Andrew Prize
Having begun a decisive purge of the ranks of civil servants during the great war, Volodymyr Zelensky’s team demonstrates to the Nation and European partners their readiness to turn Ukraine into a civilized state of law, writes politica.com. ua.
Meanwhile, the involvement of old cadres, who have been repeatedly convicted of official fraud and corruption, dooms all the efforts of the new Ukrainian government to marking time and inevitable failure.
It is convenient to study this unfortunate trend on the example of the prosecutor Andrey Priz.
Priz Andrei Andreevich has been working in the prosecutor’s office since October 1997. During this time, he held more than 20 responsible leadership positions, in particular, he was an assistant prosecutor of the Rokytnyansky district of the Kyiv region, a prosecutor and a senior prosecutor of the prosecutor’s office of the Kyiv region, a senior assistant to the prosecutor of the Kyiv region, a deputy head of a department of the prosecutor’s office of the Kyiv region, a prosecutor, a senior prosecutor and a head of a department Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.
Thus, Andriy Priz belongs to a generation of prosecutors who made corruption, nepotism and judicial arbitrariness the norm of Ukrainian life, undermined the citizens’ faith in justice and doomed the country to the role of a European outsider.
Prosecutor Andrei Priz
Prosecutor Priz found a compromise with all the political teams that came to power in the country, and during the years of the criminal regime of Yanukovych, he worked diligently in the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, serving the interests of the Donetsk team.
In 2012, Priz headed the Department for Supervision of Compliance with Laws in the Implementation of Operative-Investigative Activities and Inquiry of the Department for Supervision of Supervision of Compliance with Laws by the Tax Police Bodies of the Main Directorate for Supervision of Compliance with Laws in the Implementation of Operative-Search Activities, Inquiry and Pre-trial Investigation.
In the same year, Priz was transferred to the position of head of the Department for Supervision of Compliance with Laws in the Implementation of Operative-Search Activities, Preliminary Investigation and Support of Public Prosecution of the Department for Supervision of Compliance with Laws by Tax Police Bodies of the Main Directorate for Supervision of Compliance with Laws in Criminal Proceedings of the GPU.
A successful career under Yanukovych is already enough for Priz Andrei to at least permanently remove prosecutor’s epaulettes. The prosecutor’s office is an important body, although it does not investigate cases itself. The prosecutor’s office has the right to control investigations and keep abreast of the rule of law, investigators and detectives coordinate their actions with prosecutors.
Prosecutors, after all, bring the prosecution before the court when the investigation is completed, guiding it towards law and justice and guaranteeing its independence. Therefore, the presence in the prosecutor’s ranks of such characters of the criminal past as Priz is dangerous and unacceptable.
However, the post-Maidan lustration did not become an instrument of democracy, just as the victory of the Maidan itself did not become the Revolution of Dignity, and instead of immediate dismissal and investigation in July 2014, A.A. The prize was headed by the prosecutor’s office of the Odessa region.
In his new post, Andrei Priz liked to repeat that he considered his main task to be the defense of the victorious Maidan, but these were sly conversations of an official with life experience. The unjustly detained Maidan hero Yevgeny Rezvushkin was released by Priz under the onslaught of activists who picketed the regional prosecutor’s office (they intimidated the prosecutor with the Aidar regiment), and there were no other cases related to the revolutionary events of 2014.
But A. Priz became famous for a number of other significant moments. Working for Benya (Ukrainian oligarch I. Kolomoisky), he tried to take the Odessa airport from its owners, Boris Kaufman and Alexander Granovsky.
Under the guise of Andrei Priz, his deputy Nikolai Klyantsko (known to the police and the SBU as “watching” the Ilyichevsk port), patronized the raiders of the 7th Kilometer market and extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from businessmen in the Odessa region.
Another prosecutor, Priz, invited Tatyana Gornostaeva, the daughter of Viktor Shokin, to work in the Odessa prosecutor’s office and made his deputy. When it broke scandalshe did not find anything better than to abandon the person who raised her.
“I am familiar with Viktor Nikolaevich, but I am not his own daughter, since I was born in another marriage. At one time he was my mother’s husband, but for more than ten years this marriage has not existed.“- said Gornostaeva -“Andrei Andreevich (Priz) offered me to take this position, and I agreed“.
Priz made Vitaly Etnarovich, a protege of one of the executioners of the Maidan, Sergey Kivalov, the brother of Oleg Etnarovich of the Regions, an experienced corrupt official and the owner of a number of Odessa restaurants and gambling establishments, become his first deputy Priz.
Andrei Andreevich Priz simply could not live honestly in such an environment. Even then, the media noted that “the prosecutor with unpretentious income managed to buy quite decent property.”
With an annual salary of 255 thousand hryvnia, he supported his non-working wife and two sons, drove a 2011 Toyota Land Cruiser. (used costs about 800 thousand hryvnia) and Lexus RX 350 2010 onwards. (used costs about 650 thousand hryvnia) and led a very wealthy lifestyle.
However, the monstrous discrepancy between the income and expenses of the prosecutor A.A. The prize of his Odessa machinations is not limited.
September 12, 2019 the OSRD portal, referring to the materials of the investigation, informedthat a corrupt criminal group is operating on the territory of the Odessa region from among the employees of the prosecutor’s office of the Odessa region and employees of the Security Service of Ukraine. Members of the group, abusing their official position, organized a criminal scheme of illegal seizure (appropriation) of consumer goods.
It was about evading mandatory customs payments, as well as the subsequent movement for the purpose of theft and sale through the territory of Ukraine of cargo arriving on the territory of the country through the commercial seaports of Odessa and Odessa region.
It became known that for this purpose, the head of the Department of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine, Priz Andrey Andreyevich, entered into a criminal conspiracy with the deputy prosecutor of the Odessa region Dobroserdov Artur Renatovich.
Together with Oleg Mikhailovich Litvak, head of the Investigative Department of the Odessa Region, Igor Valeryevich Dovgalov, investigator of the Odessa Region Investigation Department, Priz and Dobroserdov entered into a criminal conspiracy with representatives of commercial structures (subjects of foreign economic activity) and committed a criminal act reflected in criminal proceedings No. 42019000000000164.
The language of the investigative documents is somewhat heavy for the article, but the seriousness of the accusation requires clarifying that we are talking about smuggling fraud with containers, the numbers of which, according to the case file, look like this:
- NOSEGU5441060,
- No SEGU2181268,
- No. TCKU9058004,
- No. ARZU4259241,
- NoARZU4817003,
- NoCMAU3021275,
- NoHMCU1079967,
- NoARHU4639824,
- noHASHAS4639824,
- NoHASHAS4 u1557701,
- NOCXDU2215159,
- NOZCSU9032204,
- NODRYU4558971,
- NoZCSU9028760,
- NoECMU9869857,
- NoBSIU9622661,
- NoUACU8256608,
- NoTTNU9029030,
- NoHLXU3708757,
- NoTRKU44104888,
- NoZCSU8953605,
- BMOU4582719,
- NoHLXU3708757,
- NoTRKU44104888,
- NoZCSU8953605,
- BMOU4582719,
- NoGAOU6116236,
- NoTCKU3558229,
- NoEMCU1357509,
- NoTRKU4422489
That is, as part of a criminal group, having colluded with representatives of commercial structures (subjects of foreign economic activity), Andrey Andreevich Priz, using his official position, initiated the theft (appropriation) of the said property in order to create opportunities for entrepreneurs (subjects of foreign economic activity) to further implement goods on the territory of Ukraine with evasion of obligatory customs payments.
The actions of the above persons, indicated in the accompanying memo, have signs of a criminal offense under Part 5 of Art. 191, part 2 of Art. 364 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
The fact that the investigation in the mentioned case was not brought to trial and sentence is evidenced by the fact that the prosecutor Priz was soon appointed to the post of head of the territorial department of the BEB in the Transcarpathian region.
The Economic Security Bureau (BEB) is a completely new structure created by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on May 12, 2021. The new body received the powers of the SBU and the tax police in the field of combating economic crimes. BEB is headed by the head of the State Fiscal Service Vadim Melnik.
The task of the department, whose work is based on fundamentally new approaches and methods, is to restore a civilized order in the economy of Ukraine, which lives according to the laws of corruption and legal arbitrariness.
If the above facts had been taken into account by the creators of the Bureau, a person from the past, the prosecutor of the GPU during the rule of Yanukovych and the malicious corrupt official Priz Andrei Andreevich would not have become an employee of the young structure and would not have been able to compromise it.
However, this did not happen, and on January 4, 2023 became knownthat the Security Service, together with the Prosecutor’s Office, eliminated the corruption scheme in the Territorial Administration of the BEB in the Transcarpathian region. It is reported that a senior detective of the Regional Economic Security Bureau is involved in organizing the criminal scheme.
The official set up a mechanism for illegally receiving money from local entrepreneurs. For regular contributions, he promised them not to respond to the facts of the underground sale of excisable products, in particular, electronic cigarettes.
For covering up illegal business, the official demanded that merchants pay him $ 2 from each sold electronic cigarette. Moreover, the official tried to maximize his influence in the region and attract as many sellers as possible to the scheme.
We managed to find out that the name of the detainee was Ivan Grubinko. He is a senior detective at BEB, and prior to joining the bureau, he was a senior investigator for especially important cases in the Criminal Investigation Department of the State Fiscal Service.
It also became known that as a result of the arrest of the detective, the head of the territorial administration of the Bureau of Economic Security in the Transcarpathian region, Priz Andrei Andreevich, was removed from his duties.
The dismissal of A. Priz from office could be called a positive moment, if the previous episodes of his criminal activity did not end with avoiding dismissal and trial.
I would like to believe that the leaders and employees of the BEB, a young and, in a number of ways, fundamentally innovative structure, are purging their ranks more decisively than the prosecutor’s office of the Ukrainian SSR_2, in which we lived before the big war.
This assumption will confirm or refute the ongoing investigation. However, it should be understood that the controlling agencies, in which such characters of the criminal Ukrainian past as Andriy Priz work, have nothing to do with civilized law and order, or with the European future of our country.
