Rosava case awaits trial
This week the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine will refer to court the case on illegal privatization of the scandalous Bila Tserkva-based Rosava tire plant, Deputy Prosecutor General Oleksiy Bahanets announced. Accusations are being leveled against the former chief of the Kyiv Radiansky district bailiff service. As we have reported before, the law enforcement officers arresting this modest lady bureaucrat seized 30,000 dollars which investigators believe are a bribe to coverup a shady scheme. Yet, the true authors of this scheme have not yet been detained. Mr. Bahanets promised investigators would be making further efforts in this direction.
Exactly a year ago a 49% state-owned stake of Rosava was auctioned off in Kyiv for failure to pay debts at a price 25 times as low as the face value, four instead of 104 million hryvnias. The tire plant management learned from the press that their enterprise was being sold. In any case, the manager showed sincere surprise. He claimed he was totally unaware of who had pulled off the dubious affair. Soon the evaluator firms, which quoted a false starting price, announced their liquidation. The experts directly engaged in the assessment of the plant property have been absent from the place of their domicile registration for as many as six months, investigators say. They must be having a good time somewhere after they did the job.
A funny situation has arisen with the search for another witness, the current chief of the Brovary (Kyiv oblast) district tax inspection. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko said the latter had not showed up at his office for the past eight months. But he cannot be officially searched for because he is a witness, not a defendant. “I am surprised that the leadership of a much-respected state body has not yet fired an employee who has so long been absent from his office,” Mr. Potebenko laments. According to him, the Brovary district chief tax collector’s absence is usually attributed to illness or health center treatment. Mr. Potebenko is inclined to believe that the suspicious illness of all, without exception, witnesses in the Rosava case was caused by “outside influence.”
The information about Kyiv’s Radiansky district bailiff’s complicity in the attempt to illegally privatize the tire plant was supplied to the Prosecutor General’s Office by a foreign national who demanded that the interrogation not be recorded. According to our information, the Rosava bankruptcy case was transferred from the Brovary district department of justice to the Kyiv raion bailiff under false pretenses in order to “quietly” sell the plant into the “right” hands. “This foreign national never visited us after that,” Mr. Bahanets says. The prosecutors are unaware of where this informer is now or whether he is alive at all. Mr. Bahanets notes they have so far only completed investigation into the illegal transfer of Rosava bankruptcy documents from Brovary district to Kyiv.
The only evidence that can reveal the true authors of the shadow scheme is a document confirming transfer of the bogus deal money from an offshore company account. The queries sent to the offshore country were answered twice, but Mr. Bahanets claims the received information is insufficient to arrest anyone. He revealed that, although he knows who exactly is implicated in this scandal, there is too little direct evidence. Mr. Potebenko also said he knows who those people are. “All the clues lead to the very center of the Ministry of Justice,” Mr. Potebenko says, adding that this ministry was too slow to produce the Rosava-related documents. Although Mr. Potebenko earlier promised to solve this crime before the parliamentary elections, he admits now that the investigation is still incomplete due to the actions of some high-ranking protectors of this deal. But, although Mr. Potebenko is going to resign as Prosecutor General and work exclusively in Verkhovna Rada, he has again promised that the masterminds of the Rosava’s shadow privatization will be arrested. All one has to do now is to wait for information from the offshore country on the founders of the firm that made the bogus deal at the auction a year ago. It will be noted that the 49% Rosava stake has already been returned to the state by court order.
