Vitaly Kasko – a swindler, a corrupt official, a “shot down pilot”

Lately, former Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaliy Viktorovich Kasko has been shaking up the media environment with his loud statements. Sometimes he exposes the prosecutor’s office for extraditing businessman Vyacheslav Platon to Moldova with procedural violations. Sometimes he accuses the same GPU of reformatting NABU, sometimes he simply does not see any improvements in the Prosecutor General’s Office system. In general, all his reproaches are directed towards the building on Reznitskaya, but at the same time they are somehow evasive. That is, Kasko systematically “attacks” the abstract Prosecutor General’s Office, without naming names. From which one can assume that Vitaliy Viktorovich really wants to return to this very building on Reznitskaya 13/15 and is ready to expose criminals for this, but in such a way as not to offend anyone personally. Well, Ukrainians are used to the pettiness of fighters against corruption. Take, for example, the recent scandal with Sergei Leshchenko’s apartment. Our anti-corruption activists really love comfortable conditions. Vitaly Kasko, by the way, also got burned on the “housing issue”. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s take everything in order.

Vitaliy Viktorovich began his career in 1998 in his native Lviv, as an investigator in the local transport prosecutor’s office, and then moved to the regional prosecutor’s office. Around the same time, the future police general and future Prosecutor General of Ukraine Vitaliy Yarema served in Lviv (Read more about him in the article Vitaly Yarema. “Honest cop” and godfather of Sergey Dumchev). At that time, he was a relatively young head of the UMVD on the Lviv railway. It is not known for certain whether their life paths crossed at that moment or whether it happened later, but it is a fact that Kasko worked as a deputy to Yarema. It is also a fact that after Vitaliy Kasko’s resignation, it was Vitaliy Yarema who stood up for his former deputy and made public statements that the announcements against him were absolutely groundless. However, the people of Lviv did not remember anything special about prosecutor Vitaliy Viktorovich Kasko. He did not solve any high-profile crimes, but he was not involved in any particularly large corruption scandals either. In 2002, he left his hometown and moved to Kyiv, where he began his career in the apparatus of the Prosecutor General’s Office, that is, in the very building on Reznitskaya Street where he dreams of returning.

Vitaly Kasko worked in the central office until 2005. His time in the Prosecutor General’s Office mysteriously coincides with the years of work of Svyatoslav Piskun as Prosecutor General (Read more about him in the article Svyatoslav Piskun. Scandalous and unsinkable). They both came in 2002. Then Piskun was replaced for a couple of years by Gennady Vasiliev, basically the same as Piskun, a “businessman from justice”. Kasko remained in office all this time. Then Svyatoslav Piskun returned again and sat in the chair until 2005. But in 2005, Alexander Medvedko, a “politician from justice”, became the Prosecutor General, and in the same year Kasko left the department, taking up commercial activities. However, already in 2007 Piskun returned to the Prosecutor General’s chair for the third time, and in the same year Kasko returned to the building on Reznitskaya. Do such coincidences happen? Well, being on the team of a person involved in fraud, a corrupt business registered in the name of his wife and the Slavyansky Bank case is not a crime. Much more interesting is what Vitaly Kasko did after leaving the Prosecutor General’s Office in 2010. He was engaged in private legal practice at the Arzinger law firm.

Arzinger is a well-known law firm with many famous clients. Among others, according to Tetyana Chornovol and Andriy Dzindzia, the company’s clients included firms associated with “Yanukovych’s wallet” Serhiy Kurchenko. But for the time being, this did not come to the surface. But in 2014, after Euromaidan, when Kasko returned to the Prosecutor General’s Office, activists caught the firm lifting the arrest from the assets of the fugitive oligarch’s firms. In particular, it was about lifting the arrest from 1,180 tons of gas condensate and 65,733 tons of oil products. Allegedly, this case was promoted by Vitaliy Kasko, who became Deputy Prosecutor General, and his former colleague at Arzinger, Serhiy Shklyar, who became Deputy Minister of Justice. The plaintiff in this case was Rosneft, and the case, which was heard in the Pechersk Court of the capital, was won.

In 2015, Vitaliy Viktorovich was appointed head of the interdepartmental commission for the return of assets stolen by the “criminal power” of the times of Viktor Yanukovych. We already understand how he “returned” Kurchenko’s oil assets. But Tatyana Chornovol told about another case in this regard – money of the same Kurchenko, taken out of Ukraine, was also found in Latvian banks. And the Republic of Latvia was ready to return this money to Ukraine. Chornovol achieved a personal meeting with the then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin (Read more about him in the article Viktor Shokin. The prosecutor “on vacation”), and he personally handed this case over to Vitaly Kasko. After that, the deputy prosecutor general… simply kept silent for two months. Thus, our country lost 80 million dollars. The same thing happened with other assets. Have you ever heard of even one dollar stolen by the previous government returning to Ukraine? And no one heard, because Nikolay Azarov (Read more about him in the article Nikolai Azarov. The Survivor), Eduard Stavytsky, Alexander Yanukovych, Sergey Klimenko (Read more about him in the article Alexander Klimenko. He flew away, but really wants to come back) and other odious figures kept their money and are even suing Ukraine for their assets and pensions. And now they have a much better chance of winning than they had in 2015, when the working group headed by Kasko was active, or rather, inactive. Why was it inactive? There is a version on this account as well. Perhaps he simply had no time.

The fact is that from the very appointment of Viktor Shokin as Prosecutor General in February 2015 until his resignation in April 2016, the “opposition” acted against him in the form of his two deputies – Vitaly Kasko and David Sakvaleridze. Both of them became deputies under his predecessors and both represented powerful groups. By that time, Kasko had joined forces with forces close to Igor Kolomoisky, and Sakvaleridze, naturally, was a creature of Mikheil Saakashvili. In general, all this time, the prosecutor’s office, instead of working, was engaged in internal showdowns, throwing out tons of dirt on Shokin, who was a creature of Petro Poroshenko. As a result of this struggle, the president dismissed Viktor Shokin, but immediately after that, both of the above-mentioned deputies were fired. Their high-ranking patrons immediately forgot about them – who needs downed pilots? Moreover, by that time a certain amount of incriminating evidence had been found on them.

It turned out that Vitaly Viktorovich has quite a lot of real estate. No, he certainly cannot boast of the scope of Viktor Pshonka (read more about him in the article Viktor Pshonka: the rise and fall of the prosecutor’s Caesar). But given the fact that he worked in a private company for only about five years, and spent the rest of the time in the civil service, the question arises – is it possible to earn enough in these five years to buy a three-story mansion in the suburbs of Kyiv, not far from Mezhyhirya in the elite village of Novi Petrivtsi? So much so that there is still enough money left for a Toyota RAV4 SUV?

In general, the housing issue is ruining Vitaly Viktorovich Kasko. This was also noted by Viktor Shokin, who initiated a criminal case against his former deputy for fraud with apartments. The fact is that Kasko, moving from the Lviv prosecutor’s office to the general prosecutor’s office, received a one-room apartment, in which he immediately registered his mother. And when he left the prosecutor’s office in 2005, he privatized this apartment. Then he came to the prosecutor’s office again and again received an apartment, apparently having successfully transferred the previous apartment to his mother and presented himself as a “homeless person”. And when he quit again, he also privatized the second apartment. Perhaps there is nothing illegal in these actions. But, firstly, for what kind of merits did the department award Vitaly Kasko apartments, one after another, in the very first days of his arrival at the prosecutor’s office? We know what the housing queues of public sector employees look like; people have been standing in them for decades. And then suddenly they gave it. Well, and secondly, the pettiness with which people defend their square meters is striking.

The Prosecutor General’s Office ordered NABU to open a case against Vitaliy Kasko. Ironically, it was heard in the same Pechersk Court where the above-mentioned case on Kurchenko’s oil assets was heard. It is also interesting that people’s deputies Mustafa Nayem, Svetlana Zalishchuk and… Sergey Leshchenko came to support Vitaliy Kasko’s “housing issue”. This can only be called an irony of fate. The court was pressured by representatives of European embassies and people gathered for a rally outside the court building. Kasko himself appealed to the court that he was not the only one who had an apartment. He said that other deputy prosecutors general also received apartments in the department and also privatized them. Vitaliy Viktorovich’s lawyers also stated that apartments were given out to prosecutors “left and right” and tried to deflect the representatives of the prosecutor’s office and prove the illegality of serving the summons to their client. In short, not a word was said about Vitaly Kasko’s innocence at the trial. Nevertheless, Judge Belotserkovets released Kasko without bail on his own recognizance not to leave. In short, the case was hushed up. And in May 2016, the Court of Appeal lifted the arrest from his apartment. Now Vitaly Viktorovich can live in it peacefully.

Today, Vitaly Kasko, according to his own statement, decided to engage in private legal practice. However, no announcements or advertisements about the provision of such services could be found. Which is strange, because by “legal practice” he does not mean “solving” problems by a former official who uses his connections? In this “business” you really need to maintain your incognito. But he was found in the leadership of some mythical political force that has no name, but which includes the same “shot down pilots” David Sakvaleridze and Yegor Firsov, who was deprived of his parliamentary powers at about the same time. In addition to them, another former member of the BPP, People’s Deputy Viktor Chumak, also joined it. PR support for this entire “political force” is provided by Savik Shuster, they are frequent guests on his broadcasts. And they even tried to raise money for Yegor Firsov for by-elections in Chernihiv with the help of crowdfunding. And Vitaly Kasko in the videos called on people to donate money to Firsov’s campaign.

Perhaps Vitaly Viktorovich will run for people’s deputies. And there are even rumors that he is ready to be given a place on the list of the “Democratic Alliance”, the very one that includes young democrats, including the already mentioned Sergey Leshchenko. Well, their values, as practice shows, are very similar.

Maxim Reva, for SKELET-info