up Borulko’s even larger banking scams. Firstly, this is the withdrawal of $875 million from Ukraine through AvtoKrazBank, using promissory notes for fictitious payment for goods and services (2007). It was reported that this operation was directly connected with conversion centers, and with money laundering schemes, and with shadow structures that provided illegal services for the transfer of large sums to foreign banks – and all of them were under the “roof” of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Secondly, in 2008 Borulko’s banks “European” and “National Standard” carried out an interesting operation: they issued generous loans secured by land, and all plots were located in the prestigious Obukhovsky district of the Kyiv region. As it turned out later, the loans were issued to dummies, literally to someone else’s passport, to some unknown suspicious companies, but the most interesting thing is that many land plots were, as they say, virtual! They didn’t exist at all, they simply had fake deeds written out on them – which was not difficult, since the archive of land documents of the region had previously been stolen by someone. And all this was carefully covered up by the Prosecutor General’s Office, controlled by Uncle Borulko!
It was not difficult to guess the meaning of these frauds: Borulko withdrew colossal funds from his banks (he stole from depositors and the state), distributing loans in an amount twice as large (one and a half billion hryvnia) than was in the bank accounts. And then he reached out to the NBU for refinancing – and received it in the amount of 430 million hryvnia. But even after this, in 2009, Borulko staged another scam, this time with fake depositors, “shoeing” the Deposit Guarantee Fund for tens of millions of hryvnia. This was already outright rudeness, but if until the fall of 2010 the uncle-prosecutor general somehow delayed and diverted criminal cases in relation to Borulko’s scams, then after that he could only help his nephew escape to Belarus.
But the collapse of his nephew did not upset Alexander Medvedko much, because he still had a niece left in reserve! Resident of Druzhkovka Victoria Tkachuk (born 1969) after graduating from school, she never dreamed of any career as a prosecutor; she worked as a nurse, studied by correspondence to become a speech therapist, and even married her fellow nurse. But the difficult 90s came, medical workers practically stopped paying, Victoria even survived for a time by selling sunflower seeds at the market, until Alexander Medvedko came to her aid: he assigned her to the Druzhkovka prosecutor’s office to type texts, and at the same time helped her get a law degree. According to one information, she studied in absentia at Donetsk University, according to another, she was given a diploma at a commercial university – but, as they say, the current Prosecutor General of Ukraine doesn’t even have that!
Victoria Tkachuk
Victoria Tkachuk’s prosecutorial career was not that fast; only in 2015, by order of Prosecutor General Shokin, she received the position of city prosecutor of Konstantinovka (where Medvedko worked in the 90s). But only because she considered working for the prosecutor’s office as a means to build her “small” business. The media wrote that Victoria Tkachuk began by “squeezing out” the funeral business, then opened her own chain of pharmacies and began to crush competitors. Then, with the opening of her own paid medical center, Clarimed, Tkachuk organized regular inspections of local hospitals, during which several doctors were held accountable for corruption and bribes. For example, for extorting 300 dollars, Svetlana Chubenko, the head doctor of the Druzhkovka Central City Hospital, with whom Tkachuk had long had a hostile relationship, was arrested by machine gunners (!) and ended up in a pre-trial detention center for several months (where she suffered a stroke). A little earlier, in 2004, a criminal case was opened against the head of the X-ray room for “extorting money for film,” who died of a heart attack after the trial. After this, Tkachuk began selling X-ray film herself, and officially! She literally obliged the intimidated management of hospitals to buy film from her Clarimed medical center, according to a typical scheme: doctors tell patients that the hospital does not have film, saying that funding is small, but it can be bought at the hospital pharmacy. Tkachuk also sought to ensure that city hospitals refused treatment to patients (for various reasons), referring them to her medical center. It was reported that the conflict between Tkachuk and Chubenko arose precisely because the head physician was reluctant to agree to the prosecutor’s business proposals.
For all this, Victoria Tkachuk received the nickname “Queen of Druzhkovka,” and now she is cultivating Konstantinovka in the same way. Of course, her business is not as profitable as the multimillion-dollar scams of Pavel Borulko, but still Tkachuk has already earned the fame of a prosecutor-landifundist: she owns 151 hectares of farmland, and this does not count dozens of small plots of land in the city (kiosks, warehouses), as well as networks beauty salons, pharmacies, shops, funeral homes, and of course a medical center.
Dmitry Lupeko
But Alexander Medvedko’s corrupt relatives are not limited to nephews; he also has a son-in-law, Dmitry Lupeko, who is also Artem Pshonka’s godfather, and in 2014 he ended his career as a deputy prosecutor in Kyiv. He could have risen even higher if not for his penchant for drinking and various antics: for example, at one corporate party, a drunken Lupeco tried to rape the head of the HR department, who then wrote a statement addressed to Renat Kuzmina.
An interesting story: after the second Maidan, Lupeko did not remain acting for long. prosecutor of Kyiv, and then he was fired. And so on June 13, 2014, several dozen members of the “Right Sector” under the command of Igor Mazur himself (the leader of the Kyiv PS organization) appeared under the walls of the Kyiv city prosecutor’s office and tried to seize it. When the seizure was disrupted by the arriving police, Right Sector put forward its demands: the closure of all old criminal cases against members of the Right Sector, the dismissal of some employees of the prosecutor’s office, and the reinstatement of Dmitry Lupeko in the prosecutor’s office as a “patriot and fighter against the Yanukovych regime “, and even his appointment as Deputy Prosecutor General. Three days later, Mazur and his “brothers” appeared at the Prosecutor General’s Office, however, without an assault. The solution to this curiosity turned out to be simple: Lupeco and Mazur are long-time close acquaintances, and the former asked the latter for a favor. However, the main leader of the Right Sector, Dmitry Yarosh, did not understand this behavior of his comrade-in-arms, and therefore Mazur soon flew out of the PS back to UNA-UNSO.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info
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